Sarah Ainslie’s Somali Portraits
Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie undertook this fine series of Somali portraits, accompanied with eloquent testimonies dictated by her subjects
Adan Jama Mohammed – Seaman
“I came to this country when I was twenty years old in 1958. Before than I was in Aden, working on a small passenger boat, but when I came here I was thirty years as a seaman and living in Middlesbrough. I started on 8th April 1959 as a merchant seaman, earning £21.50 a month. Until 1980 it was my job, then I worked on big container ships. We didn’t have much to do. I married in 1987 and I had a family in Middlesbrough, but we had to leave because they closed the docks and the factories. I had a house and a family, and a mortgage I couldn’t pay. The building society said if I didn’t pay £70 a month, they would take the house back. I had to sell the house at half price, and now my children are grown up and don’t want to know me. I live on my own in a flat at the Seamen’s Mission in West Ferry Rd, Isle of Dogs, and my family live on the other side of London. I don’t like living here in this city, there’s too many people – but you can’t help it, if you don’t have a choice. I do have some friends at the Mission. It was a hard life as a seaman.”
Ahmed Hassan Sulieman – Seaman
“I was born in Aden, when I was a schoolboy everyone over sixteen joined the army. My father was in the First World War and he was killed fighting for the British in Egypt in 1918, when I was four. So my brother and I, we wanted to join the army and take revenge on the people who killed him. All my family were in the army. All the army, they treated us very good – white and black together, no colour bar.
In 1944, I was shot in the leg while I was on a British ship that was sunk by two German U-boats off Durban. We were at sea on a raft for two days and two nights before we were marooned on land without food. I went inland and walked for six days to search for help before the British found us and took us to Durban, and when we recovered they sent us back to fight. In Egypt, four thousand people were being killed a day at that time.
I was also in Germany and Japan, the kamikaze pilots crashed into our ship. It was a very bad war, but we wanted to win – losing was nothing. I am brave because I wanted to beat the Germans and I fought for myself, I didn’t want to be captured. I was happy when we won the war and I’m happy that I’m still alive. I had four medals but I lost two recently, I never asked for them.
At the end of the war, they gave us a passport and a suit of clothes, and they brought us here to the Seamen’s Mission where I live today. So we were quite happy. I’ve been here seventy years. They said you are fit to work and I joined the Merchant Navy. I got £200 a month, before that I only got £24 a month and I had to shovel coal but the food was free. I worked as a merchant seaman until I got too old and I have lived in the Seamen’s Mission for the last forty years. I and my brother we used to go back to Somalia every year, until he was killed in a car crash in Poplar in 1980.
They told me I could bring my family over, but there’s nowhere here for them to stay. I had eight children, all grown up. Now haven’t seen them for over a year and I feel sick, and I want to go home for good. I’m too old and I want to see my children.”
Shamsa Hersi – Manager of Somali Elders Day Centre
“I was born in a town called Burao in Somaliland and I came to UK as a refugee in 1990 when I was a child. From an early age, I wanted to work for UNICEF and in those days my great uncle used to work for the United Nations, he talked to me about his work when I was eight. I cared for my family for many years in Somalia – it is second nature to me, but you have to train to be a Social Worker. I believe that if you can work with people to help them, then it gives you a more rewarding life. I studied at university in the UK and I have a qualification in psycho-therapy and a diploma in working with people who have had traumatic life experiences. It’s about giving something back for the support I received when I came to this country. It takes a lot of guts and hard work and skills to build relationships, but it’s a privilege to work with these people – they are survivors.”
Ali Mohammad – Day Care Officer
“In 1988, there was a civil war in Somalia and I fled to my brother Isaac who was a senior official at the Ministry of Education in Mogadishu. Then, in 1989, there was a massacre – fifty-six people in my tribe were shot. They dug a mass grave and shovelled them in, but there was boy who was not shot and fell in the grave too. He managed to get out and spread the news. My brother told me to go to South Africa or India, anywhere away from Somalia, and he gave me 200,000 Somali shillings and $100. I went to India and then to Bangladesh where I studied at Dhaka University, hoping to come to Europe. My grandfather Uma Hassan sent me some money from London and my visa came through before I graduated, so he told me to come at once and I arrived at Heathrow on August 21st 1992. Because I had a family address, I decided to surprise them. I took a minicab to Poplar and they couldn’t believe it was me when I arrived!
I shared a two bedroom flat with another guy in Woolwich. The country was in recession at that time and there were no jobs. Some of the Somalis who came before me didn’t try to find work, they were so negative. They said, ‘As a black guy, you haven’t got a chance.’ But I tried and, after a month, I got a job as a kitchen porter at Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital in Woolwich, all the kitchen staff and cleaners were employed by a contractor. At first, I found it hard to get all the work completed on time but it got easier after a while. I got £2.85 an hour. Language was a problem and it was a very physical job, I found it exhausting. I couldn’t understand the people I worked with because they spoke colloquially – innit? – whereas I spoke more formal English.
I enrolled at Greenwich University and while I was working seven until seven for five days, on the other two days I did my part-time course. What I earned, I sent home but there wasn’t much left after I paid the bills. I lost my job when the contract ended after one year and eight months but by the time I finished I was earning £4.50 an hour. After three years at university, I left with a diploma in computing but I was unemployed for three months. I could only get work one day a week, doing cleaning and security in the City, I couldn’t find a decent job – they were all shut to me.
Someone told me there was an apprenticeship in Social Care available for a resident of the Ocean Estate. I was still living in Woolwich but I thought, ‘I could move to the Ocean Estate.’ A Somali landlord had a four bedroom flat with an empty room, so I took it and I got the job. They paid £500 a month and I did six months working in Social Care with disabled people, seniors and children. I did well and, in 1995, I spotted a job for a Day Care Officer advertised. By then I had my certificate, so I applied and I won that one. And this is the job I do now here at the Somali Elders Day Centre. I got married in 1997 and I have three daughters and I live in Bethnal Green, five minutes walk from my work. I know everyone in this area.”
Ahmed Yunis – Seaman
“I came here in 1956 when I was a sailor in the Royal Navy. I felt comfortable in London because at that time my country was a British colony. I came on a Saturday and I left on the Monday. I was only here two days, I went to the Merchant Navy office and they gave me a job which lasted until 1982, when I retired. I lived in Liverpool for twenty-eight years but I consider London my home.
I am ninety-three years old. I have two wives, one here and one in Somalia. My London wife is forty-five and I have four children under eleven, the youngest is six. I am a grateful father. I am also a great-grandfather. If you don’t smoke or drink or kiss women, you stay healthy.”
Kinsi Abdulleh – Artist
“When I got off the plane in the eighties as an eighteen-year-old refugee, I had an older family of relations to go to in Cable St. I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to England.’ and we passed Westminster and the Tower, and we ended up in this run-down, dark little side street. I thought, ‘God, what have we come to? This is really poor, like being in Africa. I’m jumping from the frying pan into the fire!’ But, on the other hand, I fell in love with the place. I went to college and it was exciting that I could get up and go without supervision. I watched the Jackson 5 on TV and bought jeans, even though the older generation expected me to be more conventional. They said, ‘You’ve only been in the city two days and you’re going ice skating!’ They had a false outdated view of my country that I was supposed to believe. I came from the city not the village. People imagine you’ve come from Zululand and you live up a tree. I spent the formative years of my life being displaced, so I should be the one longing for tribal culture, but I am frustrated by the patriarchal tribal culture. I’ve been fortunate to end up in a place where people have extended a hand to me. I can go anywhere in Tower Hamlets, and that’s why I’ve stayed because I can walk down the street here and make my own history.”
Ali Mohammed Adan – Seaman
“I first came to London by ship in March 1958. I stayed in Aldgate for a night and went to Newport where my cousin had a house. There are many Somalis there. From that day until I retired in 1990, I was in the Merchant Navy, and I brought my family over from Somaliland. In 1970, I moved back to London to Bethnal Green but my wife and daughters chose to stay in Newport.
In Somaliland, I owned over a hundred camels and sheep. Nobody keeps camels anymore, everyone sold them and moved to the city. They say, ‘It’s too much work.’ But keeping camels and sheep and living on a farm, it’s a good life because you eat every day. Everybody wants to do it again now.”
Ismail Ibrahim – Seaman
“I came to this country in 1958 from the South Yemen which was a British colony. I was born a British subject and I am still a British subject. They say to me, ‘Why do you like it so much?’ I say, ‘I don’t know any other government.’ I joined the Merchant Navy in 1960. After we fought in the Falkland Islands in 1982, I came back and joined the Ministry of Defence from 1983 until 2000. I was in Czechoslovakia with the United Nation Forces from 1984-89, then I was in Georgia. I was in Cyprus but when they were going into Iraq, I said, ‘I’m not going.’ I retired four years ago. In the Navy, I worked in the engine room and in the Merchant Navy, I was coxswain.
I was born in British Somaliland, in the city of Berbera, one of six brothers and four sisters. In 1960, we got independence and they joined British Somaliland to Somalia which had been an Italian colony and was run by the mafia – they rape, they kill. So we decided to get our land back and have self-government, and we fought for twelve years. They killed my father, they killed my brother and they killed my children.
In 1991, we got independence again, and we settled down and all was ok in Somaliland. The country needs European help because there are no roads and no facilities. So what can I do now? – I’m ok but a bit old. I’ve got four boys and two girls, and an ex-wife in Somlia that my brother took on, and a wife here in the City Rd that I don’t live with. I was away on a ship while my children were being born, I was always at sea not here with my children as they grew up. They don’t know me. My life was sea, sea, sea.”
Ahmed Esa – Seaman
“I joined the Navy in 1953 in Aden, I was a young guy and I just wanted to work and visit other countries. I came to Plymouth in 1953 and stayed with the Navy until 1969 when I joined the Merchant Navy. I retired in 1988 after thirty-nine years. My brother was in the Merchant Navy too, he was younger than me. He came to London and enlisted, but I never worked in London. All that time, my family was at home, so I fetched them here and they live in London now. I haven’t been back to Somalia since 1996, I can’t afford to cost of the trip. Being in the Navy, it was a hard life – all that time at sea, even if you got to different countries. I’ve have no home, I’m living here in the Seaman’s Mission and waiting for flat of my own. I’m a single man again, now my children have grown up. My brother caught a virus and died in Forest Gate. Life in London is solitary, though I have a few friends at the Mission from the Merchant Navy. I was a deck hand, a carpenter and an able-bodied seaman, an odd-jobs man.”
Yurub Qalib Farah – Day Care Officer
“I came to this country on my own as an asylum seeker in 2001. I had friends here to stay with and I went to college in Haringey, studying English Language and Computers – before I came this country I was working as a secretary. In 2002, I started searching for work, and people said Tower Hamlets is the best place to find a job and I learned that Mayfield House was advertising for a Day Care Worker. I called up the number and came for an interview with the manager at 2pm on November 11th 2002, and I have worked here ever since. My ambition is to help people and be a good care worker, and in this job I am using the experience I have had to help others. I got married in February 2004, and we don’t have children but my sister came to join us. I went back to visit my family in Somalia for the first time in ten years last Christmas. There had been some changes and my friends had moved to a different area, so it was like another country to the one I knew. It was safe but so hot. I think I have two homes, here and there – and I’m glad to have that. When I said to my friends, ‘I’m going home,’ they say,‘Which home?’ And then they say, ‘Can we come with you?'”
Ahmed Awad Yusuf – Seaman
“I first came here in 1959 at nineteen years old. At that time Somalia was a British colony and I had a British passport. Seven of us, we took a ship to Marseilles and caught a train to Dover and then arrived at Liverpool St. There were a couple of Somali coffee shops in Leman St and I stayed at one for three days. A friend of mine lived in Newport so I took a train from Paddington and stayed with him for four weeks, and then I lived in Cardiff for three years. First of all, I went to the Social Security and they gave me £2.10 a week, while I was looking for a job. I worked three years in Cardiff Dock. The Merchant Navy were looking for seamen and they gave me a job for twenty six and a half years. I moved back over here to London in 1965, and I lived in Leman St, Cable St and at the Seamen’s Mission in East India Dock Rd, and in 1984, I returned to Somaliland. But in 1990, I came back here with my wife and children. I live in Leman St, it’s the place I first came and it’s where the people I know are. I’ve been all over the world, Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Gulf States, China, Japan – all the places the British ruled.”
Ruquiya Egeh – Housing Association Manager
“I came here in 1988 as refugee from Somalia at the age of fourteen. I came speaking not a word of English. I was one of twelve children, but both of my parents were teachers and my father was able to send money to support us. Fortunately, my elder sister who I came with was nineteen, that’s why we weren’t fostered, she was old enough to be my guardian. At first, we were taken to the Home Office and then sent to a refugees’ hostel somewhere in London, before being taken to temporary accommodation in Forest Gate. We met some Saudi people at the mosque and I was able to go to Swanley School in Whitechapel. But the other pupils treated me as a stupid person because I couldn’t speak the language and I had playground fights because I thought they were swearing at me. Within a space of two years, I managed to learn enough English to pass seven GCSEs. I came from a good educational background and I wanted to prove I knew something.
I found college much more difficult because there was less support yet I managed to pass Health & Social Care, but I hated it and my sister went through depression at that time too. In the second year of college, I changed courses so that I could use my strengths and I did Arabic, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Physics, and I did well and applied to University. Getting into University was a big deal and I studied Biomedical Science at Greenwich University. I got married in my second year of college and became pregnant with my first child, which let me down because I was so exhausted I fell asleep in classes. But my husband supported me and his parents looked after the baby so I could work. By the third year of University, I had three children. It made me want to achieve, I was the first person in my family to get a University degree and, when I rang my father, he said, ‘Well done, you made me proud. You were my first child to go University, now I can hold my head up.’
When I work with people who have got language problems, I know their frustration. Now I’m pushing my children. I say,‘You’ve got to be first in the class,’ just like my father said to me. I tell them, ‘If you have a good education, you can get a good job and earn good money. Knowledge is power.'”
Mahoumed Ali Mohammed – Seaman
“I came to London in 1948 and I stayed here at Seaman’s Mission for a while and for four months at the Strand Palace Hotel. I worked for the British railways for twenty years, as a porter, as an assistant lorry driver and in signalling in the Underground. Then, in the seventies, I joined the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy for another twenty years until I retired in 1992. I was based in Cardiff but I came back to London in 1996. I have a girl and boy and my wife lives in Cardiff. When I called and said,‘I’m going to London,’ she said, ‘I’m staying here with my kids.’ I’m eighty-eight now and I live in Bethnal Green.”
Ibrahim Abdullah – Surveyor of Works
“I first came to London in 1956 and studied at the Brixton School of Building for a Diploma in Civil Engineering and then I went back home. At that time, the British ruled the country and I became a Surveyor of Works. I did not return to Britain until 15th June 1990, fleeing the Civil War, and then I brought my wife and family with me. We became British Citizens and now I come regularly to Mayfield House Day Centre to meet other Somalis who were seamen, and there are lots of them. I find it calm and cool, no problems here.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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The Map Of East End Independents
Click on this map to enlarge it and explore
The East End Trades Guild commissioned this map from cartographer extraordinaire Adam Dant, featuring the independent shops and small businesses of the East End. Twenty thousand copies have been produced by Herb Lester and printed by Calverts of Bethnal Green, and Adam’s original artwork will be exhibited at Pelliccis’ Cafe this Friday and Saturday. You can pick up your free copy there and at any of the places featured on the map as part of East End Independents Weekend 1st, 2nd & 3rd December, encouraging everyone to support their local shops and businesses.
Adam Dant with Nevio & Anna Pellicci photographed by Sarah Ainslie
“The map is a panorama of the East End and what makes it tick, from cafes, mechanics, independent shops and traditional trades to new industries – there’s a whole range. It is a trompe l’oeil noticeboard with stuff pinned on; keys, receipts, photos and invoices. Using a corkboard effect and layering maps and pictures on top proved a good solution when we have so many trades to feature in the East End.” – Adam Dant
The founding members of the East End Trades Guild photographed by Martin Usborne
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At St George’s Lutheran Church In Aldgate
There is an ideal opportunity to visit the atmospheric St George’s German Lutheran Church in Aldgate for an Advent Concert next Wednesday 6th December at 7pm. Tickets are £6 on the door, including free gluhwein and stollen.
The Altar and Pulpit at St George’s German Lutheran Church, Alie St
In Aldgate, caught between the thunder of the traffic down Leman St and the roar of the construction on Goodman’s Fields sits a modest church with an unremarkable exterior. Yet this quiet building contains an important story, the forgotten history of the German people in the East End.
Dating from 1762, St George’s German Lutheran Church is Britain’s oldest surviving German church and once you step through the door, you find yourself in a peaceful space with a distinctive aesthetic and character that is unlike any other in London.
The austere lines of the interior emphasise the elegant, rather squat proportion of the architecture and the strong geometry of the box pews and galleries is ameliorated by unexpected curves and fine details. In fact, architect Joel Johnson was a carpenter by trade which may account for the domestic scale and the visual dominance of the intricately conceived internal wooden structure. Later iron windows of 1812, with their original glass in primary tones of red and blue, bring a surprising sense of modernity to the church and, even on a December afternoon, succeed in dispelling the gathering gloom.
This was once the heart of London’s sugar-baking industry and, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, Germans brought their particular expertise to this volatile and dangerous trade, which required heating vast pans of sugar with an alarming tendency to combust or even explode. Such was the heat and sticky atmosphere that sugar-bakers worked naked, thus avoiding getting their clothes stuck to their bodies and, no doubt, experiencing the epilatory qualities of sugar.
Reflecting tensions in common with other immigrant communities through the centuries, there was discord over the issue of whether English or the language of the homeland should be spoken in church and, by implication, whether integration or separatism was preferable – this controversy led to a riot in the church on December 3rd 1767.
As the German community grew, the church became full to overcrowding – with the congregation swollen by six hundred German emigrants abandoned on their way to South Carolina in 1764. Many parishioners were forced to stand at the back and thieves capitalised upon the chaotic conditions in which, in 1789, the audience was described in the church records as eating “apples, oranges and nuts as in a theatre,” while the building itself became, “a place of Assignation for Persons of all descriptions, a receptacle for Pickpockets, and obtained the name St George’s Playhouse.”
Today the church feels like an empty theatre, maintained in good order as if the audience had just left. Even as late as 1855, the Vestry record reported that “the Elders and Wardens of the Church consist almost exclusively of the Boilers, Engineers and superior workers in the Sugar Refineries,” yet by the eighteen-eighties the number of refineries in the vicinity had dwindled from thirty to three and the surrounding streets had descended into poverty. Even up to 1914, at one hundred and thirty souls, St Georges had the largest German congregation in Britain. But the outbreak of the First World War led to the internment of the male parishioners and the expulsion of the females – many of whom spoke only English and thought of themselves as British.
In the thirties, the bell tower was demolished upon the instructions of the District Surveyor, thus robbing the facade of its most distinctive feature. Pastor Julius Reiger, an associate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leading opponent of the Nazis, turned the church into a relief centre offering shelter for German and Jewish refugees during World War II, and the congregation continued until 1996 when there were only twenty left.
St George’s is now under the care of the Historic Chapels Trust, standing in perpetuity as a remembrance of more than two centuries of the East End’s lost German community.
The classically-patterned linoleum is a rare survival from 1855
The arms of George III, King of England & Elector of Hanover
The principal founder of the church Diederick Beckman was a wealthy sugar refiner.
The Infant School was built in 1859 as gift from the son of Goethe’s publisher, W. H. Göschen
Names of benefactors carved into bricks above the vestry entrance.
St Georges German Lutheran Church, c. 192o
The bell turret with weathervane before demolition in 1934
The original eighteenth century weathervane of St George & the Dragon that was retrieved from ebay
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Lucinda Rogers At Ridley Rd Market II
In the second of this series, Contributing Artist Lucinda Rogers & I visit Ridley Rd Market in Dalston to meet some of the traders featured in her current exhibition Lucinda Rogers: On Gentrification – Drawings of Ridley Rd Market at House of Illustration in Kings Cross until March
Soniya and Tariq
Soniya – “I started in Chapel Market in 2002. I had my baby and I was out with my mum when we saw a sign advertising for a shop assistant, but when I went in to enquire they gave me such a filthy look, so I said to my mum, ‘I’m going to open my own stall.’ At first, I bought £100 worth of soap and set up a soap stall, but that was not right for me. After that, I set up a juice stall. I bought everything I needed off the internet and set up the stall in my living room to try it out. Then I came here to Ridley Rd Market as a casual trader in 2015. At first, they put my stall at the top end but after six months I came down this end and I have a permanent pitch here now. When my son was four years old, he told me I was his ‘Honey Angel,’ so when the bank asked me the name of my business, I told them ‘Honey Angel Juices.'”
Sarje’s stall
Sarjeet Singh – “My brother had a stall on Kingsland Waste in the seventies and I helped him in 1973. It was so cold, I could not imagine working there, but as I got older I started by myself selling novelty items and flags from around the world, they are very popular when the football season comes. I also worked as roadie for Frankie Paul, John Holt, Dennis Brown, UB40 and Commander Cody. Ridley Rd is a great market, I have been here since ‘seventy-six and I have not got bored yet. It is a very honest place. You have to be honest in the market because otherwise it comes back to bite you. A woman left a purse here with seven hundred pounds in cash on my stall recently and I kept it for her. She came back and asked, ‘Did I leave my purse here?'”
Red, yellow and green landscape at Greg’s stall
Gregory Spyris – “I arrived in London on a Tuesday and started work on this stall on the Wednesday, and that was forty years ago! I came for my brother’s wedding and I stayed in this country. For twenty-four years, I had two shops but I sold them and just had this stall for the past twenty years or so, selling West Indian and African groceries. I have family here now, children and grandchildren, and I only go back to Cyprus for holidays.
Drawings copyright © Lucinda Rogers
Lucinda Rogers: On Gentrification – Drawings from Ridley Rd Market is open at House of Illustration, Tuesday – Sunday from 10am-6pm until 25th March
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Lucinda Rogers at Ridley Rd Market
Furniture Trade Cards Of Old London
I discovered these old furniture trade cards hidden in the secret drawer of a hypothetical cabinet
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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More Trade Cards of Old London
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Even More Trade Cards of Old London
The Great Cat & Dog Massacre
Hilda Kean introduces her new book The Great Cat & Dog Massacre – The Real Story of the Second World War’s Unknown Tragedy, recently 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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Stefan Dickers, Archivist at Bishopsgate Institute showed me these fascinating advertisements he found in an almanac from 1925 that originally came from Sandys Row Synagogue, evoking a lost East End world of Kosher Viands, Lodzer Cakes and Keating’s Powder.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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