Bonzo's War (20 page)

An Airedale bitch belonging to a dairy company horsekeeper made Lassie-like insistences that a family sheltering under a kitchen table should go down into the cellar before the house collapsed on top of them seconds later. ‘Teeney Weeney', a brave tabby, fluffed herself up to enormous size and frightened off a looter.

The home of ‘Peggy', a ‘terrier of sorts' was shattered by a bomb and her female owner trapped under debris – ‘The baby, Peggy's special charge, was in her pram, she worked furiously with her paws till she had made a hole through which the child could breathe. It is no small tribute to her skill and patience that all three – mother, child and dog – were saved alive.'

How could such pet heroes and heroines as these be regarded as in any way dispensable?

From the earliest days of planning for war, the expectation had been all along that pets would go barking mad at the first wail of a siren.
¹⁹
‘How is your dog reacting?' asked
The Dogs Bulletin
at the end of 1940. ‘On the one hand it has been stated that dogs and cats take little notice of bombs and gunfire, while the other picture presented is one of distracted hysteria.'
²⁰

‘Cats are comparatively indifferent or even contemptuous to the efforts of the German air force,' said the
PDSA News
. ‘They return to their homes the next day and sit among the ruins purring quite contentedly,' while, ‘birds remain cheerfully singing in their cages in shattered rooms without
walls or roof.' One London office cat curled up in the in-tray when the sirens went, a favourite snoozing spot normally denied him.

‘My bees are frightened out of their wits every time the anti aircraft guns fire,' a correspondent for
Bee Craft
noted in October, while a month later an apiarist reported, ‘a bomb made a fabulous crater a few feet behind our twenty or so hives. A few minutes later my wife and I were surprised to find the bees working away quite unconcerned.'

As for dogs, there were stories on both sides. When a bomb fell 200 yards away, a ‘large' Retriever ‘crept under a sofa and without a bark or yelp expired,' recorded
ARP News. ‘A
pack of startled greyhounds ran wild through a town for days until eventually they returned to their kennels,' the same edition reported. The majority of dogs of a provincial city ‘abandoned it entirely' according to another report, ‘to wander the countryside for days.' Stories of such mass panics however seemed apocryphal.

George Orwell's diary for 17 September recorded reactions in his Marylebone mansion block; its inhabitants huddled with their pets in the basement:

All the women, except the maid, [were] screaming in unison, clasping each other and hiding their faces, every time a bomb went past. The dog subdued and obviously frightened, knowing something to be wrong.

His own dog, ‘Marx', a Poodle, was ‘also like this during raids, i.e. subdued and uneasy,' he wrote. ‘Some dogs, however, go wild and savage during a raid and have had to be shot. They allege here, and Eileen [his wife] says the same thing about Greenwich [her family home], that all the dogs in the park now bolt for home when they hear the siren.'

All sorts of patent anti-hysteria dog pills were being pushed in the press. Canine columnist ‘Philokuon' advised: ‘Some people have bromide ready to give the dogs when the alarm is sounded. In such a case it should be given at once to let them have time to steady down before the racket begins.

‘The dose varies from 3 grains to 20 grains in a tablespoonful of water, according to the size of the dog. Those that are kept in outside kennels should be brought indoors, for, if they are left to themselves, they are bound to be scared.'

But were such measures really necessary?
ARP News
could report after months of bombing that if ‘a really well-trained dog is kept out of view of flashes' then all those nerve tonics and ear wads being promoted were not needed.

Instead dogs seemed positively serene under fire. Some indeed were heroes. It was the owners who panicked first.
The Animal World
reported the view of a Midland vet who thought fears of hysteria had been greatly exaggerated. ‘A timid and excited owner may transfer his terror to his pet,' he said – ‘after visiting a house following a frantic telephone call, it was not the animal that was in most need of a sedative.'

‘Animals are very sensible,' said the North London Home for Lost Dogs, ‘and dogs have apparently got used to the noise. There have been lost dogs, but some are lost due to [the] owner's carelessness.'

The Dogs Bulletin
loved stories of dogs keeping calm. When an aircraft was brought down near Croydon, it reported, ‘the engine became detached and dropped through the roof of a kitchen belonging to a nearby house. It went straight through the roof and on to the boiler. This in turn exploded and blew a hole through the wall. A dog that was in the kitchen at the time calmly walked out through the hole, unhurt.'

The naturalist Eric Hardy wrote: ‘My own Collie sheepdog has been in the shelter with us without showing the least disturbances or barking once. He has become ARP conscious, preceding the family into the shelter at a warning and then with raiders past signal getting up and returning to his kennel.' However, Hardy was very tough on less resolute dogs:

Badly trained dogs however have proved a nuisance, barking loudly and often rushing wildly about the place without entering the shelter. Muffed ears just add to the excitement and they struggle to get rid of the wadding.

If the feeding of dogs becomes a national grievance, these should be the first to be destroyed. The barking of one dog sets off all the badly trained dogs in the district.

Plenty more dogs were apparently developing an ‘ARP sense' with the ability to distinguish between the alert and the all-clear signals.

As did cats. ‘At the alert she comes indoors to take shelter,' said a loving owner in response to a newspaper request for information on pets' reactions, ‘but when the raiders-passed signal is given, she jumps up and scratches to be let out.' Some pesky dogs seemed to
like
the noise of guns and bombs, while others were ‘miserably frightened and crawl under the furniture'.

‘Some parrots definitely dislike the noise, and scream loudly and hysterically,' it was noted. Songbirds in the wild generally treated aircraft as if they were ‘hawks', the birds ‘scattering downwards and crouching to avoid detection'. Neither robins nor swallows paid any attention to aircraft.

The reactions of animals to war would continue to fascinate observers through the winter and spring. It was remarkable how little it affected them, even at the Zoo.

Captive wild creatures did not possess powers of premonition. ‘There is certainly no evidence that any of the animals in the Zoo can anticipate the arrival of aircraft, distinguish between ours and theirs, react in any important way to the sirens, or foresee the impact of bombs,' wrote a ‘special correspondent' for
The Times
soon after the bombing began. ‘The animals are, however, not entirely neutral to disturbances. After a few minutes of anti-aircraft fire the other night the cranes got rather excited and began their rattling cries; but they soon settled down.

‘The gibbons have a cry that resembles the siren in some ways although nobody who lives near the Zoo fails to distinguish them.'

On 27 September the first bombs fell on Regent's Park. The Zoological Garden's Occurrences Book noted:

38 incendiary bombs. Extensive damage to main restaurant by fire and water. Gardens closed until further notice due to unexploded bomb. Zebra and Wild Asses' house both damaged beyond repair. One Grevy's Zebra and wild ass mare and foal escaped but were captured next morning. Bomb in road at back of rodent house. Animals uninjured.

Twenty-four rhesus monkeys were noted as having been sold by the Zoo to Dr Zuckerman for ‘£12 the lot'.
²¹

In a December talk on the BBC director Julian Huxley would tell the story of the night when the Zoo was blitzed. ‘By a miracle none of the occupants was killed or even hurt, apart from a few bruises and scratches,' he recalled. ‘The female wild ass got out of her stable into the paddock, while her foal escaped at the back and wisely took refuge in the stoke hole under the hippo house, where she was found next morning.'

A zebra [called ‘Johnson'] was liberated into the gardens and made his way through the tunnel and out through the gate, which the fire brigade was using. He headed for Camden Town. Keepers set out in pursuit and by a combination of coaxing and driving he was without much difficulty got safely back and into an empty store shed.

A senior Ministry of Home Security official wrote in October to regional officers about ‘unease in the country owing to the presence of exotic animals (lions, bears etc.) which may escape as a result of air attack'. There were also known to be reptiles, big cats, etc., kept as fashionable pets. He was canvassing opinion. Should special powers be sought that they be evacuated or slaughtered? Were they indeed a danger? It seemed they were not. Like the nation's more conventional pets, their main concern seemed to be where the next meal was coming from.

19
  The businessman and philanthropist Alexander Duckham wrote to the Prime Minister in 1941 with a suggestion for changing the Air Raid Warning note from ‘the demoralising wail of the amorous gargantuan tom cat' to ‘cock-a-doodle-doo' signalling ‘defiance and triumph'. Mercifully for pets it was not adopted.

20
  Author's note: From my own experience of my two beloved rescue cats' reactions to firework night in London, I personally believe this is attributable to individual personality. One cat, ‘Fergus' (a beautiful cream Maine Coon), although normally the more timid of the two, shows little or no fear of the explosive bangs and sparks, while his co-habitee, the bold black ‘Luis', is reduced to cowering under the gas cooker.

21
  That September the anti-vivisectionist press drew attention to an article in
The Lancet
by Dr S. Zuckerman of the Department of Human Anatomy, University of Oxford, on the effects of blast on rabbits, monkeys and cats. Exposed to 70 lb of High Explosive at eighteen feet, only two out of ten cats were killed. The Professor was working to a Ministry of Home Security Research and Experimental Branch, contract with bomb effect trails conducted at a disused brickfield at Stenbay, north of Bedford. This presumably is where the Zoo's monkeys were heading.

 

 

 

‘I Help My Pals'

Motto of the Tail-Waggers Club

The beasts of England could take it. Muntjacs and mongrels, Pekes and penguins … There were no panic-stricken animals rampaging through the country. So what was NARPAC for? After a month of bombing, by October 1940 the crisis had come. Committee members were at war with each other while a delayed-action bomb in Gordon Square had caused operations to be suspended. Creditors were demanding their money. The number of Animal Guards had fallen from 47,000 to 16,000 due, it was said, to ‘boredom and local quarrels'. Talk of a great army of three million guards had been fantasy.

With the committee in uproar, the chairman, the former Ministry of Agriculture Principal Assistant Secretary, Mr H. E. Dale, was ‘sorry it had come to this,' so he told the Minister of Home Security on 26 October. He complained, justifiably, that the Government had brought the welfare charities together and then given them no status. They were now also a registered war charity, to the horror of the RSPCA, alarmed by the threat to its jumble sales and stately flow of legacies.

‘The government cannot wash its hands of all responsibility for dogs and other pets,' wrote Mr Dale.
‘The government controls everything and is responsible for everything [true enough by late 1940]. Domestic animals may not be a material interest of the nation but they are a strong sentimental interest.'

According to him, the animal welfare societies were hugely jealous of their own status while the veterinary profession was ‘suspicious of everyone'. The Vets' Association meanwhile thought that NARPAC's lack of discipline was the problem – that, and the inability of ‘well-meaning individuals who love animals to appraise the problems sanely'.

Some vets had thought it better to join the Home Guard or regular ARP, the better to serve animals, so ineffective had NARPAC proved. Henry Steele-Bodger, president of the National Veterinary Medical Association, accused the constituent welfare societies of ‘wallowing in publicity for their own self glorification'.

‘Their leaders are without conscience and their promises are worthless!' he declared. ‘The benefit of animals in wartime was not the prime concern of certain members of the committee.'

The Minister was further told that the RSPCA's lack of co-operation was based on jealousy of the registration data and against the PDSA and especially Our Dumb Friends' League on the grounds that they were ‘extremists'. The Society's supporters would be most unhappy if the ‘normal flow of legacies and subscriptions [were] interrupted or turned towards other animal welfare societies competing with it for public and private favour'.

For a while NARPAC looked as if it would simply collapse under its own contradictions. ‘I shall not be sorry to see an end to the whole unsavoury business and I doubt whether pets would be any worse off,' so Mr Eric Snelling, the official now responsible at the Ministry of Home
Security, told Christopher Pulling. But instead they commissioned an outside report (it is unsigned but it is by someone ‘hitherto unfamiliar' with the committee). With the Blitz at its height, its commissioning was a reflection of political concern, for good or ill, for the fate of Britain's pets.