Bonzo's War Read online

  The borough was also home to several firms, Harrison, Barber & Co. and the Merton Bone Co., who been turning the carcasses of animals into fertilizer for over half a century. Messrs W. J. Curley of Marshgate Lane had fifty men rendering animal fat into soap beside the River Lea. They might cope with 100 tons per week. The typescript came to what happened next:

  On Sunday 3 September, at 10 o’clock in the morning, a final briefing was held at the Town Hall for the principal workers in the animal service. The meeting had just terminated when the sirens sounded heralding the commencement of war.

  Almost immediately the town hall became besieged by a crown of panic-stricken people bringing their animals for destruction.

  In spite of attempts to reason with the well-nigh hysterical mob, we were soon inundated with dogs and cats whose owners left them in the corridors and offices. Which was the commencement of several days spent almost entirely in the destruction of abandoned animals.

  At six o’clock in the evening, a message was received with effect that Harrison, Barber & Co’s premises were filled with the carcasses of dogs and cats, and vehicles were loaded with more carcasses lined up outside their factory. The yards were covered to the depth of several feet with the bodies of dogs and cats. The weather was warm and sultry and the odour was perceptible over a wide area.

  It had all been done with good intentions, the press release, the BBC announcement – ‘it’s the kindest thing to do’ – the stockpiling of humane killers, but it was not meant to be like this.

  A despairing Mr C. H. Gaunt, the Superintendent at Ilford, told a reporter that they were doing ‘the best thing for animals by destroying the pets of evacuated families.’ PDSA staff were ‘working 18 hours a day’. They had destroyed 300,000 London animals in under 10 days. Of its reluctant role the charity says 75 years later: ‘PDSA performed a public service that many would have shied away from. Pet owners looked for support and PDSA was there.’

  Mr Bywater knew who it was to blame. ‘A few days before the BBC advised the general public to have their cats and dogs destroyed and as a result the situation became chaotic,’ he wrote. ‘When officials from NARPAC and the Ministry of Home Security went to the factory on Monday [4 September] the conditions were so disagreeable they found them impossible to bear,’ he continued. Bodies were sent by lorry to other places with disposal facilities – Fulham and Brighton – until they too were overwhelmed. They would have to be buried in pits – but where?

  That day Colonel Stordy told the Ministry that ‘over two and a half million animals had been slaughtered and transport arrangements had collapsed’. NARPAC struggled to stop the slaughter with a press release on the 4th: ‘The committee urge owners of animals not to arrange needlessly for the immediate destruction of dogs and cats. An animal is quite safe in a gas-proof room, and its keen sense of danger may be of help to people in the room.’

  But one London dog got away with his life. When the German Embassy was evacuated on 2–3 September, the embassy dog ‘Bärchen’ (‘little bear’) got left behind. It was the dog pressmen had seen being given ‘Heil Hitler!’ salutes the week before. ‘When the embassy closed nobody noticed, it dragged around matted and dirty’.

  Policemen reportedly fed poor Bärchen on ‘ham sandwiches and bones brought from home’ as he wandered in the street where his plight was picked up in a newsreel. When it was reported that he was to be destroyed by the RSPCA, 200 people asked to have him.

  Dennis Mulqueen, an Irish-born second footman from the embassy, swooped. A little later he was reported to have taken him to a new home in the suburbs, where he was ‘now recovering from eczema caused by eating too much meat’. The Daily Mirror gave him a newspaper column to comment on German affairs but, as his further adventures were limited, this did not go far.

  Coming in the opposite direction was Sir Nevile Henderson, the pro-appeasement British Ambassador to Berlin, along with ‘Hippy’5, his Dachshund. Hippy went into quarantine. The Times at the same time published an appeal from Mr D. L. Murray of Arundel Terrace, Brighton, that his Dachshunds had been ‘the subjects of insulting remarks’ on the streets of the seaside resort. The RSPCA pleaded for common sense, suggesting anyway that the breed originated in France.

  In London the slaughter of the innocents continued. Manchester caught the frenzy. Those faceless officials who had so casually triggered it tried what they might in further press briefings to shut it down. The Times commented on the 7th: ‘A widespread and persistent rumour that it is now compulsory to get rid of domestic animals is causing many thousands to be taken for destruction. Centres run by animal welfare societies are filled with the bodies of animals. The National A.R.P. Animals Committee emphasize that there is no truth whatever in this rumour.

  ‘Apart from everything else, the huge destruction of cats that is continuing at present may lead to a very serious and increase of vermin, such as occurred in Madrid and other Spanish cities.’6

  Stordy reported to the Minister on the 11th: ‘All estimates were overtaken by the wave of destruction that took place. Incinerators were not enough. Many thousands of carcasses were dumped on the ground on land7 being reclaimed at Ilford [next to the] PDSA Sanatorium under the control of Mr Gaunt.’ He estimated at least ‘80,000 in one night’. The burial of the carcasses had been ‘very efficient’.

  ‘With the advent of war, it was not only the poor that took advantage of the clinics,’ wrote Stordy, ‘but many of the well-to-do have had also their animals destroyed’ (he pencilled ‘¾ of a million’ in the margin).

  The destruction was London-wide. Society pets as well as strays went into the lethal chamber. The RSPCA reported: ‘From 1 September all the Society’s clinics were working day and night. A temporary euthanasia centre was even opened at Headquarters [105 Jermyn Street in the heart of the West End].’ Mary Golightly, The Dog World columnist, reported:

  The stories I am hearing seem almost incredible. One veterinary surgeon at length refused to put any more dogs away. The dead bodies were stacked in a heap outside his surgery waiting to be shovelled into a van and taken to the council incinerator.

  They were not all mongrels (not that that matters at all) but there were beautiful, highly bred specimens among them. Dogs of the show bench, dogs that had been treated with the greatest care, pampered, hair brushed every day in place, and now this!

  In Woman magazine, the popular novelist, Christine Jope-Slade, parlayed the pet slaughter into a romantic short story called ‘Enemy Alien’. A handsome young veterinary surgeon, ‘Charles Maurice’, calls on the heroine, ‘Mollie Dresden’ of Redmayne Kennels, to put down her Irish Terriers. ‘I must keep the youngest and the best and hope to breed from them after the war,’ she tells him. ‘Two of the beagling packs have gone. I had the Master over here yesterday.’

  Every vet’s surgery, every animal clinic was besieged. The PDSA reported: ‘Long queues lined up at [our] dispensaries. People said that if we would not destroy them they would turn them loose into the streets.’ One man brought a pair of Dalmatians and when the clinic refused to kill them, he left them ‘tied to the railings of the police station with a note authorising their destruction’.

  The Canine Defence League starkly called it the ‘September Holocaust’. ‘Looking back on those dark days our men still shudder,’ reported its journal, The Dogs Bulletin, ‘The clinics have always been centres of healing, now they were being turned into centres of destruction.’

  Phyllis Brooks was the young wife of a Dumb Friends’ League ambulance driver. She later recalled: ‘War came on a Sunday morning, and I went with him [to the Wandsworth shelter at 82 Garratt Lane]. The sirens had gone, which had upset people. There was already a queue of at least 50 people with their animals, as well as protesters trying to dissuade them from having their animals put down. Many were broken hearted about it.’

  A 24-year-old civil servant living in Croydon took a ‘kitten that had been hanging around for several weeks, crouching in our shed’ to a Can
ine Defence League clinic to be destroyed. The family cat, ‘Tiger’, was enough to worry about in uncertain times. She recorded the bleak encounter for Mass-Observation:

  An elderly man was in charge and I had hardly begun to explain before he ushered us into a small room where he apparently put the cats into the lethal chamber straightaway.

  He then said his first words since I had been there. ‘Name and address please.’ I gave him the particulars and he put them in a book beside a long list of other names, nearly all with the word ‘cat’ against them.

  I gave him a shilling and he entered it in a book. I went away feeling very sad. He had a very miserable expression about him as if he was absolutely fed up with the number of animals that were being brought in to be destroyed.

  Major Hamilton Kirk, a prominent north London vet, would tell Dogs World of this, ‘the most dreadful and loathsome experience’ in the whole of his professional career. It was not just dogs and cats that were going up in smoke. ‘Only this week I have had the misfortune to have been called to destroy two lions and five monkeys,’ he wrote in October. ‘In the case of a third lion, it was the tamest I have ever seen. As I approached the cage, it came out of its inner house with its meat tin in its mouth, played about with it, rolled on its back and purred.

  ‘How could one, in cold blood, take the life of such an animal?’ Killing a monkey was to feel something like murder,’ he added. ‘Think of the feelings of a vet when asked to destroy a happy little dog which jumps up, wags its tail and licks one hand. It is a dreadful business.’

  Dr Margaret Young, leading spirit of the Wood Green Animal Shelter in north London, recorded in the first days of war – ‘a queue nearly half a mile long of people who had to part with their pets’.

  There were plenty more pets locked in houses by fleeing families or simply abandoned in the street. Dr Young appealed for funds to help the ‘scores of animals left behind and slowly starving to death. We know of cases of cats shooting up women’s shopping baskets in a vain endeavour to find food. And there are dogs, little more than skeletons, hunting the dustbins, hoping to find some scraps.’

  The London Institution for Lost and Starving Cats based in Camden Town reported: ‘Staff pleaded with owners not to have their animals destroyed but they were adamant. Such people were kindlier perhaps than many others, because staff have continually been called to houses which have been evacuated to rescue some wild, starving cat who has been left behind.’

  Abandoned cats would haunt the capital for weeks to come. Our Dumb Friends’ League alerted newspaper readers in October to the plight of ‘imprisoned cats’ still shut up in houses, and appealed ‘to owners who have inadvertently left their cats behind, or to people who know of such cases, to write to the League’. No names would be mentioned, no prosecutions brought.

  The first of many wartime cats-being-turned-into-furcoats rumours took flight. And there were more. A cleaning lady in Hampstead was reported as saying:

  You know what they’re doing with all them cats that’s vanished? They’re using the skins to make British Warms [military reefer coats] and they boil down the fat for margarine. They say there’s cat in pies.

  There were glimpses of kindness amid the carnage and abandonment. The RSPCA swooped to rescue the pets of London County Council schools (which were still on summer holiday). ‘Over 500 school animals including an alligator which was referred to a zoo, were evacuated to the Horses’ Home of Rest at Boreham Wood and to The Ember Farm, Thames Ditton,’ reported the Society. ‘Every animal was carefully labelled.’

  Less fortunate perhaps were the ‘experimental animals’ at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – ‘eighty cats, monkeys, rabbits and other animals [which] were duly taken and humanely destroyed’ by Our Dumb Friends’ League.

  The Veterinary Record gave advice to practitioners on how to dispel fears of those clamouring for the destruction of their pets: ‘The sound of gunfire was very similar to that of thunder, which they knew about anyway,’ and ‘there are distribution and evacuation schemes like that promoted by the Duchess of Hamilton.’

  There was indeed an alternative for the astonishing Duchess had waded in again. The Oskar Schindler of pets had made her dramatic appeal on the BBC on 28 August. Now, as would be written by her lifelong collaborator, Louise Lind-af-Hageby:

  Animal Defence House [the Society’s Mayfair HQ] was filled day by day with ever increasing numbers of dogs and cats and other animals. There were monkeys, parrots and canaries. The door-bell and the telephone rang ceaselessly. A procession of applicants waited for the opening of the offices.

  The Duchess opened her own substantial London home, Lynsted in St Edmund’s Terrace, just north of Regent’s Park (Louise Lind-af-Hageby lived next door at No. 8), as a clearing station. Mary Golightly was a volunteer. She recalled the perils of the first week of war when, ‘we had to collect the dogs from different parts of London and drive them to Regent’s Park, the whole time getting mixed up with columns of evacuation school children and then getting smacked in the eye by the continuous one-way streets.’

  ‘These are brave people,’ she wrote, ‘these people I took dogs from in Stoke Newington, Poplar, Acton, Islington, all giving away a part of their very hearts as they placed their pets in my arms or urged their big fellows to get into the car.’ They called the Duchess, ‘the lady for the dogs’.

  She described the scenes at Lynsted, where multiple dogs, ‘lie quietly tied up in various points in the London house of the Duchess’. There was also a cattery extemporized in the shrubbery.

  ‘You would be amazed to see them,’ she wrote. ‘The Duchess, her eyes full of tears, places a tender hand on each and every head, moves from one to another with pans of water, bits of biscuit.’ Her kindness had: ‘Moved many a soldier. “Bless that lady of the dogs,” said one. “It puts a bit of cheer into a feller when he knows his missus and his dog is alright”.’

  The Duchess’s original scheme was for a diaspora of dogs (and cats), a call on rural pet lovers’ goodwill to take in urban refugees. This was still the case. ‘Letters offering homes in the country came at the rate of 200 a day,’ she wrote. ‘Letters begging the Society to take charge of animals came at a much greater rate.’

  There was a second BBC broadcast, ‘an appeal to owners of private cars to help with free transport. This brought much generous personal service and help.’ Commercial ‘kennels and cat-boarding establishments in the Home Counties’ were also engaged.

  It was by no means for posh pets only. This was a genuine philanthropic intervention to help the animals of the poor. As Mary Golightly wrote: ‘It took a great deal of tact to persuade some who brought their dogs that our work was purely for those owners who could not afford boarding fees, but everyone was very nice.’ One feels sure that they were.

  Then there was the barking. In an open letter of apology to her St John’s Wood neighbours Her Grace wrote: ‘I would like you to know that I heard officially that last Sunday [3 September] thousands of dogs and cats were destroyed and two days ago three truck loads of dead bodies went out from a certain animal clinic in London. We should be horrified if this sort of thing happened abroad. How we can explain such a thing to our foreign friends in this so called animal-loving England?’ (The journal of the Reich Animal Protection League would report in spring 1940 that ‘millions of dogs and cats were killed in the first weeks of war … 750 tons of carcasses had been turned by one London firm into manure,’ but did so in shock and sadness rather than propaganda gloating. It had been ‘totally unnecessary’.)

  ‘Considering how all these dogs are strangers to each other, and to us, I think they are all wonderfully quiet,’ she wrote. Her neighbours might have disagreed.

  Beyond Lynsted lay Ferne, the ducal estate in Wiltshire acquired in the 1920s. Nina Hamilton declared it once more to be a sanctuary for pets, as in the Munich crisis. The first raucous wartime transport of dogs and cats left London in the Duke’s Daimler on 4 Septe
mber. Many more would follow.

  5 When Hippy died not long afterwards, Sir Nevile wrote: ‘I can hardly conceive of another life unless Hippy be waiting there to share it with me.’ A biography of the Dachshund would be published in 1942, including a claim that he had growled at Nazis on the streets of pre-war Berlin.

  6 There was a story that a ‘shock force’ of stray cats had been collected from all over Spain to deal with a plague of rats in the city, besieged from October 1936, which eventually fell to the Nationalists on 28 March 1939. A small PDSA team, driven by an American war correspondent, had got into Madrid just before the end. They found plenty of wounded mules but no cats or dogs, ‘which bore out stories that they had all been eaten,’ said their report. ‘Mules which had been humanely destroyed quickly disappeared for their flesh.’

  7 Stordy would tell a newspaper, ‘It was the greatest single burial of pets anyone has ever seen. The secret burial ground was just by the site of recent boring for an Underground railway extension so we were able to run trucks down there.’

  Chapter 5

  Keep Calm …

  After a week, the killing frenzy burned out. Pet lovers blinked. What have we done? The sky had not darkened with bombers. A kind of calm returned. Where now were faithful Bonzo and little Oo-Oo? Reduced to fertilizer in Sugar House Lane or interred in some cold field in Ilford.

  In Memoriam notices appeared in the pet press, looking it might seem, for forgiveness. ‘In ever loving memory of our dear Chum, put to sleep to save from suffering 25 August, 1939,’ said one. ‘In memory of Bobbie. Put prematurely to sleep 30 August, 1939,’ was another.

  There was a meeting of the NARPAC executive on 12 September. Everyone threatened to resign but not over the massacre. Major E. J. Stuart, the Committee’s transport officer, declared he could not work with Colonel Stordy. Mr Bridges Webb and Keith Robinson threatened to withdraw the PDSA and Dumb Friends’ League outright – because they could not allow their ‘clinics to be given instructions except during the actual course of an air-raid’.