Bonzo's War (2 page)

Knowing what I know now, I forgive him.

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   Britain's two-and-a-half million (my estimate) companion-animal war dead have no physical memorial. Hyde Park is for service animals only, as is the more modest memorial unveiled in 2011 at Morley, Leeds, dedicated ‘To all animals who have died serving their country alongside British troops.' The Civil Defence memorial at the National Arboretum, Staffordshire, honours the ‘1939–45 animal friends who served with such loyalty and bravery.' The Purple Poppy campaign launched by the pressure group Animal Aid in 2006 commemorates animals expended by armed forces in war and used in weapon experiments.

The PDSA stated in its post-war history: ‘There is a field looking north from the Ilford Sanatorium which remains the officially recognised cemetery of some three quarters of a million cats and dogs.' After seventy years however, the site is unmarked and unacknowledged, a few cryptic mounds in scrubby wasteland on the banks of the River Roding.

Britain historically has had far more animal welfare charities than political parties. And they fought like cats. As an official who dealt with them wrote, ‘Anyone who knows anything about charities knows that, in their relations with each other, charitableness is their least conspicuous virtue'.

The Nazis simply abolished the lot when they seized power in 1933 and imposed a single state institution – the ‘Reichstierschutzbund'. A British attempt on the eve of war to create something similar, the ‘National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee' – a kind of Dad's (and Mum's) Army for pets – had grand ideas but would struggle to make an impact. To understand how the charities worked with pets and how they recorded the experience, it is important to understand their contradictions and rivalries. A lot of small-animal welfare historically consisted of catching as many street animals as possible (strays, female kittens, mongrels) and killing them with chloroform in a ‘lethal chamber'. Methods of destruction became more scientific but the conflict between the sentimentalists and the realists was always intense.

Nobody should have been under any illusions. As a pre-war Our Dumb Friends' League (ODFL) report stated
bluntly: ‘[Our cat] shelters should not be confused with “homes” for cats. Their special object is to rid the streets of these unfortunate animals, not to keep them for a lengthy period without prospect of future homes.'

Much of the story of pets at war is of animals dodging bombs and falling masonry only to be ‘mercifully put to sleep' by their rescuers. Certain charities gloss over this aspect of their wartime record in their published histories.
ⁱⁱ

From their beginnings, the charities were prone to internal rebellions and provincial breakaways. They competed fiercely for donations and legacies, launching stunts especially in wartime, to loosen the patriotic animal lover's purse strings. They all scrabbled for aristocratic and royal patronage, which was inconvenient when it came to internal ideological disputes over fox hunting. A duchess or two was essential at fund-raising functions, joined increasingly by film and radio stars. Derided by cynical journalists as an activity for social climbing, middle-class ladies, the animal welfare champions, were much more complicated than that. Some were intensely political (on the left and right). Others just loved their pets, and many worked alone. Wherever bombs and rockets fell, there would soon be women with baskets doing what they thought was right.

Mr Keith Robinson, the secretary of Our Dumb Friends' League, admitted in a 1938 interview that ‘anyone who devotes his life to fighting cruelty in animals is bound to be a bit of a crank'. Robinson revealed that most of his funding came from the donations of spinsters and was no more than a few shillings at a time. He himself lived with seven cats.

A wartime account described: ‘One East End woman, who gave her bedroom to
the cause
, would herself search miles in a night with a box on wheels like the slum child's cart looking for injured animals.' But what could she really do to help them?

As I read the stories of selfless volunteers, of midnight feeders of ferals and those who listened for cries beneath the rubble, I realized they drew their fortitude from an earlier tradition of concern for animals, one with largely a female face.

The idea of ‘pets' had risen with the late-nineteenth-century urban middle class (with Britain, the US and Germany leading the way) and now, in later life, it was their children who championed pets in their time of trial. Without mad cat ladies (and some were really mad), there would have been a much-diminished ‘animal welfare' culture to meet this new emergency.

Even as late as 1939, the ‘animal welfare movement' remained imbued by the spirit of its founders – many of
them the impassioned women who, four decades before, had found another channel for their suffragette political energies in animals:
The Cause
. But under the renewed shadow of war, they were seen as eccentric Edwardian relics.

Women like Nina, Duchess of Hamilton (derided as a ‘crank' by MI5), the Swedish aristocrat Louise (‘Lizzy') Lind-af-Hageby and Alsatian breeder Mrs Margaret Griffin, who took her amazing rescue dogs into action during the V2 rocket campaign of 1944–45.

There were some remarkable chaps as well, like Major James Baldwin, the Alsatian wolf-dog champion, Mr Albert Steward, who lived in a house full of cats in Slough and campaigned without cease for wartime felines, Captain T. C. Colthurst, ‘Animal Guard Number One', Mr Bernard Woolley, who turned a Lancashire cinema into a dog rescue centre, and Edward Bridges Webb, the inspired pet-populist of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor (PDSA), who invented the ‘Mascot Club'.

The veterinary profession meanwhile remained overwhelmingly male, as were the executive officers of the charities, with lots of peppery former 1914–18 officers keeping everyone on their toes.

By the coming of war, routine cruelty to animals in plain sight had become rare. Working horses in cities had been largely mechanized away but there were new concerns. Pit ponies and performing animals generated strong feelings, as did Government poison gas and weapon experiments. Vivisection, vaccination and zoos always excited the ultras. The charities each had their own priorities. They further had deep experience, both political and practical, from the First World War and from the social hardships of the thirties.

The RSPCA (founded in 1824) was the oldest and richest charity of all. In 1932, led by its chairman, the Conservative
MP Sir Robert Gower, its Council had crushed an anti-hunting, anti-circus rebellion. The Society was interventionist and in many poorer people's eyes, its inspectors seemed to possess civil police powers and they were therefore suspicious of it. It had experience of mass, urban small-animal destruction in pre-war slum clearance programmes, killing an estimated 50,000 animals a year. In Birmingham, its staff had experimented using carbon monoxide from a car exhaust (and they themselves had been prosecuted for cruelty).

Through the war, the Society's annual reports and monthly magazine,
The Animal World
, were published unbroken. The Society had an ambitious foreign policy promoting animal welfare schemes in Poland, Finland (which were short-lived) and the Soviet Union.

Our Dumb Friends' League (founded in 1897) was not nearly so grand, and was less interested in prosecuting the cruel than the active promotion of kindness. The League had launched the ‘Blue Cross Fund' to assist military horses during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and found support for its continuation in the Great War. It faced down a pre-war mutiny led by a countess over the alleged ‘disgraceful condition' of the North London Dogs Home.

The plight of ‘old war horses' sold on post-1918 to beastly locals in France, Belgium and Egypt proved a big fund-raiser right up to the eve of a new war (an equivalent German campaign in 1938 to give old horses ‘war comrade medals' and ‘free oats for poor farmers' found nine British Army horses that had fallen into German hands, still alive).

Money flowed in. Two years into the war, a former dustman willed a huge amount to the League to look after his cat, but it had inconveniently disappeared. However, the League promised to track it down and make it comfortable till the end of its days.

The League had drifted uncertainly to the radical wing of animal rights – with a ‘political committee' which campaigned among other things for a rise in the legal status of cats (‘currently the same as a weasel') and for the National Trust to ban fox hunting on its land. One activist watched by Special Branch was a member of the British Union of Fascists.

There was a big row in 1938 with a mass defection of aristocratic patrons when the secretary, a Mr E. Keith Robinson, said: ‘We feel that people would get just as much fun from a drag hunt as they would from chasing a wretched little fox across the country.' The League published annual reports throughout the war.

The People's Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor, founded by Mrs Maria Dickin in the East End of London in 1917, was a relative newcomer – offering free medical care for lowlier pets and working animals. Its relationship with the veterinary profession was turbulent. However, its dispensaries, mobile ‘caravans' and volunteers would be at the forefront of animal rescue when British cities were bombed.

In a mid-war publicity masterstroke, the PDSA founded both the Services Mascot Club and endowed the ‘Dickin Medal' for gallantry, named for its founder. But it was for ‘service' animals only. In fact most of the recipients were carrier pigeons of the National Pigeon Service. Winners of the Our Dumb Friends' League's ‘Blue Cross' and the RSPCA's ‘For Valour' medallion for animal bravery are less well known.

At the war's end Mrs Dickin wrote a prospectus for an ‘Allied Forces Animals' War Memorial Fund' to remember those ‘animals and birds who have suffered and died on active service in our time of terrible need'. She wanted a ‘practical memorial in the shape of ten mobile dispensaries'.
But the charity's founder furthermore included what she called ‘those civilian animals who shared with us the horrors of the raids'. As she said:

The P.D.S.A. Rescue Squads were eye-witnesses of their misery, and know how they suffered. Like their comrades on active service, these animals frequently ignored their own danger to stand by and help their owners; often they struggled to find and help them in blazing buildings, when they themselves could so easily have escaped to safety alone. Truly they were faithful unto death.

It would be ‘a tribute to the Unknown Animals who gave their lives in service for us, or were innocent victims in our war, not theirs'. She even made an analogy with the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. It was not to be.

A year later, pets had vanished from the appeal. The memorial was to be for ‘the thousands of animals and birds [which] have helped our victory'. The Unknown Animals would remain just that. Only those who died on ‘active service' would be remembered – by plaques on the side of the shiny new caravans.

It was the same over fifty years on. In 1998 the PDSA's Trustees rejected an appeal by the then just-starting Animals in War Memorial Fund (its primary charitable aim, to ‘promote the military efficiency of the armed forces of Her Majesty's Government') as being ‘too far removed from our objects'.

But when approached again, a new Director General replied: ‘If you could offer a guarantee that the sculptor could include an animal wearing a Dickin medal, I am sure it would influence the decision of the Council of
Management.' It was duly so. £10,000 was given to the service-animals-only memorial.

The organization published the
PDSA News
throughout.

The National Canine Defence League (NCDL) was founded in 1891 during the first Crufts Dog Show ‘to protect dogs from ill-usage of every kind'. Throughout the war it published the lively
The Dogs Bulletin
, full of gossip and wheezes to boost the cause of dogs. It concerned itself greatly with refugee dogs, operated clinics and was very active in promoting Air Raid Precautions (ARP) for dogs, building dedicated canine air raid shelters in Kensington Gardens and Sutton Coldfield. Since the start, the League had been regarded as ‘the Opposition' by the Dogs' Home, Battersea. On the eve of war, it was said that their secretaries ‘could never work together'.

The Cats Protection League (CPL) was founded at a meeting held at Caxton Hall in London in 1927, under the chairmanship of Miss Jessy Wade. The first secretary was Mr Albert A. Steward and the headquarters were established at Prestbury Lodge, a sizeable house in Slough, gifted (as so many were) in a legacy, where he lived on the first floor surrounded by cats. Early achievements included the introduction of an elasticated collar for cats and ‘the development of a simple cat door'. What a boon – and still flapping down the ages!

Its magazine,
The Cat
, is the indispensable source for the British feline view of the Second World War and I am grateful to the current editor, Francesca Watson, for permitting me access to wartime copies kept at the National Cat Centre in Ashdown Forest. Long may its work continue.

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  In 2013 the RPSCA said of its wartime record, ‘of the animals rescued from bombed sites during this year [1940], 10,100 pets sadly had to be put to sleep because of the extent of their injuries. But 5,940 animals survived and were successfully rehomed.'

Its archived end-1940 reports say in contrast, ‘In one month alone last year [September] 10,100 household pets were humanely destroyed, 5,490 were rescued from bombed premises, fed for a time, boarded, or [432] provided with new homes.' The 1941 report records its inspectors dealing with 42,095 animal ‘victims of the war' of which ‘50 per cent [were given] a painless end'.