Bonzo's War Read online

  A nation of animal lovers stirred. The redoubtable Nina, Duchess of Hamilton, rushed from Scotland to London with a statement to be broadcast on the BBC. It went out on the morning of 28 August 1939: ‘The Animal Defence Society is anxious to have the names and addresses of people who can offer free accommodation for other people’s animals. There must be large numbers among those who are likely to leave London and provincial centres in an emergency who cannot afford to have their animals boarded out. It is emphasised that accommodation offered must be free of charge.’ A statement appeared in The Times personal columns the next day:

  Homes in the country urgently required for those dogs and cats which must otherwise be left behind to starve to death or be shot. Remember that these are the pets of poor people who love them dearly and who will have sufficient worries without those caused by the knowledge that their pets are suffering.

  ‘The result of the broadcast was startling,’ Louise Lind-af-Hageby of the Animal Defence Society wrote: ‘Within five minutes, the offer of a home was made by telephone and accepted.’ But the offers were soon outnumbered by the animals which were brought to Animal Defence House [the Society’s HQ in St James’s Place, Mayfair] by their anxious and distressed owners – soldiers and sailors called up, families about to be evacuated:

  And so the house was filled day by day with ever increasing numbers of dogs and cats and other animals. There were monkeys, parrots and canaries. And owners did not only bring their animals to the Society. The private house of the Duchess of Hamilton was also besieged by people who clamoured for assistance in finding homes, who wanted to save their animals from air raids and destruction.

  ‘If you can’t take my poor Bob now, I must have him destroyed tomorrow morning,’ said one. It was heartbreaking.

  The Ministry of Home Security hated this freelance initiative. A NARPAC ‘representative’ evidently turned up at Animal Defence House the next day and insisted that all such appeals ‘go out in its name’. The Duchess of Hamilton pointed out huffily that she had not even been asked to be represented on the Committee. Relations would not improve.

  ‘Is there a pet in the house?’ so the Daily Mirror’s Susan Day asked brightly on 28 August. She advised readers to ‘make your plans for their comfort and safety now’, but rather than follow the Government’s soothingly lethal guidance, her humane feature article argued strongly against doing anything with immediate fatal intent. She recognized the acute dilemma faced by pet owners, asking perceptively: ‘Is it that perhaps we feel a little guilty about our dumb friends that they should have to suffer for the horrors made by man?’

  Yes, it was true that ‘you cannot take them into public shelters,’ she said. But there was plenty to think about first. ‘If you live in an evacuable area, send them at once to friends who are outside the danger area,’ she advised. ‘The ODFL and NCDL have lists of people who are willing to accept pets and motor car owners who can assist.’ If only it were that straightforward.

  ‘Putting your pets to sleep is a very tragic decision. Only do not take it before it is absolutely necessary,’ insisted Miss Day. ‘If there should be no war you would feel terribly upset afterwards to think that you had parted with your little friend for no purpose.’

  In London, newsmen watched the frantic comings and goings in Whitehall. A Chow dog was seen wandering unattended on the Duke of York Steps near the German Embassy. ‘A passer-by gave him a facetious Heil Hitler! salute,’ so it was reported. ‘The dog wheezed and went to sleep.’

  It was recognized as the pet of the recently departed ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who at one stage had had three Chows plus a Pembrokeshire Corgi (one Chow had been killed by a flying golf ball in Scotland in 1937). Ribbentrop was recalled to Berlin, leaving the remaining dogs in London, and was replaced by Herbert von Dirksen, the former ambassador to China, who was seemingly indifferent to pets.

  That afternoon a ‘mystery black cat’3 was seen in Downing Street. ‘When it reached the door of No. 10, onlookers cheered,’ a newspaper reported. ‘When photographers rushed forward, the cat fled.’

  It was going to be war, surely, and better to follow Government advice. Many thousands of pet owners were doing just that. A nation of animal lovers stirred.

  On Tuesday, 29 August, Mrs G. Blandford, a schoolmistress from Highbury, north London, noted in her diary: ‘I seem to see such a lot of people taking cats about in baskets – evidently to be destroyed, as the people are obviously not going on a journey.’

  A newly-wed couple in Kingston recalled the neighbours coming round and suggesting firmly that their dogs – an Alsatian and a Cocker Spaniel – be destroyed ‘in case they ran amok in an air raid and bit them’. During this genteel-enough discussion, the dogs inconveniently did a lot of barking. Perhaps they sensed the gnawing tension building in the London suburbs. Their pets had to go; it was the kindest thing to do.

  The next day at NARPAC’s new Bloomsbury headquarters there was a frantic effort to get firearms licences distributed, organize cars, armbands, badges and identity cards. Actual anti-gas and rescue equipment was meant to come from local authority stores. No one seemed to know much about it but twenty-two designated veterinary posts – based in existing surgeries – were now on alert across London.

  Evacuation of children from London was officially announced on the 31st – it would begin the next morning, 1 September, the day the German attack on Poland began. The British Armed Forces were mobilized.

  ‘Whatever happens don’t let us doggy people get the jitters,’ Mrs Phyllis Dobson, editor of The Dog World, commented in the issue published that day. She complained meanwhile about a ghastly say-no-to-this-capitalist-war pamphlet she had just been handed on Westminster Bridge by, so she presumed, the ‘Communists’.

  ‘What [the possible outbreak of war] will mean to canine affairs is not yet known,’ said The Kennel Gazette. While the Kennel Club journal observed: ‘A German Dog Show is planned for October under the patronage of the Army High Command, although by then they may find they have other, more pressing, matters to attend to.’ How prescient they were.

  BBC Television at Alexandra Palace shut down at 12.35 p.m. on Friday, 1 September 1939 (a Disney cartoon, ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ was the last item to be screened). All that week the BBC had been making live outside broadcasts featuring Freddie Grisewood – from London Zoo at Regent’s Park. The plans made at the time of Munich were being put in place, sandbags filled and war-veteran keepers, Overseer MacDonald and Keeper Austin, were reacquainted with the workings of the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle for fear of a great animal escape. Once again the heat in the reptile house was turned off. Sluggish snakes awaited their fate.

  Newspapers carried stories of deep shelters for animals being dug, and plans for their wholesale evacuation to the Zoo’s ‘country estate’ at Whipsnade in Bedfordshire, 35 miles north of the capital. ‘Enormous crowds,’ were reported, ‘in spite of bad weather and inclement political conditions.’ A name suggested for a Giraffe born on 28 August was ‘Crisis’.

  Thousands of children, evacuation labels round their necks, were saying goodbye to beloved pets. Blackout was declared across the country; the ARP was mobilized. How troublesome it all was for the judges and exhibitors struggling to get to the Harrogate Dog Show, highlight of the north of England dog lover’s year. It went ahead nevertheless on 2 September.

  There was, however, plenty to see in the gloom, including ‘the Penyghent Alsatians in obedience tests’, and a display by the sheepdog filmstar, ‘Owd Bob’.4

  As The Dog World noted: ‘The Border Terrier bitch winning most Challenge Certificates in the breed just before Harrogate closed the shows was Mr and Mrs Jordan’s champion Susan of Shotover, who luckily managed to get her well-deserved title before Hitler interfered.’

  The whole thing was terribly inconvenient. Mrs Brinton Lee of London W10 had already foresightedly despatched her cat, ‘Smout’, by train to friends in the Cotswolds. On Saturday the 2nd, the Mass
-Observation diarist left the capital by car for Oxfordshire with the kitten, ‘Dibs’, in a basket. Arriving at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, she discovered the village to be inhabited by strange, wide-eyed children.

  ‘Our kitten soon disappeared,’ she wrote, ‘and we thought it had been picked up by the Liverpool evacuee children. We went out looking for it in the pouring rain while asking ourselves why should we be bothered [with] such a small thing as a kitten when war seemed so close.’

  Actually, it would have been all that mattered. Then Dibs appeared, ‘after dark, quite dry and cheerful’. The Merseyside urchins were blameless.

  London was emptying, the children leaving by train, the better-off families, like Mrs Lee, scrambling by car for the country via ‘the principal routes out of town [which] are one-way streets for three days’, as an American eye-witness recorded. ‘Cars poured out pretty steadily all day yesterday and today, packed with people, luggage and domestic pets,’ she wrote on that same Saturday.

  They were the lucky ones. In the Cotswolds, Dibs and Smout were already settling in nicely. There were plenty of domestic pets heading for a different destination.

  It was a busy time too at London Zoo for all the wrong reasons. The Day Log for 1 September has ‘Germany invades Poland’ written in red ink. ‘Animals unwell: Ruffed Lemur, Patas Monkey, Raccoon, Asiatic White Crane, Wolf, Dingo, 2 Elephants and Sun Bear, Eland, Camel, Llama, Reindeer.’

  As the Zoo’s director, Julian Huxley, wrote in his memoirs: ‘When the news came over the radio the first thing I did was see that the poisonous snakes were killed, sad though it was for some snakes were very rare as well as beautiful. I closed the aquarium and had its tanks emptied and arranged that the elephants who might run amok if frightened be moved to Whipsnade.’

  The Zoo’s own ledger of ‘occurrences’ (written up each evening, an evocative record of births, deaths and transfers of its ever-changing population) for 1 September tells the sad tale of what happened. There were 593 visitors, of whom 68 paid 6d. extra to visit the aquarium. They were unaware of the slaughter in the reptile house – where 35 snakes were KBO’d (Killed by Order) – kraits, cobras, vipers, two puff adders, sundry rattlesnakes and five Gila monsters – all ‘beheaded’, according to one source.

  That same day the pandas were crated up and began the ponderous journey by road to Whipsnade – with sundry chimps and Franz the orangutan. The next day Babar, the Asiatic elephant, would make the same journey north. The Occurrences Book also noted the arrival of a moholi galago (bushbaby), ‘found in the neighbourhood and handed to the superintendent’.

  It was reported on the 2nd: ‘The poisonous snakes at the Zoological Gardens have been destroyed. The non-poisonous snakes were tended as usual but all will be destroyed at the outbreak of war.

  ‘George the centenarian Alligator will be saved, along with the Chinese Alligator, the Komodo Dragon and the two largest pythons. The black widow spiders and the bird-eating spiders in the Insect House along with the scorpions have also been destroyed. Ming the young Giant Panda left for Whipsnade yesterday afternoon. Other animals will leave at the weekend.’

  On Sunday the 3rd at 11.15 a.m., Neville Chamberlain announced on the BBC that Britain was at war with Germany. One London woman would later claim her dog got out of its basket and ‘stood to attention at the historic moment’.

  That same day Winston Churchill was remade First Lord the Admiralty, political head of the Royal Navy. In the venerable building at the Trafalgar Square end of the Mall, a nameless battleship-grey cat prowled the basement. He would soon make Mr Churchill’s acquaintance. Their relationship was to be full of incident.

  The Zoo’s Occurrences Book was written up: ‘Gardens closed at 11.00am on declaration of war against Germany. Remaining closed until further notice.’ That same day the non-poisonous snakes, pythons and anacondas – huge creatures – went the way of their venomous brethren as the sirens howled. The aquariums were closed (‘danger of flying glass’) with the fish released or destroyed. Some reportedly went to West End restaurants.

  Fear of interrupted food supplies seems to have determined who was next on the Regent’s Park death list. The manatee in the tropical hall of the aquarium got it, as did six Indian fruit bats, seven Nile crocodiles, a Reeve’s muntjac and two American alligators (‘destroyed owing to war conditions’). Two lion cubs were put down.

  Meanwhile over at the Kursaal Zoo at the Southend funfair, Mr Frank Bostock, the attraction’s owner, complained that the animals, including seven lions, bears, wolves and a tiger worth £1,000 were now, ‘practically valueless and a liability’. An RSPCA Inspector, Mr T. Stephens, despatched them all with a rifle. The fate of London’s big cats looked distinctly grim.

  Regent’s Park continued as it might without visitors except for a few curious journalists. The animals were ‘bored and disgusted, listening and waiting for the crowds that feed them,’ so it was reported. They were getting ‘more and more depressed’. The appearance of barrage balloons had vexed them more – ‘although some of the big cats in the outdoor pens interpreted them as some sort of potential prey’. The exodus to Whipsnade continued, while common native bird species, kites, kestrels and herons were simply released into the wilds of north London.

  According to the daily log, an alligator was sold for £6 to ‘Koringa’, the notorious female fakir of Bertram Mills Circus. At Whipsnade the elephant, ‘Jumbo II’, was shot ‘because of housing difficulties,’ according to the Daily Telegraph. It was healthy young bull, ‘a gift from the Governor of the Soudan’. Presumably the influx from London meant the prospect of a noisy territorial dispute. On the 15th Regent’s Park reopened to the public but few people visited.

  The public did not come because the capital’s children had been evacuated, so the naturalist James Fisher explained in an article in Animal and Zoo News: ‘The people left in London have little time for anything other than work and sleep.’ So why not shut the Zoo down?

  Not everyone was a zoo lover. An anonymous columnist for The Animals’ Defender, ‘Anti-Vivisectionist’, went to see for himself. After he ‘had paid sixpence and passed the turnstile’ he encountered, ‘a creature coated with short, bristly fur, a Siberian badger, according to the label.’

  Up and down, up and down the front of the cage he went, pausing momentarily every few seconds to dart his snout through the impassable metal meshes. Some of the visitors offered him food but it was not food he wanted. I saw nothing but dreary, weary creatures destined to live, and then at length mercifully to die, deprived of everything that could give their life a meaning.

  ‘It is not only as the proprietor of a menagerie that the London Zoo carries its weight in organised science,’ wrote James Fisher. ‘Some people might think it wasteful and wrong that academic science should still be indulged in when Britain is fighting for its life. But honest free knowledge is part of what we are fighting for.’

  The country retreat at Whipsnade would prove the London beasts’ lifeline. The big cats and bears would be spared. Other animals would be less fortunate.

  3 Secret Cabinet Office files reveal that two cats, ‘Bob’ and ‘Heather’, were employed at the nearby Treasury as mousers, who prowled the precincts of power as war clouds gathered.

  4 In fact Collie bitch ‘Glyn’, who starred in the hit film of the same name (Owd Bob in 1938) – a canine drama in which a sheepdog from Derbyshire and his owner (newly arrived in the Borders) must take on a grumpy Scottish farmer and his Alsatian, ‘Black Wull’, in the sheepdog trials. Glyn became hugely famous and made lots of personal appearances. His Alsatian co-star, ‘Crumstone Storm’, would go on to enjoy an even more dramatic wartime career.

  Chapter 4

  Killed by Kindness

  West Ham, the County Borough on the eastern edge of London, was, on the eve of war, a tangle of industry and housing along the Rivers Lea and Thames. It contained the Royal Docks and sprawling factories. It was where, over the years, the malodorous activities of London
had been exiled: slaughterhouses, fat renderers, glue and fertilizer works.

  It had waxed fat on the proceeds, raised a splendid town hall and laid out its own electric tramways. Its fleet of municipal horse-drawn rubbish carts had been partially mechanized in 1936 to tend the streets of humble terraces but still the borough employed hundreds of horses.

  Messrs Price’s Bakeries had eighty horses, United Dairies had ninety in Freemasons Road and the Co-op fifty horses in their Maryland Street stables, dutifully delivering the bread and milk. There were dairy farms in the borough, piggeries, cattle yards and abattoirs, plus a large number of household animals, fowls, rabbits, etc. Every household was reckoned to have a cat, 50,000 of them, with 10,000 more in warehouses and factories.

  In 1939 West Ham was of distinct interest to Luftwaffe strategic planners because of all those docks and chemical works. It was an industrial target. And like the whole of the East End of London, it was full of animals.

  In the archives of the RSPCA is an unpublished typescript history of animals under fire in the borough, unsigned, but almost certainly by Harold Edwin Bywater, chief veterinary officer of West Ham and NARPAC treasurer. He was a proper cockney, the son of an East End haulage contractor who had worked with horses (for which he clearly cared deeply) as a teenage Army Veterinary Corps ‘shoesmith’ in the First World War and then qualified as a vet. Intensely personal and humane, it begins with the first intimation that they were both a target for bombing and had a special problem with animals. Thus in early 1939 a volunteer animal ARP was organized, recruited largely from butchers and slaughtermen. A special plan was made for Silvertown on its dockland peninsula, which could easily be cut off by bombing. A mayoral fund paid for humane killers but not much else. First aid classes were given at the town hall. The vicar of St Marks in Silvertown, the Reverend Shaw, gave over the church hall to pioneering animal ARP lectures.