Bonzo's War (24 page)

‘Four days later, I rescued from the rubble in a badly bombed, working-class district, a black Retriever lapping from a burst water cistern. His mistress was killed and his master terribly injured.'

In another street were, ‘cats, dogs, chickens, canaries, budgies and ring doves, trapped by a 500-kilogram time bomb'. He found a parrot alive after five days, drawn by the noise coming from under the rubble: ‘Polly's all right, Polly's all right!'

According to
Our Dogs
reporting on the fate of Hull's pets: ‘It is worth mentioning that officials of the Dogs Home and the RSPCA, together with other animal lovers, dealt with seven hundred domestic pets, not hesitating to enter dangerous buildings to rescue them.'

Dog World Annual
went somewhat over the top in reporting the People's Dispensary's gallantry in its survey of ‘British Dogdom' in 1941:

It is their proud slogan that they ‘Go Where the Bombs Fall' and no call for help is ever left unheeded. Rescue
workers have entered burning stables and they have mounted dizzy staircases, against the advice of the police, in order to reach some cat or caged bird, which had been left shut in a cupboard by some thoughtless owner.

So, who were these selfless volunteers? Who were these brave midnight feeders of ferals and listeners for cries beneath the debris? They drew their fortitude from an earlier tradition of concern, one with largely a female face.

Without the mad cat ladies (and some were really mad) of late Victorian Britain, there would have been a much-diminished ‘animal welfare' culture to meet this new time of trial. The pioneering work of these much-mocked-at-the-time women had gone round the world.

The independence of such women was another reason why animal welfare was so fragmented. Like cats, they walked on their own. Right at the beginning, in the first flush of abandoned pets, a Mrs Thornton went out on to the streets of Leytonstone at night, ‘looking into churchyards and derelict houses for the victims of callous owners'. She told her story in the ODFL report: ‘I noticed a large, old, black gaunt cat. He was starved and neglected. He sat upon a roof where I could never possibly get at him. I began to throw food out to him, and then I found that somehow he came into the factory at night, and I fed him secretly. Of course, he found the food and would wait hours for me to feed him.'

Kindly Mrs Thornton was, after some time, able to catch him. The following year the League would record the story of Mrs Lilian Lane of Regent's Park, north London, ‘where she worked single-handed from her own home'. She was approached by ‘the distressed owner of a lost black and
white male Persian cat' who had no address disc – ‘He did however have a mark on his nose.' For weeks Mrs Lane searched in vain. Then, in her own words:

One day, very recently, a sweet natured woman, who feeds all hungry cats in the district, told me about a black and white Persian she was feeding. I made several journeys to the feeding spot but did not see him. However, one Saturday I spotted him and his nose and there was the black mole mark. I went and fetched the owner who was overjoyed and they are all happily reunited.

Mrs Lane, an Animal Guard from the earliest days, would feature in a newspaper article as the ‘Florence Nightingale of Animals', going round north-west London on her bicycle with its NARPAC badges emblazoned on baskets fore and aft, which has ‘become a two-wheeled animal ambulance'. ‘In the Blitz I had panniers on either side as well for I had a load,' she said. The article stated that ‘In the past year she had had 131 stray cats put to sleep and found homes for forty cats, four dogs and one bird. Two dogs and fifty cats had been returned to their owners.' She regularly ‘sat up till two in the morning working on identity discs'. Good and kind Mrs Lane!

And it was not just women.
The Cat
told a cheerful story in February about cats who ‘refused to leave their bombed-out homes'. They had found, ‘a friend in London bus driver, Mr. Arthur Heelas, who has, himself, been bombed from his home. Every day he tours the district with food for his furry friends, who emerge from the ruins at the first sound of his footsteps.'

And there was, ‘animal lover Mr. C. J. Searle, a businessman of Petts Wood, Kent, who approached the
League about opening stations both at his home and at his place of business'. In the space of a year Mr Searle had, ‘rescued and put down three stray cats, lethalled a cat whose owner could no longer keep him, returned one dog to its owner and arranged for a dog to be sent to a temporary evacuation home. In addition, he took into his own home one cat and one dog, which he had rescued from bombed premises.'

Rita Cannon of the Animal Defence Society recalled: ‘Someone asked me to go and see a poor old woman who lived in a tiny lodging where she kept a number of cats. I found her indescribably bedraggled in a room swarming with cats and kittens, which she had found homeless and befriended. Once convinced of my friendly intentions, she agreed gratefully to my coming back to fetch the cats. Most of these poor people will give their last crust to their cat or dog.'

Whether they liked it or not posh cats and alley cats alike were recruited into the feral colonies now taking over bomb sites and military camps, surviving from pigswill bins and cook houses. Humans, for some reason, had chosen to put all their scraps and leftovers into convenient containers
at the end of every street
. Best get there before they were emptied.

After one raid on east London, an RSPCA Inspector reported, ‘1,400 pets, mostly cats, found all apparently ownerless'. The ownership of some was traced but, ‘many of them were of the type that had no specific owners and were fed communally by residents in blocks of buildings'.

‘In one East End street it took three months to round up a hundred cats during early morning and late evening visits,' noted the Customs House and Plaistow District shelter of the ODFL. As
The Veterinary Record
observed: ‘Cats are the most difficult to retrieve, and so long as they
are not suffering or starving, the policy is to let them remain and, thanks to a kindly public, many of them are regularly fed.' Fed with what? Giving human food to cats was illegal – it took a special kind of cat devotion.

In November 1940 the
Daily Mirror
made a big story out of a 65-year-old widow, Mrs Caroline Roberts, who ‘has fed hundreds of homeless cats in a heavily bombed district of London and every evening makes a fire in her sitting room just to make them feel at home where they doze after she has given them a good dinner of cats' meat, bread and milk.' Ministry of Food enforcement officers must have been apoplectic.

There are plenty such examples in the archives of individuals who took pet collecting over the edge of obsession and ended up being dragged out themselves from some improvised shelter overrun with starving animals to face prosecution for cruelty or for wasting food.

Such pet-human dramas happened in different circumstances. In October 1941 there was a report from Barnsley, Yorkshire that Mr Carter, the huntsman of the Pershore Hunt, ‘rather than see the pack cease to exist had not put them down'. The court was told that it ‘had been impossible to get quality feeding stuffs and the hounds had lost weight'. One emaciated Foxhound's corpse had been kept in ice by the RSPCA as prosecution evidence. He was fined £10 for cruelty.

Wealthy zoophiles such as Nina, Duchess of Hamilton might be considered pet collectors on an industrial scale. In describing a fund-raising gymkhana at Ferne animal sanctuary, it was later reported, ‘an aircraft hangar was arranged complete with central heating for the cats and staff engaged to care for them under the personal supervision of Her Grace'.

The cosy cat-filled hangar was at the estate's aerodrome,
laid out by her son, pilot and RAF officer Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Marquess of Clydesdale (who became 14th Duke of Hamilton when his father died on 16 March 1940), who would fly round the family properties, just as he would the pre-war European capitals, in his personal Tiger Moth. The dashing airman had been a keen appeaser who had made connections with prominent Nazis, especially those who shared a love of flying.

In late 1940 the Duke was embroiled in an MI5-Air Intelligence fishing operation to flush out potential Nazi sympathizers and general German intentions. These manoeuvrings would eventually lead to the flight of the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, from Bavaria to Scotland on 10 May 1941, bearing ‘a secret and vital message' for the Duke of Hamilton, the Duchess's son, whom he had briefly encountered five years before at the Berlin Olympics.

Having bade farewell to his pet Wolfhound ‘Hasso', Hess, an accomplished pilot, parachuted out of a Bf 110 long-range fighter over southern Scotland. His intended destination was the airstrip that the Old Etonian aristocrat had created in the grounds of Dungavel House. Although he had a map with Dungavel marked in red, Hess missed it and ran out of fuel to land south of Glasgow. The next day, Hamilton saw Hess in Maryhill Barracks propped up in bed with a twisted ankle.

If the deputy Führer had aimed for the Hamilton spread at Ferne instead, he would have found himself nearer to London to make his peace overture, but the aerodrome was inconveniently full of cats. MI5, the security service, kept an eye on the goings-on. When Hamilton's name first came into the frame, an officer noted on the file: ‘I remember Clydesdale at school, he was up to normal but only just. It seems that his family were attracted by the
Nazi atmosphere.'
²⁶
He further wrote: ‘The Duke's mother is a well-known crank. Animals! etc!'

That was MI5's view of animal welfare campaigners. In an age of total war they seemed like long-frocked relics of another age. Nina, Duchess of Hamilton, might indeed have been a crank but no more than the many hundreds of women, young and old, rich and poor, who were drawn into the fight to help wartime pets. Like newly married Phyllis Brooks, aged 20, who worked with her ambulance-driving sister-in-law at Our Dumb Friends' League Hammersmith Shelter. She recalled later:

We had lots of voluntary people in those days. There were many well-off women at home who did charity work. Wherever we went to rescue animals there was always somebody close by who would have a basket handy.

A lot of people cared. When there were lulls in the bombing, people drifted back to London, then some would come and offer a home to a cat.

Mostly we tried to talk common sense to people to help them nurse their animals back to health. We were the last of the rescue people to get on to a bombed site and we had to carry an identity pass issued by the National Air Raid Precaution Animals' Committee. Quite often there would be animals wild with terror and it would mean many visits to the site to set traps. There were people who would feed the strays, but we were kept very busy.

‘We were all described as cranky, we animal welfare workers,' said Mrs Brooks. You can bet they were thought cranky. They did it because with a war raging, they loved animals with a passion. How cranky was that?

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  It was noted on the file that the youngest of the Duke's four sons, David Douglas-Hamilton, had married Prunella Stack, youthful head of the Women's League of Health and Beauty. The couple had visited Hamburg in late 1938 for the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) sponsored Congress of Physical Fitness.

Month after month, the continuing Blitz brought plenty of new observations of how animals reacted under fire. Cats were becoming positively blasé.

A Birmingham cat, ‘Polly', was observed taking her three kittens one at a time to the cellar of a house during ‘a terrific barrage'. Polly reappeared – ‘followed by another cat, which she had apparently persuaded to join in the comfort and safety afforded by the refuge'.

When Chelsea Old Church in London was reduced to rubble on the night of 16–17 April 1941, ‘a small cafe, with a nice cat, was destroyed,' it was reported. The owner of the cafe went back the next day and called for his pet among the ruins. He saw a heap of bricks moving to find, ‘a small cat ghost, so encrusted was the little creature with plaster and dust'. Taken home and bathed, the cafe kitten became itself again – but ‘after its morning meal, the kitten went back to the ruins, every day, returning to its new home at night'.

‘My own two cats are getting quite used to bombs,' wrote the editor of
The Cat
, ‘unless they fall very near, when they rush on to our shoulders and cling closely, quite stiff with fright. They love to go out on moonlit
nights but make for home as soon as the siren sounds.'

That was a universal observation. Cats generally were reported as knowing the alert warning (wooing siren) meant danger from above – and they took to the cellar. There was a story about a London tabby sitting peacefully in a garden, who when the siren sounded ‘sprang up, ran full tilt, and took cover in a public shelter'. The recorder of this incident had ‘heard many similar stories of dogs, but none of cats'. She commented sagely:

The dog is a friend, enters into our life and imitates some of our behaviour, even to the extent of looking both ways before crossing a busy road. But the cat is of another world, and his ways are not ours. It is an act of condescension on his part to avail himself of a human safety device.

And one cat was said to warn its deaf owner of raids. And on the first wail of the siren, Mrs Holroyd's delightful sounding ‘Suli' and ‘Meru' would go to where their leads were hanging (Siamese, you see), ready for the walk in the dark down the garden to the Anderson shelter. ‘Once there, they would settle in their specially prepared gas-proof box and go soundly to sleep. At the first sound of the All Clear they are awake and ready to return to the house.' What practical creatures!

There were many such reports of cats emerging from their hiding places on the raider's passed sound (a constant tone). And there was more. Such as the tale of a London cat ‘that knew the difference between the British “planes” and the German “planes”'. This miraculous feline ‘could hear the Jerries' engines' – described as an ‘uneven dragging, bumping' noise – ‘sometimes before the siren sounds'.