Bonzo's War Read Free Page A

Westminster Abbey. It was not to be.
    A year later, pets had vanished from the appeal. The memorial was to be for ‘the thousands of animals and birds [which] have helped our victory’. The Unknown Animals would remain just that. Only those who died on ‘active service’ would be remembered – by plaques on the side of the shiny new caravans.
    It was the same over fifty years on. In 1998 the PDSA’s Trustees rejected an appeal by the then just-starting Animals in War Memorial Fund (its primary charitable aim, to ‘promote the military efficiency of the armed forces of Her Majesty’s Government’) as being ‘too far removed from our objects’.
    But when approached again, a new Director General replied: ‘If you could offer a guarantee that the sculptor could include an animal wearing a Dickin medal, I am sure it would influence the decision of the Council ofManagement.’ It was duly so. £10,000 was given to the service-animals-only memorial.
    The organization published the
PDSA News
throughout.
    The National Canine Defence League (NCDL) was founded in 1891 during the first Crufts Dog Show ‘to protect dogs from ill-usage of every kind’. Throughout the war it published the lively
The Dogs Bulletin
, full of gossip and wheezes to boost the cause of dogs. It concerned itself greatly with refugee dogs, operated clinics and was very active in promoting Air Raid Precautions (ARP) for dogs, building dedicated canine air raid shelters in Kensington Gardens and Sutton Coldfield. Since the start, the League had been regarded as ‘the Opposition’ by the Dogs’ Home, Battersea. On the eve of war, it was said that their secretaries ‘could never work together’.
    The Cats Protection League (CPL) was founded at a meeting held at Caxton Hall in London in 1927, under the chairmanship of Miss Jessy Wade. The first secretary was Mr Albert A. Steward and the headquarters were established at Prestbury Lodge, a sizeable house in Slough, gifted (as so many were) in a legacy, where he lived on the first floor surrounded by cats. Early achievements included the introduction of an elasticated collar for cats and ‘the development of a simple cat door’. What a boon – and still flapping down the ages!
    Its magazine,
The Cat
, is the indispensable source for the British feline view of the Second World War and I am grateful to the current editor, Francesca Watson, for permitting me access to wartime copies kept at the National Cat Centre in Ashdown Forest. Long may its work continue.

    ii   In 2013 the RPSCA said of its wartime record, ‘of the animals rescued from bombed sites during this year [1940], 10,100 pets sadly had to be put to sleep because of the extent of their injuries. But 5,940 animals survived and were successfully rehomed.’
    Its archived end-1940 reports say in contrast, ‘In one month alone last year [September] 10,100 household pets were humanely destroyed, 5,490 were rescued from bombed premises, fed for a time, boarded, or [432] provided with new homes.’ The 1941 report records its inspectors dealing with 42,095 animal ‘victims of the war’ of which ‘50 per cent [were given] a painless end’.
    The PDSA states in 2013 with justifiable pride that its brave ‘Animal Rescue squads helped to save and treat over a quarter of a million pets buried and injured by debris during the Blitz.’ Its 1947 history meanwhile accounts for the ‘treatment’ of almost 3.68 million animals in the six war years (‘including lethalling’), while this number excludes the mass panic-killing of 1939–40. Not all, of course, were due to enemy action or wartime circumstances and not all were destroyed.
    Battersea records ‘145,000 dogs [passing] through during the course of the war’, while the Metropolitan Police reports the destruction of 77,217 of them by its south London contractors