MEET SOME FAMOUS CATS

Evening Star, Issue 23679, 12 September 1940, Page 16

MEET SOME FAMOUS CATS

In London a number of cats have official status. In the Budget every year special provision is made for the No. 10 ” cat, who watches with superb disdain the ever-changing procession of diplomats, generals, and Prime Ministers come and go at Downing Street. There used to be a famous cat at the Guildhall, and another' at Bow Street Police Court. “ Nigger,” the friend of magistrates and prisoners alike, is still mourned. Run over in Long Acre, and nearly dead, “ Nigger ” dragged himself to the police court and just reached his friend, P.C. Dyer, before he died. A cat, “ Desiree,” was recently left £SOO in the will of Miss Janet Bell, of Edinburgh. In the last sad years of her life in a nursing home, Miss Bell, who was a patient there, was cheered by tlie quiet companionship of this cat, “ to whom,” she said in her will. “ I have every cause to feel the greatest gratitude and affection.” _ Ten people owed their lives to a London kitten. A fire broke out some

time ago in their house in Fernlea road, Balham—and started in the dining room on the ground floor. At 3 o’clock in the morning Mrs Doris Taylor, a guest in the house, was awakened by the kitten scratching on the bedroom door. The kitten could have easily escaped from the ground floor. Of all mothers in the animal kingdom the eat is one of the most intelligent and dauntless. Nothing, it seems, will discourage it. ON A LOAD OF HAY. There was an Irish cat whose exploit was discovered by accident by an Irish farmer. He was on his way to Belfast when he heard a loud mewing, and saw a cat and three kittens right on the top of his cartload of hay. He put them down in a hedge, intending to pick them up on his return journey. Wb en he passed that way again they had disappeared. Yet a month later, working in the fields, he saw the cat carrying her kittens home in her mouth —one at a time —stopping every 100 yards to put the kitten down and return for another. Within a month, it was estimated, that cat, in tackling r. 15-milc journey, had travelled 75 miles.

BRIGHTON MYSTERY. A strange caso is related by Mr George Palmer, keeper of a pets* store in Campden town. A woman bought a cat from him, and lived with it in’her house in Regent’s Park. She decided to move to a flat in Brighton, a flat she had never been to before. In + he course of moving her cat got lost, yet by some amazing way turned up at tlie Brighton flatl How did it know where to go? Mr Beverley Nichols, the writer, had a black Persian cat that walked seven miles to rejoin its old dog companion. He gave it to a friend at Saffron Waldron, and there the cat grew fond of the house dog. When the friend moved home the cat would have none of it, but journeyed back until it arrived, dishevelled, dusty, but very happy, at its old home. Nobody recognised it, but Pan, the faithful house dog. Their reunion was so touching that nobody parted them again.