Free Bonzo's War by Clare Campbell Page A

about with it, rolled on its back and purred.
    â€˜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 byfleeing 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 analligator 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