RATS LIKE BEER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 258, 2 June 1944, Page 20

RATS LIKE BEER

-But Now. They Can’t Get Drunk From a BBC Talk: by London's Official Rat-catcher

ILLIAM DALTON, like his ancestors before him, is» official tat-catcher of the City of London. F my wife was listening to me, she'd say: "Eh, hop it, I’ve ‘heard enough about rats. Get out of the way," she’d say, "You're holding up the washing." The women of our family, the Daltons of the City of London, are sick and tired of the, word rat, sick and tired of it. Last summer, my wife and I had a holiday in Devon, and before we went she said, "Bill," she ‘said, "I hope you don’t talk about rats while we’re away." I didn’t, but it was hard, very hard. You see, he’s an artist, really, the ratcatcher is, and his mind’s always on his work, We start th» job in our family just about as soon as we can walk. There’s three of us in this generation-three brothers-all rat-catchers. When we were kids, we used to go out with dad on Friday nights, after school. Those

were the best nights of the weeks for us, and in that way, we’d done all. the ground work long before we were 10 years of age. When we were 14, we were put into a building at night alone to put what we knew ito practice. That was the way our father, our grandfather and his father before him had been trained, and, it was what we would do with our own sons. : Rats have been in the news lately because they do a terrible lot of damage to stuff we can’t afford to lose in wartime. You will understand that I’m playing my part in keeping them down, but here’s something I'd like you td know. And here’s one thing-lI’ve always thought it a bad description of an unpleasant human being to call him a rat. Believe me, it’s an expression you'll never hear a rat-catcher use. The rat’s a gallant fellow, and if you ask me, the tat has a far larger amount of intellect than plenty of people you see aboutfar larger and more family feeling, too. You sometimes hear of babies left on doorsteps. Now that’s a thing a rat would never do. The mother rat will

defend her young against any ferret you like to put down. And there’s no one so good at making a nice home as the lady rat. I was called into a big city hospital once. The price tickets were disappearing from the carcasses of meat in the larder. Well, it was a lady rat all right: We found her in the space under the dynamo which works the refrigerator. There she was with seven little nippers -all tucked into a beautiful nest made of meat tickets and bits of string-over 200 tickets altogether. But what interested me was, that rat had enough intellect when she got into that great clean larder and found she was "expecting," to look around and say: "Well, I’m (continued on next page)

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blowed-string for a nest, and some tickets, and some very nice tickets, too, well-here goes." The rat is an object lesson — that’s what it is-and if I was the Transport Minister, I'd put the rat up as an example of how to behave. He doesn’t so easily throw his liberty away. You have to tell one idiot to mind the road, look right and look left and all that rubbish. I say this-if you haven’t enough intellect to look as you step off the road, well, there’s a place in the mortuary for you. But the’ rat has nobody to direct him or to give him advice, that’s what makes him so audaciously clever. Sixty-six Senses We consider we've five senses, don’t we? and possibly six. Well, in my opinion, a rat has 66. And I’m speaking as one who has been connected with rats from the cradle upwards. My ancestors have been rat-catchers in the €ity of London for more than 200 years. And I believe they were game-keepers in the same district before there were buildings on it. A rat has 66 senses, but we can’t determine them. You have to be told that a certain piece of electricity plant is dangerous-it’s put up in red letters. A rat knows it’s dangerous-you won't find him )going near it. In my opinion, it’s his whiskers; what do you think Nature put them there forso that he could twirl them? Another thing, a rat will hide behind his own shadow, he’ll get himself in such a position that he camouflages himself, and its only the glint of his eye that discloses him. If a rat’s running up a pipe, he’ll always get on the side nearest the wall. See the idea? If you strike him, you strike the pipe first. Oh, I could write a volume on the things a rat will and won’t do. He knows all about closing time-same as you and me. "Time, gentlemen, please!" He’s listening, you know. Then silence, beautiful silencewhat he’s been waiting for. And, by the way, rats love beer. Before the last war they were known to get drunk. But not now; beer was beer then! No one has ever seen a rat drunk in this war. But all the same, rats don’t drink beer if there’s any water going. It’s the eatables that get the rat. He’s a wonderful master of anything eatable. Even the smell of something goes to his head. Rats did £400 worth of damage in Petticoat Lane the other night. When the manager showed me the coats, I said to him: "Can you imagine why every third coat has been gnawed?" He said, "No, I. can’t." I said, "If your young lady who counted these coats will teil you honestly she’d say she’d been eating a sandwich with meat or fish on it, and the smell of that food on her fingers-three-three-three, was where she’d touched those coats when she’d counted. No Paraphernalia Now, ,just.a word about the method we use-it’s secret, but I'll tell you this. There’s none of the paraphernalia you might associate with rat-catching. No ferrets, or dogs, or anything like that. We catch enormous quantities of rats with very little material. Quickness, silence and sharp hearing are the things we rely on most. I could handle a rat just as easily as another man would handle a glass of beer. When I come into a building on the frail of a particular rat, I know beforehand I’m going to catch him with the right or left hand. That’s because I’ve worked out the whole job beforehand. ef In the City of London it’s nearly all big business premises we have to do,

and the work’s all done at night. We work singly very often, but sometimes if it’s a very big building, we work in pairs. We wear very soft shoes; and you can take it from me a shadow slipping along a corridor or round a showcase wouldn’t be quieter than the rat-catcher. As quiet as a grave we are. And here’s something very important: if I was to lose my hearing, I’d be useless as a rat-catcher. We Listen for Noises There are all sorts of noises in the building at night, all sorts of creakings and crackings and sighings and rustlings. But to the rat-catcher’s ear there’s no other noise like the noise made by a_ rat. It’s completely different from the noise made by a mouse-louder, bolder, more devil-may-care. Supposing there’s an apple core at the bottom of a wastepaper basket; Mr. Rat will go through the paper till he gets at it with a loud, manly sound. Oh, he’s not nervous like a mouse. He’s a different character altogether. Sometimes a rat meets his tailor, and then there’s a fight. My word, two tails and eight legs-you can just imagine it! People often ask me "Is it true about rats leaving a sinking ship?" Well, of course it’s true. He knows there’s some-_ thing wrong because he’s the first bloke to get his feet wet. He’s not strutting about the deck in canvas shoes-not (continued on next page)

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he. He says: "Here, come on, old girl, out of this." Of course he’s the first to leave. Another thing people say is: "Aren’t you afraid of the rats attacking you?" No, there’s no danger of that. The fat’s a gallant fighter. But if he isn’t interfered with or actually touched, he’ll not attack under any conditions whatever. If you want to know my opinion of those stories of babies being eaten by rats in their cradles-it’s all hooey. It’s Fleet Street wanting to cause a sensa-tion-that’s all it is. If anyone tells us tat-catchers a thing like that we have a jolly good laugh. If the King of England told me I just wouldn’t believe it. And don’t you go on thinking that a ratcatcher wouldn’t have much chance of speaking to the King of England: My brother Tom and I worked on the floor above the King and Queen when they were Duke and Duchess of York, and Princess Elizabeth sent a special message saying: "Please tell the rat-catcher not to touch my rabbits." Essential War Job Rat-catching is an essential war job. Rat-catchers are reserved from military service at 25. You can understand why that is. If rats get into a factory canteen, production is held up at once. In one place the manager wired us: "Come quickly. Every time a rat appears, 60 girls leave their machines." And, mind you, the fear of rats isn’t confined to the female section. I remember one time a delayed-action bomb had been dropped in the city and a party of men came to remove it. They dug a pit round. the bomb, but it got dark, and they had to leave it. Next morning when the chap in charge thought about going down, there was a rat in the pit. "Here," he said, "I’m not going down there with that rat." The bomb, which Was a very large one, might have gone off’ at any moment. That didn’t worry him, it was the rat that got on his nerves. ; We did plenty of rat-catching in the city during the blitz. And working as we do at night, we had all the bad times. The worst of it was that every time a bomb dropped anywhere near us, off went all our traps, sometimes 60 or 70 at a time. Then we had to re-set the lot again. You can imagine what we thougnt of old Hitler and his mob then! As for the~rats, they soon got used to the gunfire and the bombs. Several times we lost everything-traps, rats and all the gear. And many’s the time we were working by the light of flames from a neighbouring building, but we never lost a rat-catcher. One of the essential war jobs we do is on the aerodromes. I remember one in particular we did, where the rats got inside the bombers. There was risk of them gnawing the communicating cables, and the planes had to be examined every morning to make sure the rats hadn’t done any damage during the night. We were seven nights there, and we caught a thousand-odd rats. It was so intensely cold, I remember, that the rats in our cages were frozen. I used to knock off about four in the morning and walk across the landing ground covered with snow like a snowman, carrying my cages of rats all frozen stiff in different shapes. And when I looked up, there was the Dawn Patrol going out, dim up there in the half light. There are proud moments in every profession, and that was one of them for me.