At Stationers’ Hall
Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral at Christmas for a walking tour of storytelling and sightseeing through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile to London Bridge in search of the wonders and wickedness of the City of London. CLICK HERE TO BOOK
‘The Word of the Lord Endures Forever’
Next time you walk up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s, turn left down the narrow passage just beyond the church of St Martin Within Ludgate and you will find yourself in a quiet courtyard where Stationers’ Hall has stood since the sixteen-seventies.
For centuries, this whole district was the heart of the printing and publishing, with publishers lining Ludgate Hill, St Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row, while newspapers operated from Fleet St. Today, only Stationers’ Hall and St Bride Printing Library, down behind Ludgate Circus, remain as evidence of this lost endeavour that once flourished here.
Yet the Stationers’ Company was founded in 1403, predating printing. At first it was a guild of scriveners, illuminators, bookbinders, booksellers and suppliers of parchment, ink and paper. Even the term ‘stationer’ originates here with the stalls in St Paul’s Churchyard where they traded, which were immovable – in other words, ‘stationary’ stalls selling ‘stationery.’
No-one whose life is bound up with writing and words can fail to be touched by a visit to Stationers’ Hall. From 1557, when Mary Tudor granted the Stationers their Charter and for the next three hundred years, members had the monopoly upon publishing and once one member had published a text no-one else could publish it, thus the phrase ‘Entered at Stationers’ Hall’ became a guarantee of copyright.
Built in the decade following the Fire of London, the Great Hall was panelled by Stephen College ‘the protestant joiner’ at price of £300 in 1674. In spite of damage in the London Blitz and extensive alterations to other buildings, this central space retains its integrity as an historic interior. At one end, an ornate Victorian window shows William Caxton presenting his printing to Edward IV while an intricate and darkly detailed wooden Restoration screen faces it from the other. Wooden cases display ancient plate, colourful banners hang overhead, ranks of serried crests line the walls, stained glass panels of Shakespeare and Tyndale filter daylight while – all around – books are to be spied, carved into the architectural design.
A hidden enclave cloistered from the hubbub of the modern City, where illustrious portraits of former gentlemen publishers – including Samuel Richardson – peer down silently at you from the walls, Stationers’ Hall quietly overwhelms you with the history and origins of print in London through six centuries.
The Stock Room
The Stock Room c. 1910
The Stock Room door, c.1910
Panel of Stationers that became Lord Mayor includes JJ Baddeley, 1921
The Great Hall, where Purcell’s Hymn to St Cecilia was first performed in 1692
The Great Hall c. 1910
Stained glass window of 1888 showing Caxton presenting his printing to Edward IV
The vestibule to Great Hall
The Stationers’ Garden
The Court Room with a painting by Benjamin West
Looking out from the Court Room to the garden with the Master’s chair on the right
The Court Room
The Court Room, c 1910
Exterior of Stationer’s Hall, c. 1910
Archive photographs courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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The Nights Of Old London
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The temperature is plunging and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out in search of the dark nights of old London.
Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.
Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Dorothy Annan’s Murals At The Barbican
Years ago, I wrote this appreciation of Dorothy Annan’s ceramic murals adorning Fleet House in Farringdon St which was due for demolition, but I am happy to report that – as a consequence – these wonderful pieces were moved to a new location in the Barbican, where they lighten a gloomy passage and bring joy to thousands, both residents of the estate and visitors to the arts centre alike.
1. Radio communications and television
Wandering down under Holborn Viaduct years ago on my way to magicians’ convention at the Bridewell Theatre, I was halted in my tracks by the beauty of a series of nine large ceramic murals upon the frontage of Eric Bedford’s elegant modernist Fleet House of 1960 at 70 Farringdon St. Their subtle lichen and slate tones suited the occluded November afternoon and my mood. Yet even as I savoured their austere grace, I raised my eyes to discover that the edifice was boarded up and I wondered if next time I came by it should be gone. Just up from here, there were vast chasms where entire blocks had disappeared at Snow Hill and beside Farringdon Station, so I was not surprised to discover that the vacant Fleet House was next to go.
Each of the murals was constructed of forty bulky stoneware panels and it was their texture that first drew my attention, emphasising the presence of the maker. Framed in steel and set in bays defined by pieces of sandstone, this handcrafted modernism counterbalanced the austere geometry of the building to sympathetic effect. Appropriately for the telephone exchange where the first international direct-dialled call was made – by Lord Mayor of London Sir Ralph Perring to Monsieur Jacques Marette, the French Minister of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones in Paris at 11am on 8th March 1963 – these reliefs celebrated the wonders of communication as an heroic human endeavour. In 1961, the General Post Office Telephonist Recruitment Centre was housed there at Fleet House and they paid telephonists £11 week, plus a special operating allowance of six shillings and threepence for those employed on the international exchange.
These appealing works, enriching the streetscape with a complex visual poetry, were created by Dorothy Annan (1908-1983) a painter and ceramicist with a Bohemian reputation who, earlier in the century, produced pictures in a loose post-impressionist style and was married to the sculptor Trevor Tennant. Although her work is unapologetic in declaring the influence of Ben Nicholson and Paul Klee, she succeeded in constructing a personal visual language which is distinctive and speaks across time, successfully tempering modernism with organic forms and a natural palette.
It was the abstract qualities of these murals that first caught my eye, even though on closer examination many contain figurative elements, illustrating aspects of communication technology – motifs of aerials and wires which are subsumed to the rhythmic play of texture and tone, they offered a lively backdrop to the endless passage of pedestrians down Farringdon St.
Once a proud showcase for the future of telecommunications, Fleet House had been empty for years and was the property of Goldman Sachs who won permission this summer to demolish it for the construction of a ‘banking factory.’ I feared that the murals might go the same way as Dorothy Annan’s largest single work entitled ‘Expanding Universe’ at the Bank of England which was destroyed in 1997. Yet although Fleet House itself was not listed, the City of London planning authority earmarked the murals for preservation as a condition of any development. And today, you can visit them at the Barbican where they have found a sympathetic new permanent home, complementing the modernist towers, bringing detail and subtle colour to enliven this massive complex. The age of heroic telephony may have passed but Dorothy Annan’s murals survive as a tribute to it.
2. Cables and communication in buildings
3. Test frame for linking circuits
4. Cable chamber with cables entering from street
5. Cross connection frame
6. Power and generators
7. Impressions derived from the patterns produced in cathode ray oscilligraphs used in testing
8. Lines over the countryside
9. Overseas communication showing cable buoys
Dorothy Annan’s murals upon Fleet House, Farringdon St, November 2011
Dorothy Annan’s murals at the Barbican Centre, November 2013
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In Search Of Flower & Dean St
Celebrating the publication of Journal of a Man Unknown, I am publishing a series of pieces by Gillian Tindall. Today you can read about her quest for Flower & Dean St where the protagonist of her novel lodges with a family of Huguenot weavers back in the seventeenth century.
Click here to order a copy of ‘Journal of a Man Unknown’ for £10
This is the last call for the launch party at Hatchard’s Piccadilly this Wednesday 19th November 6-8pm. At 7pm, travel writer Colin Thubron will speak in appreciation of Gillian and actor Alan Cox will read from the novel. Drop me a line at spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to be added to the list.
Fishman’s Tobacconist, Flower & Dean St, seventies, by Ron McCormick
It is a disappointing fact that some dwellings are built to be poor, you can find examples all over Britain. But in parts of London, once desirable streets had poverty imposed upon them. The streets of Spitalfields, whose early Georgian houses are now expensive and desirable, were from the Victorian period until well after the Second World War under this shadow. It is only thanks to the energies and determined actions of a few in the sixties and seventies that a number of these streets have survived, but many have not and one of these is Flower and Dean St.
In Tudor times, Spitalfields was actually fields beyond the City wall, though by the late Elizabethan days a sprinkle of individual wealthy gentleman’s houses began to dot the roadside up to Shoreditch and, by the reign of Charles I, there were more of them – typical ribbon development. This ceased during the Civil War but once peace was established, even before the Cromwells were seen off and Charles II was restored, builders got busy again in this desirable-almost-rural setting.
In 1655 two brothers called Fossan, one of whom was a goldsmith, acquired an odd-shaped chunk of land not far from an ancient, muddy track to brick fields, now Brick Lane. Much of the ground was used for tenter fields, where woollen cloth woven locally was hung up to dry. Already the City clothing industry was impinging on the rural land. The Fossans leased the land for ninety-nine years to two builders, John Flower and Gowan Dean. Such was the system under which most of Greater London was created over the next two hundred years. There they built Fossan St, whose name a generation later came to be misunderstood as ‘Fashion St,’ and gave their own surnames to the street just south of it.
Fashion St still exists with the handsome early eighteenth century Christ Church, Spitalfields, and its graveyard just to the north, but its present buildings are of a later date. The original Flower & Dean St is gone as if it had never been.
It must have been a pretty street and a respectable one for much of the next century, when it was mainly occupied by Huguenot silk-spinners. These were protestants who had come to England to find a more welcoming society than the Catholic France of Louis XIV. They arrived in far greater numbers in the 1680s when Louis tore up a legal agreement tolerating Protestantism and real persecution set in. Some arrived across the Channel in dangerously small boats, making their way into the Thames estuary and up the river by night. Nothing in the life of nations really changes.
These hard-working spinners and weavers flourished, and by the mid-eighteenth century many had established themselves in other businesses, entering prosperous British society. Those who remained began to do less well, imports of silk and cotton from India were damaging the home trade. By the middle of the century the houses in Flower & Dean St were being sub-divided into smaller lodgings. There were also questions about their stability, the brickies employer by Flower & Dean were said to have used inadequate mortar.
Fifty years later, the land east of Whitechapel was entirely built up with houses and these were extending further along the Mile End Rd. Within another generation, the hamlets set in countryside that was visible from the Tower of London would be turning inexorably into the great mass of the East End. To the prosperous residents of expanding West London, this might as well have been a foreign country.
In reality, of course, much of the East End was filled with decent hard-working people who themselves regarded such places as Flower & Dean St as dangerous slums. It was now where lodging houses offered a bed for a few pence a night and where, it was said, thieves felt at ease and prostitutes plied their trade, though it is unclear who would seek them out there.
Ford Maddox Brown, the painter, described it as ‘a haunt of vice… full of cut-throats’, and it was a place where policemen were said only to venture in pairs. But the street acquired a sudden and much more general fame when, in 1888, two women who lodged in there in different houses met their demise in the Whitechapel Murders. Enough was enough. With the not-entirely rational logic that has often been applied to places that get a bad reputation, it was decided the street should be pulled down.
Just to add to the drama, during demolition in 1892, two skulls and some bones were found in a box under the yard. More murder victims, it was at once assumed. In reality, the examination of the bones seems to have been cursory and it is likely these relics were from a field-burial hundreds of years earlier.
What rose in the place of Flower & Dean St was Rothschild Buildings, a massive tenement block bestowed on the large newly-arrived population of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. The bestowers were the Rothschild banking family, and it was a classic example of ‘four percent philanthropy’ – a charitable cause, yet one which nevertheless brought in a modest but steady income.
Moral views change and the improvements of one era attract the disapproval of later times. By the seventies, many of the descendants of the original Jewish occupants of the Rothschild Buildings were established in more salubrious northern suburbs and Bangladeshis arrived to take their place. The Buildings were steeped in soot and the lack of bathrooms in the flats was considered unacceptable. They were pulled down leaving only the grandiose brick archway. Today, the site is a dug-out games pitch at the end of the short stub of Lolesworth Close off Commercial St.
Just to the south is Flower & Dean Walk, a modern low-rise pedestrianised development, looking oddly out of place amidst the complex of old alleys and new tower blocks, with the raucous salesmanship of Petticoat Lane a few minutes away. I went for a stroll down there recently on a snowy day. There was a thin mist floating above the whiteness and it seemed as if the monstrously tall constructions that have transformed the City were dissolving into the sky, as if they were disappearing while the older, traditional buildings remained. Would that it were so!
Rothschild Buildings by John Allin, painted in the seventies
This bollard in Lolesworth Close is all that remains of Flower & Dean St
Entrance to the former Rothschild Buildings
Flower & Dean Walk
Flower & Dean Walk
Flower & Dean Estate opened by HRH The Prince of Wales on 18th July 1984
The Gentle Author’s Winter Walks
During the forthcoming festive season, I will be hosting walks offering the opportunity of some gentle exercise and fresh air in the midst of the holiday. And if you are seeking gifts for friends and family we are offering GIFT VOUCHERS for my 2026 tours.
Image courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute
Click here to book for my CITY OF LONDON WALK on Sunday 28th December at 2pm
Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral for a walking tour of storytelling and sightseeing through the alleys and byways of the Square Mile to London Bridge in search of the wonders and wickedness of the City of London.
Click here to book for my SPITALFIELDS WALK on Thursday January 1st at 2pm
Brush away the cobwebs on New Year’s Day with a ramble through two thousand years of culture and history in Spitalfields at the heart of old London.
Click here to buy GIFT VOUCHERS for The Gentle Author’s Tours
John Vanbrugh in Greenwich
Next year will be the tercentenary of the death of John Vanbrugh, the playwright-turned-architect who designed Castle Howard and Blenheim. Charles Saumarez Smith, former Director of the National Gallery and an East End resident, has written a biography John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture. Today he writes about Vanbrugh Castle in Greenwich where Vanbrugh lived at the end of his life. Charles will be talking about Vanbrugh at the Wigmore Hall next Thursday 20th November. Click here for tickets
Vanbrugh Castle
If you walk up the hill in Greenwich Park from the Queen’s House or from Greenwich itself, you may spot the battlements of a small, fortified castle poking above the park wall and wonder what it is. Is it an eighteenth-century folly? Or the house of a nineteenth-century antiquarian?
Vanbrugh Castle, as the house is called, was built by John Vanbrugh as a rural retreat for himself, his new wife and their family in the early 1720s. He signed a lease for a small plot of land, immediately next door to the park, together with an adjacent twelve-acre field on 3rd March 1718, apparently planning to build a set of houses for himself and members of his close family — his two younger brothers, Charles and Philip, both officers in the Royal Navy, and two younger sisters, Victoria and Robina.
It was just at the moment that Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, was promulgating the importance of designing in an orthodox Palladian style. Burlington travelled out to Italy in the summer of 1719 and returned with vast numbers of Palladio’s drawings which he bought from the owner of the Villa Maser. Vanbrugh was perfectly capable of designing in an orthodox Palladian style if required as he demonstrated in his design for the Temple of the Four Winds, one of his last works at Castle Howard. But for his own house, Vanbrugh decided to design in a pseudo-medieval style with a circular turret attached in front, with a very inconvenient, steep staircase, and two corner towers with battlements. What on earth made him do this?
When he was supervising the construction of Blenheim, Vanbrugh had become very attached to living in the ruins of the medieval Woodstock Manor which still survived in the grounds of Woodstock Park. Vanbrugh adapted them for his own use, introducing new windows and making small-scale repairs, including adding a bog-house. When the Duchess of Marlborough discovered that he had spent money on this, she was livid and ordered the ruins to be demolished. But Vanbrugh held his ground and, possibly unwisely, sent her a long paper in which he described how important these medieval ruins were, how full of historical associations, and that they were an important historical landmark in the view from the new palace.
At almost exactly the time that Vanbrugh was making plans for his new house, he also encouraged his friend, Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle, to build a whole line of medieval fortification on the edge of his estate at Castle Howard. These fortifications are in exactly the same style as Vanbrugh Castle, not intended to be authentically medieval, but in the medieval style, a kind of free-form medievalism in which the house is reduced to a bare geometry.
Vanbrugh not only designed a castle for himself but a number of other buildings nearly, including another large-ish house flanked by turrets for his younger brother, Charles, and a very curious single storey building like a castellated bungalow which was known as ‘The Nunnery’, lived in by his unmarried sisters, although in the early 1720s, it was another brother, Philip, who paid the rates. Maybe all three of them lived there together.
On either side of the Nunnery were two tower houses, known as the White Towers, four stories high in their central section, so, in contrast to the low-level The Nunnery. Imposing, although, as he described the houses in a letter to Lord Carlisle, there was only a single room and closet on each floor. He told Carlisle that he was designing these houses for his sons, although his younger son, John, known as Jack, was dead by 1723.
Plans and outline drawings for these houses survive in a large cache of drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bought in 1992 with help from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. There are many other outline sketches for small houses in this collection. These are freehand, experimental doodles, in which Vanbrugh tries out different ground-floor room arrangements and how even a small house can be made to look interesting through the use of abstract geometry and with a limited amount of, again abstract, articulation, much in the style of Goose-Pie House which he had built for himself in Whitehall and which Jonathan Swift satirised as being like a mud-pie, copied from children playing in the street.
It seems that in the last few years of his life, when Vanbrugh was no longer involved with Blenheim (he had fallen out terminally with the Duchess of Marlborough in November 1716 and was never allowed back), he focused his attention, instead, on designing smaller houses for himself, his family and friends. It may have been an early form of property development.
An antiquary, William Stukeley, Secretary of the recently established Society of Antiquaries, visited Greenwich in June 1721, not long after Vanbrugh Castle had been built and drew it in exactly the same way that he drew medieval ruins, labelling it ‘Castellum Vanbrugiense apud Grenovicum’. The following August, he returned to draw his brother’s house which he called a ‘castellulum’, a baby castle. It is a very odd idea: an earnest antiquary drawing them as it they were authentic medieval buildings.
Another Scottish antiquary, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, visited in 1727, the year after Vanbrugh’s death. He was equally surprised and wrote:
‘Vanbrugh was a famous architect but of an odd taste. These houses of his consist of great heaps of brick and thick walls but little accommodation within. There is scarcely a room in them above 8 or 10 foot square and some much less. The ornaments are such which the Goths and their successors used to place in Castles and Prisons, viz. battlements, round-towers, little windows and doors. And yet this was the man chosen to build Blenheim House for the Duke of Marlborough!’
Vanbrugh was a very independent-minded man. Was he, when he came to design a house for himself, nostalgic for his youth when he had served in the army? Or was it an elaborate stage-set built to impress his young wife ? He had been a playwright in his youth.
After being kicked out of the ruins of Woodstock Manor by the Duchess of Marlborough, he was no doubt enjoying the fact that he had been able to build a castle for himself, cocking a snook at the Duchess and enjoying the view from his own little castle over Greenwich. I like to imagine him at the gate with his spy-glass.
Photograph by Charles Saumarez Smith
Photograph by Charles Saumarez Smith
Vanbrugh Castle, drawing by William Stukeley 1721
Vanbrugh Castle, drawing by William Stukeley 1722
The Nunnery, drawing by William Stukeley 1721
John Vanbrugh by Godfrey Kneller, c. 1704 and c. 1710 (courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)
Charles Saumarez Smith’s John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture will be published by Lund Humphries on 20th November 2025. An exhibition of Vanbrugh’s drawings opens at Sir John Soane’s Museum on 4th March 2026.
The Great Cat & Dog Massacre
This is an extract selected by Hilda Kean from her book The Great Cat & Dog Massacre – The Real Story of the Second World War’s Unknown Tragedy published by University of Chicago Press
Blue Cross rescue of a cat (Courtesy of State Library of Victoria)
Frequently we hear the Second World War described as “The People’s War” and this phrase has become set in the public imagination, but – too often – the experiences of our own (or our relatives’) cats and dogs at the time are forgotten. Of the start of the war in September 1939, much is remembered. Certainly we remember that at the time school children were evacuated to the countryside, blackout curtains were made and even flower beds were starting to be dug up to create vegetable patches. Yet such positive action was rather different to what happened to cats and dogs at the start of the war.
In September 1939, many animals were killed by their owners. Politician Sir Robert Gower, who was also the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, argued that at the decisions of ordinary people themselves nearly 750,000 pet animals were killed. Later the RSPCA and Brigadier Clabby, the author of the official history of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, declared that 400,000, representing around 26% of cats and dogs in London alone, pet animals were killed. And this killing happened in the first week of the war in September 1939.
These acts of killing were not imposed by the government, but were undertaken by people taking their pet animals to vets and animal charities. Yet these were not the explicit decisions of the charitable organisations. Prior to the war, the RSPCA organised a conference on horse welfare involving many organisations and – in partnership with the National Air Raid Precautions Committee and with Home Office support – set up a body “to advise on all problems affecting animals in wartime.” Vets were annoyed and, with too little involvement from the government, they issued their own literature arguing that it was their responsibility to persuade people from having their pets killed.
But at the start of the war thousands of animals were killed. The RSPCA, the oldest animal charity in the world, reported the number of dogs and cats being brought in to be destroyed had doubled at its London clinics, and wrote “the work of destroying animals was continued, day and night, during the first week of the war.” The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, well known for its work in East London, noted that destructors were overwhelmed by thousands of animals brought for death to its clinics. Then the National Canine Defence League, set up in the eighteen-nineties to protect dogs at a time of rabies hysteria, reported that, so extensive was the slaughter of dogs, its supplies of choloroform had been exhausted. The Battersea Dogs’ Home killed fewer than other charities, having argued in the Bow and Battersea branches that people should take their animals home. Even at London Zoo there was an initial killing of poisonous snakes, and some birds including kestrels, herons and kites that were observed flying over Regent’s Park. Yet after a few months, many zoo animals were financially sponsored and continuing their lives there at the zoo – even including a dormouse paid for at the cost of a shilling per week !
During the war the government did much to ensure the status of dogs and cats including through BBC broadcasts. By Spring 1942, it was widely publicised that cats were doing work of “national importance.” Again the BBC would praise the NARPAC for offering free identification discs with the animal’s own collar. Less than half-way through the war, over three and a half million animals became registered and wore large blue and white discs.
Internally, civil servants were also working busily explaining to their ministers that “dogs are not to be interfered with” and ensuring the dogs “must be fed.” As a result, dogs could eat thousands of tons of food and cats could drink gallons of milk. If the civil service was to restrict materials for the manufacturing of dog biscuits then, they concluded, people would probably substitute for them other forms of human food! Given that so many people were in favour of their pets, the civil servants allowed genuine breeding to continue. For some months, civil servants thought about increasing dog tax but recognising such a topic was unpopular, they proposed psychological factors should be taken into account. They also rejected going along with the Nazi policy for conscription of the dog population for their war effort!
Vulnerable dogs as well as cats were looked after by the sanctuary organised by the Animal Defence House near Salisbury, which drove them to the countryside from Central London. Some of the dogs were taken to the home of Nina Duchess of Hamilton where they, together with moggies and pedigree cats, found countryside premises away from the London bombing. In their diaries and even in their mass observation interviews, many men and women talked about their own animals. Thus the writer, Fryniwyd Tennyson, took in two new cats- sharing their own food but also supporting their owner’s belief “they know nothing about war.”-
Sometimes the war situation was tragic. Thus Lilian Margaret Hart, living in Bethnal Green Rd with her husband George in the Air Raid Precautions, looked everywhere for Gyp the dog and Timmy the cat but sadly both had died in the bombing. On similar occasions others survived. Thus a parrot from Samuda St on the Isle of Dogs was kept alive in his squashed-up cage by being fed with bacon rind and crusty bread, only to give a wonderful recital of obscene language. Other animals, such as the canaries in the photograph below were rescued from a public house in southeast London. Thus the local community in West Hampstead searched for the mother of a local cat who was found by demolition workers in the debris of a nearby shop who carried her home in a sack. She was thin but was none the worse for her ordeal! In the Poplar air raids, Rip the dog helped find victims with Mr King the local air raid warden and stayed with him next to his small allotment. Together, they regularly visited an air raid shelter comforting those sheltering. As a result of his positive actions, Rip received a Dickin medal for his bravery.
Many animals were looked after and their stories passed on to children of all ages to give them emotional support. As one respondent argued, her father had given her The Photo Book of Pretty Pets for Christmas in 1940 and she recalls “The quality of my life has been enhanced by animals.”
On some occasions, children questioned why people were carrying their pets to a vet for their destruction. As a result of one particular boy becoming upset, his family returned home with the rescued ginger cat who had been about to be killed. Others, such as the late Brian Sewell, art critic, noted the seaside killing of his own dog as a “cold, hard, vengeful aversion lodged” in his long memory.
In diaries and in the records of Mass Observation during the war many adults told their stories. As one young man said to Mass Observation, “Probably dogs do more to uphold morale among their owners than anything else.” In many diaries, animals were witnessed and encouraged. Thus, the well-known Nella Last was an enthusiast about her dog Sol and cat Mr Murphy, explaining that, “To me he is more than an animal: he has kindness, understanding and intelligence and not only knows all that is said but often reads my mind to an uncanny degree.”
Even Winston Churchill publically celebrated his black cat Nelson at 10 Downing St and his ginger cat at his Chartwell home. When Rab Butler, pioneer of the 1944 Education Act, came to his room one night while Nelson was curled up at Churchill’s feet, Winston started the conversation by expressing that, “This cat does more for the war effort than you do!”
For some years the experience of wartime animals, especially in London, had stuck in my head as I rarely found them to be included when I was reading any conventional histories of the war. In my earlier book on Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800, I wrote no more than a few pages about the treatment of the animals in war. This was not through ignorance but because of the paucity of animal material. Although Angus Calder’s The People’s War had talked very briefly of the destruction of animals, his common phrase “people’s war” ignored the effect on animals in the main.
Thinking about animals and researching the diary writers, family stories, animal charities and state archives, from that time highlighted the specific plight of animals in London and the East End for me. It also demonstrated the long established (if sometimes erased ) presence of animals, as well as those only thinking themselves and their ancestors as participating in ‘the people’s war.’ Rather than forgetting about this time of varying treatment, perhaps we should choose to think in different ways, remembering cats and dogs as much as humans.
Disc of the National Air Raids Precaution Animals’ Committee
Canaries rescued from a pub in southeast London, September 1940
Joint canine and human fatigue at Southwark Rest Centre c. 1940
Dog at an East End rest centre, September 1940
Families, including children and a dog, at an emergency feeding unit in Chingford, January 1945
A hen is a victim of the bombing in Hackney
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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