Bonzo's War (27 page)

That August there was plenty of anti-cat material circulating between the Ministries of Food and Agriculture, which might soon prove useful. A curious file was opened about the feline threat to the Dig for Victory campaign. It contained a growing number of cat-hating letters.

Mr G. W. Danton of Perranporth, Cornwall wrote to the Minister of Agriculture to say, ‘You seem to think that the small gardeners of this country are not important enough to save their vegetables from cats.' His shallots had been
scratched up twice, he complained. ‘Unlike dogs, cats stroll about when and where they like.' He was sent a cyclostyled copy of
Dig for Victory News
in response, which admitted:

Wayward cats are often very troublesome to gardeners. Owners are urged to control their pets and prevent them damaging allotments. Gardeners are advised to shoo off feline neighbours by the use of pepper dust and creating obstructions of loose wire on tops of walls.

Such advice was ‘useless' according to a host of letter writers who had been sent the same missive. Outraged of Bournemouth suggested a nightly curfew on cats otherwise they should be shot on sight by the police.

Mrs G. E. Elliot wrote from Birmingham on 25 June to the Minister of Food: ‘My Lord – I have a large bed of onions where I found nine or ten cats rampaging. Would I be in order in shooting or poisoning them?'

She suggested an emergency bill in Parliament for all cats to be destroyed, either that or a cat tax, and a limit of one per household. ‘Having gone into the matter carefully, I am amazed,' she said, ‘at the number of small households that keep large numbers of cats – ten or eleven of them. Thousands of pints of milk must be given to cats daily and the same for tins of salmon, which in fact is cheaper than cats' meat or fish.' Mrs Elliot suggested kittens be disposed of at under six weeks and an ultimatum to cat lovers be broadcast on the BBC.

A local newspaper meanwhile noted the sale for 6
d
. in Oxley, Wolverhampton, of a six-week-old kitten with ‘peculiar black markings'. It was called ‘Hitler'.

German cats had also better watch out. Those Nazi animal protection laws had been amended to say that cats straying outside of their usual habitat could be considered ‘poaching'. They could therefore be caught but must be ‘humanely' treated and their owner had to be informed. But if such adventurous cats proved ownerless, they were to be killed. Many thousands of so-called poaching cats were shot each year.

In response, Professor Dr Friedrich Schwangart, an esteemed feline researcher, had written in his 1937 book,
Vom Recht der Katze
(‘On the Rights of the Cat'), that, ‘domestic cats live in a permanent state of emergency, hated by the majority of the population and slandered by the press'. Third Reich cats must be protected because ‘nowhere were they mistreated in any culture and country so vilely as in Germany'. Against the accusations of bird lovers that cats were bloodthirsty killers, Professor Schwangart and others presented the cat as a ‘hygienic helper', eternally engaged in the unrelenting war ‘against the enemies of the German people – mice'. But German cats could not look to the Führer for protection. He was Reich bird-warden of Obersalzburg, after all.

British cats meanwhile had friends in high places. During a dinner at Chequers for a US diplomat in spring 1941, a large grey cat stole into the dining room. Evidently it was Nelson, the original Admiralty cat. The American war correspondent, Quentin Reynolds, had been invited. He recorded Churchill as saying: ‘Nelson is the bravest cat I ever knew. I once saw him chase a huge dog out of the Admiralty. I decided to adopt him and name him after our great naval hero.'

‘His daughter, Mary, said: “You know he adopted you. He's being nice to you tonight because he knows we're having salmon for dinner and hopes you will offer him
some.”' It was a cosy family dinner, so Reynolds continued: ‘Churchill scarcely mentioned the war. Our first course was smoked salmon and twice, when Mrs Churchill was not looking, the Prime Minister sneaked pieces of salmon to Nelson.' He should have been arrested.

There was another Prime Ministerial cat encounter on 10 August when Mr Churchill met President Franklin D. Roosevelt on board the battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
, off the coast of Newfoundland. Churchill noticed the ship's cat, ‘Blackie', apparently about to desert across a gangway in favour of the cruiser USS
Augusta
, drawn up alongside. The Prime Minister bent down to pat Blackie on the head, creating a much-published news photo.

The Cat
saw it and commented on Mr Churchill's
faux pas
in ‘bestowing that caress abhorred by cats, rather than first offering his hand for investigation then waiting for a sign of approval'. In response the American pet press made quite a meal of
The Cat's
remarks, calling them ‘ludicrous' and ‘woefully ignorant of the true nature of cats'.
The New York Times
picked it up. Mr Churchill however seemed very pleased with his meeting with Blackie,
²⁸
beaming broadly throughout.

Back home still the tide of anti-cat invective raged. The legal advice in the Ministry of Food was that shooting, poisoning cats, etc. as angry allotment holders were
demanding was against the 1911 Protection of Animals Act. ‘There seems to be little we can do,' noted the Permanent Under Secretary. (The internal correspondence shows a secret nest of cat lovers in the Ministry. One wrote, ‘being somewhat of an admirer of pussy, I don't like the idea of classing him as a land pest'.)

Meanwhile the Soviet Army was fighting for its life as hard as Britain's cats were for theirs. On Wednesday 21 August, the Worcester and District Canine Society held a dog show in the Talbot Hotel, Worcester. Such morale-boosting events were permitted to continue when they were local affairs, raising money for a war charity perhaps. Whippet shows were popular in mining districts. No challenge certificates were at stake in this ‘Sanction Show held under Kennel Club rules' – but judgements most certainly would be made. Mass-Observation was there to test the national dog-loving mood.

The show attracted a large turnout from Birmingham. Dog-friendly Silver Wings Coaches were there to take you there and back. ‘All exhibitors and visitors must carry gas masks,' the police insisted.

The poet Louis MacNeice had noted in a 1938 visit to a big dog show in London how, ‘hardly anywhere else can you pick up such unsconscious egotism, love me, love my dog and hate everybody else's'. In fact he was there to exhibit his own sheepdog, which was harshly judged for being far too small.

He noted how ‘the toy department offers you six-foot Sapphos in breeches and hardbitten men who might be champions at billiards'. And so it seems to have been in Worcester. The Mass-Observation researcher reckoned about 150 people were there, ‘overwhelmingly women, seventy per cent of them better off and mostly aged over thirty.

‘Many wore riding breeches and several, including one of the judges, were in uniform, ATS and NAAFI, etc.'

He noted that several Pekingese seemed very nervous and ‘would not curl their tails up'. Their owner said: ‘I am surprised I didn't lose them, I thought they'd be killed.' All her windows had been blasted out in an air raid on a Birmingham suburb but the dogs had not seemed to mind.

The judge of Pekingese (Mrs Gilbert, ‘Female 45 A' – gender, age, well-off, a Mass-Observation code) was heard to say to a friend: ‘There is bound to be trouble, I'm just going to please myself – you can't please everybody.'

A Birmingham Dalmatian owner said it was very unfair that people were not allowed to breed thoroughbreds – the Kennel Club had asked them to breed only enough to keep going for after the war. She was always being asked for Dalmatian puppies and ‘of course their whiteness is an advantage in the blackout'.

A Sealyham breeder said that she was doing very well, had recently told ten puppies and had a large store of biscuits. Small dogs were in demand. Everyone was complaining of a lack of meat. A diet of horseflesh was not keeping a large Bulldog's coat as glossy as beef, said its owner (‘Female 50 A').

A homelier affair was the dog show held at Hendon Park in north London the following month in aid of the PDSA, where around 300 dogs were put through their paces. There were prizes for dogs whose owners were in Civil Defence uniform (as Air Raid Precautions had been renamed in the spring).

The Mayor of Hendon judged the tableau of child and dog entered by ARP posts and Chief Superintendent C. M. A. Steele made a speech saying it was good thing that, ‘even with a war on, the people of this country could still
be animal lovers and attend such shows'. In fact the show would become an annual fixture for the duration.

In November, in a bid to clamp down on profiteering, maximum prices for pets' meat were fixed: 6
d
. raw and 7½
d
. cooked on the bone. Belgian and Dutch refugees ate horse, indeed they seemed to relish it, but feeding this to pets would not be illegal. There was another variation of rationing in December when the ‘points system' was introduced in addition to coupons, but which at least allowed individuals a degree of selection in getting their hands on newly restricted items such as dried fruit, cereals, treacle and tinned and bottled goods. Dog food came in tins and glass jars – middle-class dogs were very fond of it, it seemed.

The makers of Chappie dog food announced mournfully on the 16th: ‘As the war goes on, a lot of us are going to wonder more and more just how we are going to solve the problem of feeding our dogs. Unfortunately “Chappie” is [now] rationed. So the most we dare promise is that customers shall get their fair and regular share of the limited supplies available.'

The Ministry of Food would take a deepening interest in Chappie and just what was in it. However much dogs liked it, the consumption of Chappie would turn out to be not in the national interest. Soon there would be no Chappie at all.

Things were looking up generally for cats, however. After much bureaucratic anguish, in early 1941, ‘Peter' the Home Office cat had been granted a maintenance allowance of 1s. a week. The news had spread like wildfire along the corridors of power. Evacuated Ministry cats on duty in the Hydro and Hawthorne hotels in Bournemouth were clearly eligible for the same deal. ‘See how elastic is the Treasury allowance for turning one cat into many cats,'
suggested a senior official. It would turn out to be eminently stretchable.

A hint of better times to come came in the House of Commons on 26 November when a planted question was asked of the Junior Food Minister Major Gwilym Lloyd George – ‘whether a small daily ration of milk might be provided for cats, as these animals are a national necessity?' No, said the Minister, cats consuming milk meant less for humans. But there was a glimmer of hope. ‘Limited quantities of damaged dried milk no longer suitable for human food can be issued to owners of warehouses and other food stores in which cats are kept,' he added.

And there it was on 30 December when Lord Woolton, the Food Minister, announced that ‘damaged milk powder' would be made available to cats – but only to cats on
‘work of national importance'
.

28
  Blackie was renamed ‘Churchill'. Later that year when the mighty battleship was sunk off Malaya by Japanese air attack with great loss of life, Churchill the cat managed to get ashore with some of the crew and ended up at Sime Road RAF Station in Singapore. ‘He settled in with them, shared their rations and moved camp with them,' it was reported, ‘but in February 1942, orders came to evacuate within hours and Churchill, off on one of his hunting trips, could not be found in time. Despite extensive searches, he finally had to be left to his fate.' One can hope against hope that Blackie somehow adapted to a new life in the Malayan jungle.

The Minister of Food bathed in the glow of popularity that his kind-to-cats move had bought with pet-loving public opinion. The Germans were at the gates of Moscow, Leningrad under siege and Hitler had declared war on the United States, but what really mattered at home, it seemed, was that the news for cats was good.

‘Lord Woolton's face can seldom have shined with a happier benevolence than it did yesterday,' said the
Manchester Guardian
as 1942 dawned, when, ‘he told the press about the largesse the New Year will bring to those engaged on work of national importance, cats who keep down mice and rats.'

But the owner of one ‘extraordinarily fussy cat' told a reporter at the newspaper that her cat ‘absolutely loves' powdered milk. Another woman declared her cat ‘would not touch it'.

The Times
editorialized on 8 January: ‘We must not be jealous of cats engaged on work of national importance,' reminding readers that ‘their allowance of powdered milk only extends to those engaged in keeping down mice and
rats in warehouses containing at least 250 tons of food or animal feeding-stuffs.'
²⁹

The RSPCA hinted that the Ministry would take ‘a lenient view of reasonable feeding as most homes have to keep cats to reduce the number of rats and mice' while stressing that the natural drink of cats was water, not milk. Work of national importance began at home.

There was mixed news for dogs. ‘Damaged' flour and meat greaves (the residue left on a carcass after the fat has been rendered) would be released for use in dog biscuits at a level one third of the pre-war quantity, it was announced. So the turgid regime of horseflesh and oven-baked stale bread (which was technically illegal) continued.

Scraps and household waste were collected for ‘economic animals' – pigs and poultry, though none for dogs. Bones similarly were part of the war effort – to make glue for aircraft and glycerine for explosives. There was still plenty of whispering against dogs as useless mouths to feed.