Free Bonzo's War by Clare Campbell

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 shortstory 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 Canine 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