Bonzo's War (30 page)

It all reached a head in genteel Cheltenham when the owner of Lassie, ‘the collecting dog', pointed out the ‘many useful purposes of our dogs', including guiding the blind such as himself. ‘To say nothing of the many good dogs who guard important places and also lonely women whose husbands are on war-work or active service.'

‘Certainly no dog should be fed on food suitable for human consumption,' said ‘Owner of Lassie'. ‘Such crimes as raiding the pig-bins should be severely dealt with.' As to felines: ‘If cat-haters had their way and destroyed this useful animal, how would they solve the problem of excessive vermin? May our cats and dogs be kept safe from the clutches of people who do not appreciate them.'

The Cat
noted a remark made by the Minister of Agriculture, Robert Hudson, when he was heckled during a meeting. ‘This town has too many poodles and too many Persian cats. What about all the food they consume?' shouted ‘Disgusted of Leamington Spa'.

Mr Hudson had replied, ‘We are a nation fighting for freedom. I have spent a good deal of my political life trying to prevent the issue of rules and regulations.' But the feeders of animals were beginning to feel the force of the
law. Ministry of Food enforcement officers were called to London Zoo in May after complaints that a woman fed, ‘cake, Canadian apples and orange segments' to a chimp. Watching children were described as being far more in awe of what was going through the bars than the antics of those inside.

On 29 October a Mrs Isabelle Thornton, of Maidstone, Kent, was fined £15 for feeding fifty-one tins of pink salmon to cats and dogs. She claimed it was ‘off' and one feels somehow certain that it was.

In Bristol, with the onset of winter, a Miss Mary O'Sullivan was fined £10 for permitting bread to be wasted. ‘Her servant was twice seen throwing bread to birds in the garden,' and when Miss O'Sullivan was interviewed she admitted that bread was put out every day. ‘I cannot see the birds starve,' she told the court.

And that October four company directors (one of them a serving RAF officer) were tried at the Old Bailey and sent to prison for a punitive eighteen months for ‘using flour in the form of sausage rusks in the manufacture of dog food'.

London Divisional Food Office Inspector, Jane Blom, had first taken an interest in November 1941 in Messrs Shaw's Veterinary Products, the manufacturers of ‘Dogjoy' and ‘Livabrex' dog food.
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Both lines were made to the same recipe – cornflake waste, fishmeal, dried liver and ‘anything that they can get according to supplies' she was told. Apparently they were the same (Dogjoy was the cheaper brand sold in Woolworths). They contained no flour, so the company secretary insisted. But Inspector Blom found large quantities of mysterious sausage rusk in the Harrow Road premises plus two tons of cheese.

Dogjoy's makers' crime was to use human-intended flour in the shape of the sausage rusk. Messrs Chappell Bros of Slough meanwhile were doing fine by Ministry inspectors who investigated their product, ‘Chappie'. It was made of condemned meat, knackers' meat, potatoes and ‘cereals unfit for human consumption'. Seventy per cent of it was water. That was alright by the Ministry – for now.

The year of living dangerously for Britain's cats and dogs was drawing to an end. The reconstituted NARPAC still promoted its registration scheme while drawing up baroque plans for the evacuation of coastal towns, should the threat of invasion somehow re-emerge. Clearly it had little better to do. At the evacuation end, firm instructions for the ‘disposal of pets' would be issued – that no animals other than small creatures such as lapdogs would be allowed on evacuation trains.

If small animals got through to the reception end, there was no guarantee they would be allowed in billets, therefore Animal Guards ‘responsible for their destruction' should operate. The Army would put down stray dogs and this time the RSPCA would be obliged to co-operate. Stray cats ‘of a suitable type' able to fend for themselves would be spared and indeed would prove useful as a means of keeping down rats and mice in the empty towns. The Germans had no intentions of invading.

NARPAC had gratefully said goodbye to its rural scheme in June, the better to concentrate on pets. Economic animals were now to be the responsibility of the ‘Farm Livestock Emergency Service', with the Duke of Beaufort, England's premier huntsman and owner of half of Gloucestershire, as its chairman. Fox hunting had a champion at court – Ministry officials addressed him as ‘Master'.

Our Dumb Friends' League published its end-of-year report. It regretted the abandonment of NARPAC by all the animal welfare societies except itself and the PDSA as it had seen the brave Animal Guards as a ‘forerunner of closer cooperation between them'. That ambition had been a little too brave.

It could report that 582 dogs and 803 cats belonging to members of HM Forces were being looked after by the League, ‘in spite of those few members of the public who consider that dogs have no practical value'.

There was ‘Glen', for example: ‘Every month a letter is sent to his master telling him how Glen is getting on and he visits on leave.' Fifteen dogs belonging to the Fighting French brought out of France were still in their care. Meanwhile a Frenchman and his wife who had set off (with their dog) in a small boat from the Breton coast to join the Free French were picked up by a destroyer. The Setter was now happily accommodated at the Blue Cross kennels.

The perils of the Blitz were largely over. Stories of animal heroism were now of a different kind. Medals were being awarded to humans who had rescued animals (and the other way round). ‘Billy', for example – a ten-month-old dog whose persistent barking woke his owners, Mr and Mrs Yerby of Kentish Town, when their house was on fire. And ‘Teeny Weeny', a very brave cat who fluffed himself up to enormous size and scared off an intruder.

And to ‘Jim', a 19-year-old cat in New Malden who slept downstairs but woke Mr and Mrs Coffey when he himself was woken ‘apparently by smoke'. Mr Pungenti of the Old Kent Road who fell out of a tree and was killed trying to rescue a cat was specially commended (the coroner said unkindly that it was entirely his fault). The League successfully persuaded Messrs Searle's furniture
shop to cancel the hire purchase agreement with the bereaved Mrs Pungenti.

The League in its end-of-1942 round-up expressed its gratitude to the Ministry of Food, ‘for so readily understanding that cats are a national asset' and allocating powdered milk to the League itself for those cats it was keeping. It was concerned however that the Ministry of Agriculture had done nothing about the large amount of ‘wild birds, rooks, plovers, larks, sea birds and other English wild fowl, pheasants, even swans for sale in shops and markets'.

The League was annoyed about stories that the Red Army was using dogs with explosives to destroy enemy tanks. In London, the Soviet Embassy said it was Nazi propaganda.
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The League was concerned too by reports of cat stealing. It talked of spasmodic but organized outbreaks of animals being stolen for their fur or even as food – as ‘cat in pie or stew can taste like rabbit'. The matter was raised in the Commons but the cat pie urban myth never went away.

There were plenty of stories of unlikely animal friendships. For example, the mongrel puppy taken into a home in Weston-super-Mare, where a jealous parrot ‘did its best to make the pup's life a misery'. ‘But it suddenly decided to change its tune, became much friendlier and whenever the puppy was about, said: ”Good morning, come right in”.'

The Superintendent of the Tottenham Shelter had taken to visiting ‘the local swill bins and refuse dumps' because
she had found that when it was quiet, ‘many stray animals congregated there'.

The League's Newport, Wales branch report had an extraordinary tale of a German aircraft brought down in Monmouthshire with a tabby cat aboard. There had been several instances of enemy pets captured at sea
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but this was the first airborne arrival. Along with the crew it was taken prisoner. The League, in an exemplary humane gesture, offered to quarantine the tabby PoW.

‘“Tiger”, on arrival at the shelter, showed several characteristics of the Hun,' said the report, ‘but after living under the care of the League he has become a docile, well mannered and well behaved animal.'

Nazi cats in Wales were unusual. But if Alsatians could write history, another pet-related event of 1942 would stand out. The human authority is Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Propaganda Minister, who wrote in his diary on 30 May: ‘He [Hitler] has bought himself a young German Shepherd dog called “Blondi” which is the apple of his eye. He bought the dog from a minor official in the post office in Ingolstadt [in Bavaria].
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‘ Goebbels continued:

It is very nice to watch the Führer with his dog. At the moment the dog is the only living thing that is constantly with him. At night it sleeps at the foot of his bed, it is allowed into his sleeping compartment in the
special train and enjoys a number of privileges that no human would ever dare to claim.

There were many humans in National Socialist Germany who had no privileges whatsoever. The oft-quoted diaries of Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish journalist and academic in Dresden, published in 1998, moved many readers – especially with the account of the fate of his tomcat, ‘Muschel'.

Klemperer was told that as Jews, he and his wife, Eva, could no longer make donations to the Reichsverband für das deutsche Katzenwesen (the Reich League for German cats). Its swastika-bedecked magazine,
Das deutsche Katzenwesen
, was filled with articles exalting the authentic German cat over lesser breeds. Although it was stressed in the animal journals that pets had the right to live even in times of war when feeding was difficult, this apparently did not include the pets of Jews.

In May 1942 all Jews in the Reich, and all those married to them, were told that they must surrender all pets. Dogs, cats and birds could live only in pure Aryan homes. About Muschel, Klemperer wrote:

I feel very bitter for Eva's sake. We have so often said to each other: The tomcat's raised tail is our flag, we shall not strike it and at the victory celebrations Muschel will get a ‘schnitzel from Kamm's' (the fanciest butcher here) [they had fed him on their meat rations].

Unless the regime collapsed by the very next morning, we would expose the cat to an even crueller death or put me in even greater danger. (Even having him killed today is a little dangerous for me.) I left the decision to Eva.

The little animal plays, is happy and does not know it will die tomorrow. The last meal he got was veal, as in peacetime.

Eva took the animal away in the familiar cardboard cat-box to the vet in Grunaer Strasse. She was present when he was put to sleep by an anaesthetic. The cat does not suffer but
she
suffers.

As in London, so in Dresden: poor Muschel! Far, far worse was to come.

33
  Tinned or bottled dog foods were relatively new. From none in 1937, 4,000 tons of the stuff was being sold in the UK by 1942.

34
  Russian dogs trained to carry satchels of explosive under enemy tanks and blow up in the process were indeed used in 1941–42 but with mixed results. German propaganda claimed it was because Soviet soldiers refused to fight.

35
  
The Cat
had a story about a captured merchant ship with 57 German sailors landing at a Scottish port. One of them was ‘a 15-year-old boy clutching a black and white cat which he guarded anxiously'.

36
  The Goebbels' diaries are quite clear but other sources say that Blondi was a gift from Martin Bormann and the Ingolstadt dog was a second Schäferhund bitch, ‘Bella', which Hitler subsequently kept at Berchtesgaden.

The surrounded German 6th Army was on the brink of surrender. If any pet was left in Stalingrad it was in immediate danger of being eaten. Fifty thousand German Army horses had perished thus far in the doomed offensive.

In January 1943, British newspaper readers were treated to the story of ‘Mourka' the cat who, so an enterprising feline propagandist reported, carried messages between embattled units of Britain's gallant Soviet allies. A photograph, reportedly of Mourka, shows a fine Siberian tabby with a full winter coat perched on the edge of a foxhole in a shattered factory.

‘He has shown himself worthy of Stalingrad,' reported
The Times
on the 15th, ‘and whether for cat or man there can be no higher praise.' Mourka seems to have been a pet cat who somehow got swept up by the winds of war.

That same wintry day, a journalist reported seeing three cats (unaccompanied by any humans) queuing outside a fish shop in Muswell Hill, north London, waiting for it to
open. Maybe they had got used to queuing after almost two-and-half years of war.
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The drama playing on the Volga meant Stalin could not join the discussions at Casablanca in Morocco, where Churchill and President Roosevelt were meeting to decide their next strategic moves. Mrs Clementine Churchill wrote to her husband in Africa of an urgent matter on the 14th:

The ‘Annexe' & No 10 [Downing Street] are dead and empty without you—'Smoky' wanders about disconsolate—I invite him into my room & he relieves his feelings by clawing my brocade bed-cover & when gently rebuked, biting my toe through it.
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Pets were not bringing much relief in Germany. The eminent military surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, recorded in his memoirs an incident in late 1942 when he was summoned to the Führer headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. He was ushered into an empty waiting room, when suddenly, ‘a huge dog entered, all teeth and snarls and prepared to spring at my throat'.

Sauerbruch then ‘patted the brute, which held out a paw and began to gaze at me adoringly'. Hitler came in, in a furious mood having harangued his generals for their failures in Russia. ‘What have you done with my dog?' he screamed. ‘You have deprived me of the only creature who was truly faithful to me, the only creature in the whole world who loves me! I'll have him shot.' The pet (presumably Blondi) was reprieved.