Bonzo's War (39 page)

Old habits were hard to break. As Parliament debated the issue, the RSPCA could not condemn fox hunting. Our Dumb Friends' League tried to revive the plight of old British war horses but was told practically no animal had been left alive by the retreating Germans. Any that remained had probably been eaten. In the British Control Zone of Germany moves were taken to ship surviving German Zoo stock to Britain so as to leave more food for humans. The de-Nazification specialists in the Military Government wound up the Reichtierschutzbund but left the Reich animal protection laws of 1933 in place. Army vets with the British control commission found that the German civil veterinary service, headed by Dr Friedrich Weber, a close friend of Hitler, ‘was one of the most pro-Nazi branches of civil administration in Germany'.

The Animal Guards disbanded without ceremony. The ARP Animals Committee mutated into something called the ‘National Registration of Animals Service' before
disappearing altogether, leaving some identity disks in cupboard drawers as curious reminders of pets at war.

The Technical Officers of the PDSA, so long derided as unqualified quacks, received qualified recognition by parliamentary legislation.

Europe's zoos were in ruins. A visit by
The Times
to Berlin in early 1946 discovered, ‘the animals, few and far between, must be tracked down amid ruined buildings and piles of rubble':

The elephant looks a rather woebegone creature. There are few buns or apples to spare for him just yet. Other survivors from the days of bomb and battle include two young lions, and there is as well a fine male lion, a newcomer since the capitulation. A lone chimpanzee delights young Berliners by riding in a swing and other antics. Two animals had to be killed to make food for the others, but none has starved.

Frau Doctor Heinroth, widow of the former head of the Aquarium, was in charge. The Zoo appealed to patrons to help provide food and was offering the following prices: ‘10 pfennigs for a mouse, 20 pfennigs for a rat, 8 pfennigs for a kilo of acorns and 1 mark 50 pfennigs for a litre of worms.'

A 1946 statement from the once-proud Hagenbeck Tierpark in Hamburg described the daily requirement for seals, pelicans, etc. as 80 kg of fish a day. For the carnivores it was 100 kg. But it was not getting through. Herbivorous animals subsisted on turnips and ruminants on ‘acorns collected by Hamburg school children'. The hippo was starving. It was decided to ship it to London, along with two more and an elephant from Hanover Zoo.

In London the physical damage to the Zoo seemed
‘negligible' (although the Zebra House still lay in ruins), while numbers of visitors were hugely up over 1939. The end-of-1945 annual report stated that there were 1,849 animals at Regent's Park, and 824 at Whipsnade, their numbers boosted by all those donated mascots and regimental pets.

Wartime rescuers left the stage. The Duchess of Hamilton died on 12 January 1951, leaving the Ferne estate in Wiltshire as an animal sanctuary. Mrs Maria Dickin died aged 80 on 1 March 1951 and Edward Bridges Webb became chairman of the PDSA. Louise Lind-af-Hageby continued to run Ferne and Animal Defence House in St James's Place with inevitably dwindling competence. She died at 7 St Edmunds Terrace on 26 December 1963, leaving her fortune to the Animal Defence Trust. The legacy became the matter of a financial scandal and a Department of Trade & Industry investigation of a Dartmoor badger sanctuary.

Ferne House was demolished in 1965, along with the centrally heated aircraft hangar that so comforted evacuee cats in the great emergency of 1939–41. A new house would eventually be raised in neo-Palladian style for the proprietor of a cat-supporting tabloid newspaper. Ferne Animal Sanctuary, as it is still called, continues at another site near Chard in Somerset. The London pet refuge, ‘Lyndhurst', and next door No. 7 St Emund's Terrace were replaced by a block of flats in the seventies. The Lido Cinema, Bolton, was demolished in 2006. Animal Defence House in Mayfair, once crammed with refugee pets, was home to a hedge fund seventy years later. Hook House, near Potters Bar, the Army War Dog School, became the UK Oshwal religious centre in 1989.

Rota, the lion from Pinner presented to Winston Churchill in 1943, sired forty cubs. He died in 1955, was
stuffed and mounted then purchased for display by a Florida museum.

One by one, the war hero animals, celebrities all, left the field. The little Poplar Terrier, Rip, died in 1946 and was buried in the PDSA's Ilford cemetery. His headstone was inscribed ‘Rip, D.M., “We also serve” – for the dog whose body lies here played his part in the Battle of Britain'. Beauty, the pioneer search and rescue dog, died on 17 October 1950 and was duly laid to rest. The death of Faith, the Blitz cat, in September 1948 was reported in
The Times
(‘little is known of the life of Faith before she entered the church, she was a stray') where her bravery was compared with Mourka, the Stalingrad tabby. She was buried in St Paul's churchyard.

Tich, the desert adoptee, got to Ilford in 1959 (‘Sleep Well Little Girl') to be buried in a flag-draped coffin with full military ceremonial to lie alongside 3,000 no less adventurous wartime pets. They included ‘Hitler', ‘Timoshenko', ‘Joffre', ‘Dinky', ‘Dusty', ‘Ginger' and ‘Peter', the Home Office cat.

Brian, the parachuting D-Day Alsatian from Loughborough, died aged 13 in 1955 and was buried alongside his fellow Dickin Medal holders in Ilford, Essex, close to the field where so many less celebrated pets had been interred, unnamed and unmemorialized, in the great destruction panic on the outbreak of war and the mass abandonment of late summer 1940. That is where little Oo-Oo and Bonzo went – along with hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs, the ordinary pets of Londoners. It is a haunted place.

The overgrown cemetery in east London was restored in 2007 with National Lottery funding, but the charity ‘chose not to emphasise' the fact or manner of their passing.

But they will be remembered.

50
  The British Army had 120,000 animals on charge in 1945, plus 80,000 captured ‘enemy' horses and mules. Within a year this was reduced to 27,000 by a policy of approved sales and humane slaughtering. The scandal of selling old warhorses locally, as in 1918, was not to be repeated.

I am grateful to the archivists, librarians and charity gatekeepers who kindly made available so much hidden information on wartime pets. Special thanks to Francesca Watson and her colleagues at Cats Protection (CPL), Tracey Hawkins of Blue Cross (ODFL), Chris Reed of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Michael Palmer of the Zoological Society of London, Clare Boulton, librarian of the RCVS, Ruth Macleod of Wandsworth Heritage Service, Jean Rosen of the IWM Department of Documents, Sarah Graham of the Dogs Trust (NCDL) and Mr Alan Meyer for information on the Animal Defence Trust.

I am additionally grateful to these organisations plus the PDSA for the reproduction of material from their contemporary publications and reports. I am grateful to the publishers of
The Dog World
and
Our Dogs
for permission to quote from wartime issues of their publications. The
Manchester Guardian
newspaper is quoted by permission of the Guardian Media Group, the extract from
Boy in the Blitz
by Colin Perry by permission of his daughter, Felicity Collier, and extracts from the published works of Norman Longmate, Lionel Montague
and Arthur W. Moss appear by permission of the Random House Group. Quotes from the
Diary of George Orwell
are copyright George Orwell and appear by permission of the Random House Group. The extract from the poem ‘War Cat' by Dorothy L. Sayers is by permission of David Higham Associates.

Transcripts from Crown Copyright documents in the National Archives at Kew appear by permission of the Controller of HM Stationery Office. Extracts from Archbishop Temple's wartime correspondence on prayers for animals are by permission of the trustees of Lambeth Palace Archives.

I am grateful to the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum and the individual copyright holders for granting access to the collections of private papers held by the IWM and for permission to publish extracts from them. Mass Observation (M-O) material is reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, Copyright © the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive.

Copyright in the extracts from the WW2 People's War online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public belongs to the contributors as credited, licensed to the BBC. The archive can be found at
www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar
. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of further unpublished documents and published works in print or electronic form from which quotations have been made.

Thank you especially to two remarkable German Shepherd devotees, Joyce Ixer and Garbo Garnham, for sharing wartime memories.

I would also like to thank my publisher, James Gurbutt, and agent Felicity Blunt for getting behind this book so enthusiastically from the start, as well as editors Jane
Donovan and Clive Hebard for their intelligent and insightful comments.

In addition, my thanks to Victoria and Joseph, who tirelessly run their own cat rescue project in Clapham, and from whom we received our own two beloved felines, Fergus and Luis, and who along with my aunt's poor, long-gone Paddy, were part of the original inspiration for this book.

Finally, I would like to thank my husband and co-writer, Christy Campbell, whose hard work, enthusiasm and eye for detail never wavered, and our daughters, Maria and Katy, and son Joseph, who have inherited their parents' passion for pets and concern for their jeopardy.

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