Bonzo's War (10 page)

‘The secretary at Ferne is Miss Judy Mussprat-Williams, the fiancée of a flying officer somewhere in France, who is delighted with the more work she has to do as it takes her
mind off her own affairs,' so Miss Golightly reported. Special commendation was also made to ‘Miss Bunbury' and ‘Miss Jacobs', pet lovers who took in evacuee dogs on a slightly less ducal scale. And Mr Bernard Woolley, impresario and dog-loving owner of the Lido Cinema, Bolton, had offered homes to 100 dogs. Apparently they were driven north in yapping car-loads by the ‘head of cats', Miss Molly Atherton, ‘in batches of 10 to 20, unloaded, given a run and taken into the cinema'. I wonder what was showing?
⁸
Actually they were promptly introduced to prospective hosts and taken into the bosom of Lancashire dog-loving homes until the shortage of
petrol made the flight from London much more difficult. Kind Mr Woolley!

The Duchess described her own charges: ‘The evacuated cats were very numerous. Sometimes they would arrive with a dog friend.' Mrs Freeman's six cats, evacuee-veterans of Munich, were back, along with a long procession of ‘grey pussies, black pussies, tabby pussies, white pussies, orange pussies, tortoiseshell pussies, long-haired Persians and shorthaired cats'.

‘It became a very real problem as to how to distinguish each one,' she wrote, ‘for cats have ways of slipping off collars. Many kind hosts came forward, but the greatest number of cats went to Ferne Sanctuary.' That winter there was an outbreak of feline influenza brought in by an ‘evacuee kitten' – but the usual eighty per cent fatality rate was brought down to ten by ‘the dedication of Miss Dukie and Miss Swallow who nursed the invalids day and night.'

There was embarrassment when the Duchess was fined £10 for blackout offences. It was reported that she had ‘200 evacuee dogs at Ferne House and has twenty girls, acting as kennel maids'. Twenty windows were recorded as showing lights over a number of nights. Her solicitor said, ‘It is extremely difficult to control these strange young ladies.' The chairman of the bench, sentencing, said: ‘It is a serious case. The fact that the Duchess has taken on a large number of dogs is not much of an excuse.'

Blackout was more of an issue for town pets. Motor vehicles, even in their reduced numbers, were a mortal danger. And dogs must be ‘exercised' in darkened streets. This could be vexatious in several ways. There were many slithering upsets as the nights lengthened.

The Dog World
reported at the end of September a new interest in ‘white dogs – such as Sealyhams and Bull Terriers, useful in avoiding pedestrian collisions'. ‘Carry a
white Pekingese,' an opportunist Peke breeder advertised. The Dumb Friends' patron, Lady Hannon, devised a natty white saddle cloth for dogs while the
Daily Mail
promoted ‘a white coat for your dog to protect him from unseen feet on crowded pavements in a blackout'. Another such garment came with jingling bells.

The National Canine Defence League offered the ‘Lustre Lead' – ‘glows with a beautiful fluorescent green colour in the dark – nothing to rub off or harm the dog – obviates risk of accident'. In the constant collisions and trampling dogs on leads proved as much of a menace in the gloom as those without them.

‘Humans must learn to be cats and walk in the dark,' wrote ‘Lucio', the
Manchester Guardian
columnist, a theme cheerfully picked up by
The Cat
. The editor pointed out:

We should all know that while cats can see in dimmer light than we can, they cannot see in total darkness. I was troubled about my cat, a strong-sighted animal, when the lighting regulations came in. Not only was he nervous and worried about the pitch darkness, but he was quite unsighted and fumbled his way through the house.

He specially disliked having to jump into a dark room from the window and I struggled with a torch and the black-out curtains in an attempt to help him without breaking the regulations. I then hit upon the simple device of a nightlight on the floor, where it cannot show outside. I commend it.

Cats and dogs could adapt to the blackout – but what about rationing? It would be food, not enemy bombs, that would determine the fate of pets in the much more testing times to come.

In those innocent, early months of conflict, ‘feeding dogs in wartime is no problem,' the Bob Martin Company could say in a useful pamphlet. ‘Several breeders during the last war kept their kennels healthy on a diet which consisted mainly of potato peelings and meat offal. We are officially informed by the Ministry of Food that there is no present intention of restricting in any way the supply of cereal foodstuffs used in the making of dog-foods. There is no present shortage, but what may happen in the future it is of course impossible to forecast.'

‘In practice you will find that only one or two items of your dog's regular diet will become unobtainable and substitutes can be easily found,' said the Canine Defence League. ‘For instance, boiled offal or horse-flesh can be substituted for raw beef, and should meat become impossible to obtain, soya bean flour or other protein food can be used.'

Dogs were already getting grumpy at the prospect. It was ‘all a bit Mother Hubbard,' to purloin one journalist's clever phrase. Housewives faced queuing for half a morning to get fish heads – or boiling lungs and windpipes (eight hours' minimum) in noisome vats on the soon-to-be declared ‘Kitchen Front'. Love of pets in wartime would be true love. It would only get worse.
The Cat
revived a recipe from 1917 for ‘a good solid pudding' made from table scraps mashed up with Marmite liquid and baked for an hour in a pie dish into a nutritious cake. It also warned that ‘most of the canned foods apart from Kit-e-Kat [made by Messrs Chappie of Slough] are likely to be withdrawn'.

‘What Is He Going To Eat Now?' asked Doris Knight in the
Daily Mail
in early October to reassure readers about the prospect of a shortage of pet food. ‘Experts are of the opinion that many dogs suffer from overfeeding and that a
period of sensible dieting will give most beneficial results,' she wrote. ‘Cats will usually eat similar meals to dogs provided there is a moistening of gravy provided by stewing cods' heads or kipper trimmings in water.'

‘There's no need to start worrying about how to feed your dog or cat when food rationing comes into force,' she continued. ‘The authorities have been giving plenty of attention to the matter for months past.'

Actually they had had other things on their minds. As soon as war was declared, the Ministry of Food had come into being. It was headed by William Morrison, the pre-war Minister of Agriculture, once tipped as a future premier. He would announce on 1 November that rationing (for humans) was to be introduced in the near future – to general grumbling. What about rationing for animals? That was not yet on the agenda but it soon would be.

Feeding pets and farm livestock was not the prime concern of NARPAC. After the catastrophe of the great pet slaughter, there seemed little for it to do. The Committee's affairs were about to be re-energized by Edward Bridges Webb's idea of a mass registration of the nation's pets by ‘animal wardens on every street'. To begin with they were to be mustered by the ‘Distributing Organisation of the PDSA's Jumble Dept'.

For patriotic animal lovers keen to do their bit, this did not seem very exciting. But create an army of ‘Animal Guards' to do the registering and distribute the collar tabs – two million of them – made by ICI out of celluloid, and you had something much more warlike-sounding. Special elastic collars were to be provided for cats.

It was all the idea of a certain Captain T. C. Colthurst, who would later tell an audience how, in September 1939, he was moved to take action after seeing the bodies of dogs that had been thrown into the Regent's Canal in north
London. He was ‘Animal Guard No. 1,' he announced proudly. By October there would be thirty of them.

‘Animal Guards are Needed Now!' announced
Animal and Zoo News
. ‘Who will volunteer? Any adult woman or man over military age is eligible. It is to the Animal Guards throughout the country that we shall turn if our herds of cattle are contaminated by gas. And it is the Animal Guards who will care for our domestic pets if they fall victim to war.'

It was publicist's dream. Pathé Gazette made a newsreel showing guards in swaddling anti-gas suits lovingly rescuing a fashionably dressed suburban woman's Great Dane, which had been ‘wounded by shrapnel'. A cosy chat was given on the BBC by Mr Christopher Stone, the honey-toned, Old Etonian Radio Luxembourg disc jockey. ‘Do not have your pet destroyed,' he pleaded. ‘At the beginning of the war a certain number of people did this. They have regretted it ever since. So far, thank God, the raiders haven't come but you do see, don't you, how important it is that this great plan for the benefit of the animals should be able to work smoothly?'

He mentioned an ‘eel, the pet of an elderly lady' and a number of ‘mongeese brought to our ports by sailors' as having been candidates for registration – which further ‘brought to light all kinds of curious pets, fowls, ducks, goats, lambs, monkeys, small bears, and even a lion cub,' as he would write later.

A news-sheet appeared. Issue No. 2 of the
NARPAC Bulletin
announced: ‘A great army of National Animal Guards is organising throughout the country. These voluntary Guards, of which it is hoped there will be one in every residential street, are intended to act as contact officers between first-aid posts and animal owners in each locality. The National Animal Guards will invite owners
to register all animals and will provide identity discs. Animal Guards are recognised as doing work of national importance and will wear distinctive armlets.'
⁹

All this was months before the Local Defence Volunteers (thereafter the Home Guard) would come into being. Animal Guards? What on earth were they? In fact they were unpaid volunteers with no official status, no preference for petrol, telephones or reservation from military call-up. They did not even have the legal status to destroy a wounded animal without a vet's signature. Nevertheless they would have a rank structure and a six-man (and three women) Grand Council – a kind of pet lover's Supreme Soviet.

According to a rose-tinted, post-war account: ‘Offers of help poured in and in the course of a few days over 40,000 people had offered to become National Animal Guards. The process of enrolling them, of arranging them in local groups under Chief Guards, and of fitting such groups into coherent regional organizations, gathered speed. The Guards all wore a white armlet with the now familiar NARPAC symbol, a blue cross in a red circle.'

The triumphalism of late-1939 was extreme. ‘For the duration of the war all the animal welfare societies are supporting the National A.R.P. Animals committee,' it was announced in the
Bulletin
. ‘It will have under its care at least six million dogs and cats as well as huge numbers of other animals.'

There was more. ‘The PDSA has placed its Jumble Department at the Committee's disposal. This jumble collection is the
only one
officially authorised on behalf of animals,' it was announced. This was a coup. The RSPCA consulted their lawyers – jumble was charity lifeblood.

The Duchess of Hamilton was equally furious. She had recently made a genteel appeal in the press: ‘Who will help by offering a free country home to a dog or a cat belonging to evacuated London people and to those called up for service?' What was wrong with that?

NARPAC had become very cross: this was breaking the common front. They had sent someone round to Animal Defence House to give her a ticking-off. But the Duchess could give as good as she got and told Committee chairman H. E. Dale in December, ‘This country has gone to war in the cause of freedom. We strongly resent, as will all earnest friends of animals, any dictatorial attempt to suppress and curtail animal welfare activities.' She knew who to blame for the September ‘massacre' as she called it – the Home Office and their horrid ‘grey pamphlet' (‘Air Raid Precautions for Animals') with its fatal advice.

Furthermore the organization of ‘a great army of animal guards' was doomed to be ‘as embarrassing a failure as the ARP organisation generally,' Her Grace insisted. That was the Ferne blackout rumpus. Mr Dale replied feebly: ‘I assure you we have no dictatorial ambitions.'

So the patrician ark in Wiltshire stayed beyond the socialistic clutches of NARPAC. Something else was stirring at Ferne. ‘The officers and men at a wireless station somewhere in England, have owing to the efforts of one of their police staff, come forward with an extraordinary offer to help and several evacuees have been placed with them,' reported
The Dog World
in November. It was all
very unofficial. Could refugee pets serve the war effort themselves? It turned out they could.

There had been no rush to recruit pets directly to the aid of the nation's armed forces. Dogs had served the British Army well on the Western Front in 1917–18 as messengers, but in this new, mobile, more technical war what might their place be? Mr H. S. Lloyd, the Crufts champion breeder, was working on a Home Office contract to conduct experiments with police dogs. In November 1939, one of his dogs was tried out as a guard in a test staged at RAF Northolt, the airfield west of London.

A bigger trial followed – with a view to finding suitable breeds and training methods for canines to protect ‘detached posts such as RDF [radar] stations where the guard personnel stayed consistent – and to whom the dog would respond and stay loyal'. ‘I could get a lot of material from the “Lost dogs homes” and train these,' Mr Lloyd told the War Office.

It was not a success. One dog was ‘so fierce it was a danger to the general public, whether innocent or guilty.' Another was so friendly ‘it could not be relied upon even to bark at the approach of an unauthorised person'. One dog proved friendly with the men at the guard post but although he ‘occasionally barked in the night, it was by no means certain he would so at the approach of an intruder'. This was not going to get the war won.