Bonzo's War Read online

  BONZO’S

  WAR

  Also by Clare Campbell

  Out of It: How Cocaine Killed My Brother

  Tokyo Hostess: Inside the Shocking

  World of Tokyo Nightclub Hostessing

  BONZO’S

  WAR

  CLARE CAMPBELL

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Corsair,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2013

  Copyright © Clare Campbell and Christy Campbell, 2013

  The right of Clare Campbell and Christy Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Written with Christy Campbell

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-47210-679-7 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-47210-687-2 (ebook)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed and bound in the UK

  Jacket images © Mirrorpix, Harshad Pisavadia (author); Jacket design: Leo Nickolls

  To Fergus and Luis, and all those that went before

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  A Note on the Animal Welfare Charities

  A Note on the Sources

  A Note on the Naming of Pets

  PART ONE: PAWS IN OUR TIME

  1 In Case of Emergency

  2 It Really is Kindest …

  3 Killed by Order

  4 Killed by Kindness

  5 Keep Calm …

  6 … and Carry a White Pekingese

  7 Hunting Must Continue!

  8 Wolves Not Welcome

  PART TWO: THE MINISTRY OF PETS

  9 Pets Get the Blame

  10 The Dunkirk Dogs

  11 Three Million Dogs to Die

  12 No Cat Owner Need Worry

  13 Blitz Pets

  14 The Comfort of Pets

  15 How is Your Pet Reacting?

  PART THREE: PETS SEE IT THROUGH

  16 The Perils of NARPAC

  17 Non-essential Animals

  18 Pets Under Fire

  19 Wanted – Dog Heroes

  20 Pets on the Offensive

  21 Nationally Important Cats

  22 Too Many Poodles

  23 The Secret War on Dogs

  PART FOUR: PETS TRIUMPHANT

  24 Camp-followers

  25 Flying Pets

  26 The D-Day Dogs

  27 Doodlebug Summer

  28 Finest Hour

  EPILOGUE

  Pets Come Home

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Source Notes

  Author’s Note

  When I was eight years old I was horrified to discover that my uncle ‘had killed a dog’.

  Eavesdropping on my parents’ conversation in our south London home one evening, I heard my mother tell my father how distressed her twin sister, Lena, had been at the very start of the Second World War. This was not as a result of fears for herself or her young son at the thought of the approaching conflict, but rather because her husband, Ernest, had decided to have their beloved pet dog ‘Paddy’ destroyed.

  From what I could gather, Paddy had been a very nice Wire Haired Fox Terrier. I had never known him; it was all several decades earlier. But I do remember a fading snap in our family photo album of an agreeable, eager-looking dog with magnificently tightly curled fur bouncing along by my aunt’s side. He had reminded me of the Tri-ang toy push-along dog that I myself had loved so much as a child.

  Now he was long gone. But I pricked up my ears and wanted to know more. With some reluctance, my mother told me.

  The way she told it, each evening my Aunt Lena would walk Paddy across the common to the suburban station to meet Ernest off his train, the dog jumping up to greet him with joy. It was summer 1939; war was coming. Everybody sensed it, even if the pets of the southwest London suburbs were as yet blissfully unaware of Herr Hitler’s intentions.

  Then, when the Invasion of Poland was at last announced on the BBC News, my mother told me that Uncle Ernest had suddenly decreed that Paddy must go.

  Always a very ‘rational’ man and totally lacking in sentiment, he took the dog from my aunt’s arms the following day (2 September 1939) and went out the front door, I assume, with Paddy happily beside him on a lead. The next day, a Sunday, the sirens sounded and Britain really was at war.

  My aunt never saw Paddy again. I was horrified. I thought of my uncle, otherwise a twinkly-eyed, kindly man of whom I was very fond, and decided then and there that he must be a monster. ‘Well, it was the war, darling,’ my mother explained unconvincingly. ‘Food was going to be rationed, everybody thought so, and your Uncle Ernest decided Paddy was one more mouth to feed. He wasn’t the only one who thought like that at the time.’

  For every person who thought like my uncle, I am sure that there were dozens for whom pets were like members of the family, and only slightly less dear to them than their own children. What on earth should they do if, as everyone expected, the war began with a cataclysm from the air?

  As I would discover, it was a scene repeated in thousands of loving homes – weeping children, sobbing mothers, stern fathers saying it was the only thing to do. That it was the kindest thing to do.

  It was all based on a false assumption: that mass bombing of cities with gas and high explosive would very soon follow the outbreak of war. A general panic stalked pet lovers. Would their animals suffer terribly? Would they become hysterical and run wild at the sound of sirens and explosions, their bodies burned or contaminated with mustard gas or whatever other horrors were coming? If they survived the opening onslaught, could they even be fed?

  It had been in the papers, broadcast on the BBC – ‘It really is kindest to have them destroyed,’ said the man from the Ministry of Home Security, spoken in a soothing announcement from deepest officialdom made in the treacliest tones of Mr Cholmondley-Warner (I can only imagine that’s how it was).

  The result was a catastrophe. Actually it was all an accident, wasn’t it?

  And thus it happened that in those first days of war, many, many thousands of cats and dogs were shooed out into the street, dumped in the woods or taken to the vet or animal welfare clinic for some sort of kindlier end to be inflicted. It was a national tragedy, a heart-breaking pet holocaust that still haunts animal lovers like me. And it had touched my family directly.

  ‘There has always been a rumour that something like that happened,’ the archivist of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) told me while I was on the long and varied research trail for this book. Well, it did happen – and it’s all there in the Society’s own archives – and in those of other animal welfare charities – and it’s recorded in detail in the official files of HM Government. I know who I blame …

  Introduction

  So, what was it like to be a pet during the Second World War? What happened to domestic dogs and cats when bombs began to fall and food went on the ration? And what happened to the animals at the zoo?

  Living in a house full of cats and history books I began to wonder. Unlike medal-w
inning ‘war animals’ with memorials and biographies galore, at first I could find nothing on the ordinary pets of ordinary people, and the humble working animals: the milkman’s horse rather than the war horse. Then, little by little, the story opened up. What follows concerns the civilian animal experience of war and especially the pets of embattled Britain.

  Since 2004, those animals who officially served Great Britain have had their own monument in Hyde Park, London: the ‘Animals in War Memorial’,i dedicated, as it proclaims, to ‘all the animals that served and died alongside British and Allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time’. It bears a second inscription – ‘they had no choice’.

  Well, neither did the war pets: the companion animals that often had more to fear from their owners than anyone else, it would turn out. Cats and dogs had no choice when the bombs began to fall (other perhaps than to run), although plenty of choices would be made for them.

  Pets, on the whole, do not write their memoirs. To find out what happened I had to look for accounts of those who entwined their lives with their pets because they loved them especially or because they sought to advance the wellbeing of animals generally.

  I found them in abundance. And what extraordinary stories they were – of animals under fire in the Blitz, of evacuated, blacked-out, foodless and homeless pets, of brave cats and intrepid dogs who did not go barking mad at the first wail of sirens as everyone expected them to, but rather gave aid and comfort to humans.

  And it is about how many humans, otherwise engaged in waging total war, did their utmost to comfort and save their animals. At least some of them did.

  I looked at my own cats. Could I queue all day for a cod’s head or boil up sheep’s windpipe for hours on end? That took a deep devotion. Would I have smuggled them into an air raid shelter to be barked at by a horrid warden – or risked being taken to court for giving them a saucer of milk?

  Then there were the accidental animal combatants who became entangled by the fortunes of war, those who were left behind when everybody else had fled – like the Dunkirk dogs – and the masses of camp-following pets who often had to dodge officialdom or switch sides to stay alive. ‘No mascot is as popular as one captured from the enemy,’ it was said in the midst of war. And I imagine whoever wrote that knew what they meant.

  Indeed many so-called ‘regimental pets’ had to change sides to survive at all. But who could condemn these furry collaborators with no understanding of the struggle in which they had been swept up?

  And, as I discovered, Britain set out in 1942 to recruit an army of 6,000 dogs. They were pets loaned by their families for the duration. Many did not make it home. At the same time officials were secretly plotting the mass destruction of dogs and launched a hate campaign against cats. The wartime Archbishop of Canterbury would not allow the saying of prayers for animals because it was ‘theologically inaccurate’. It’s amazing that pets made it at all.

  The war was won. And so the victor nation’s animals had seen it through. Rationing would ease though not quite yet. In the glow of victory, the pets had done their bit by boosting morale – while in the background, Government officials had considered getting rid of them all in the cause of national survival. A bit like my Uncle Ernest, that part was not to be spoken of.

  Knowing what I know now, I forgive him.

  i Britain’s two-and-a-half million (my estimate) companion-animal war dead have no physical memorial. Hyde Park is for service animals only, as is the more modest memorial unveiled in 2011 at Morley, Leeds, dedicated ‘To all animals who have died serving their country alongside British troops.’ The Civil Defence memorial at the National Arboretum, Staffordshire, honours the ‘1939–45 animal friends who served with such loyalty and bravery.’ The Purple Poppy campaign launched by the pressure group Animal Aid in 2006 commemorates animals expended by armed forces in war and used in weapon experiments.

  The PDSA stated in its post-war history: ‘There is a field looking north from the Ilford Sanatorium which remains the officially recognised cemetery of some three quarters of a million cats and dogs.’ After seventy years however, the site is unmarked and unacknowledged, a few cryptic mounds in scrubby wasteland on the banks of the River Roding.

  A Note on the Animal Welfare Charities

  Britain historically has had far more animal welfare charities than political parties. And they fought like cats. As an official who dealt with them wrote, ‘Anyone who knows anything about charities knows that, in their relations with each other, charitableness is their least conspicuous virtue’.

  The Nazis simply abolished the lot when they seized power in 1933 and imposed a single state institution – the ‘Reichstierschutzbund’. A British attempt on the eve of war to create something similar, the ‘National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee’ – a kind of Dad’s (and Mum’s) Army for pets – had grand ideas but would struggle to make an impact. To understand how the charities worked with pets and how they recorded the experience, it is important to understand their contradictions and rivalries. A lot of small-animal welfare historically consisted of catching as many street animals as possible (strays, female kittens, mongrels) and killing them with chloroform in a ‘lethal chamber’. Methods of destruction became more scientific but the conflict between the sentimentalists and the realists was always intense.

  Nobody should have been under any illusions. As a pre-war Our Dumb Friends’ League (ODFL) report stated bluntly: ‘[Our cat] shelters should not be confused with “homes” for cats. Their special object is to rid the streets of these unfortunate animals, not to keep them for a lengthy period without prospect of future homes.’

  Much of the story of pets at war is of animals dodging bombs and falling masonry only to be ‘mercifully put to sleep’ by their rescuers. Certain charities gloss over this aspect of their wartime record in their published histories.ii

  From their beginnings, the charities were prone to internal rebellions and provincial breakaways. They competed fiercely for donations and legacies, launching stunts especially in wartime, to loosen the patriotic animal lover’s purse strings. They all scrabbled for aristocratic and royal patronage, which was inconvenient when it came to internal ideological disputes over fox hunting. A duchess or two was essential at fund-raising functions, joined increasingly by film and radio stars. Derided by cynical journalists as an activity for social climbing, middle-class ladies, the animal welfare champions, were much more complicated than that. Some were intensely political (on the left and right). Others just loved their pets, and many worked alone. Wherever bombs and rockets fell, there would soon be women with baskets doing what they thought was right.

  Mr Keith Robinson, the secretary of Our Dumb Friends’ League, admitted in a 1938 interview that ‘anyone who devotes his life to fighting cruelty in animals is bound to be a bit of a crank’. Robinson revealed that most of his funding came from the donations of spinsters and was no more than a few shillings at a time. He himself lived with seven cats.

  A wartime account described: ‘One East End woman, who gave her bedroom to the cause, would herself search miles in a night with a box on wheels like the slum child’s cart looking for injured animals.’ But what could she really do to help them?

  As I read the stories of selfless volunteers, of midnight feeders of ferals and those who listened for cries beneath the rubble, I realized they drew their fortitude from an earlier tradition of concern for animals, one with largely a female face.

  The idea of ‘pets’ had risen with the late-nineteenth-century urban middle class (with Britain, the US and Germany leading the way) and now, in later life, it was their children who championed pets in their time of trial. Without mad cat ladies (and some were really mad), there would have been a much-diminished ‘animal welfare’ culture to meet this new emergency.

  Even as late as 1939, the ‘animal welfare movement’ remained imbued by the spirit of its founders – many of them the impassioned women who, four decades before, had found anoth
er channel for their suffragette political energies in animals: The Cause. But under the renewed shadow of war, they were seen as eccentric Edwardian relics.

  Women like Nina, Duchess of Hamilton (derided as a ‘crank’ by MI5), the Swedish aristocrat Louise (‘Lizzy’) Lind-af-Hageby and Alsatian breeder Mrs Margaret Griffin, who took her amazing rescue dogs into action during the V2 rocket campaign of 1944–45.

  There were some remarkable chaps as well, like Major James Baldwin, the Alsatian wolf-dog champion, Mr Albert Steward, who lived in a house full of cats in Slough and campaigned without cease for wartime felines, Captain T. C. Colthurst, ‘Animal Guard Number One’, Mr Bernard Woolley, who turned a Lancashire cinema into a dog rescue centre, and Edward Bridges Webb, the inspired pet-populist of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor (PDSA), who invented the ‘Mascot Club’.

  The veterinary profession meanwhile remained overwhelmingly male, as were the executive officers of the charities, with lots of peppery former 1914–18 officers keeping everyone on their toes.

  By the coming of war, routine cruelty to animals in plain sight had become rare. Working horses in cities had been largely mechanized away but there were new concerns. Pit ponies and performing animals generated strong feelings, as did Government poison gas and weapon experiments. Vivisection, vaccination and zoos always excited the ultras. The charities each had their own priorities. They further had deep experience, both political and practical, from the First World War and from the social hardships of the thirties.

  The RSPCA (founded in 1824) was the oldest and richest charity of all. In 1932, led by its chairman, the Conservative MP Sir Robert Gower, its Council had crushed an anti-hunting, anti-circus rebellion. The Society was interventionist and in many poorer people’s eyes, its inspectors seemed to possess civil police powers and they were therefore suspicious of it. It had experience of mass, urban small-animal destruction in pre-war slum clearance programmes, killing an estimated 50,000 animals a year. In Birmingham, its staff had experimented using carbon monoxide from a car exhaust (and they themselves had been prosecuted for cruelty).