Bonzo's War by Clare Campbell Page A

– it would begin the next morning, 1 September, the day the German attack on Poland began. The British Armed Forces were mobilized.
    â€˜Whatever happens don’t let us doggy people get the jitters,’ Mrs Phyllis Dobson, editor of
The Dog World
, commented in the issue published that day. She complained meanwhile about a ghastly say-no-to-this-capitalist-warpamphlet she had just been handed on Westminster Bridge by, so she presumed, the ‘Communists’.
    â€˜What [the possible outbreak of war] will mean to canine affairs is not yet known,’ said
The Kennel Gazette
. While the Kennel Club journal observed: ‘A German Dog Show is planned for October under the patronage of the Army High Command, although by then they may find they have other, more pressing, matters to attend to.’ How prescient they were.
    BBC Television at Alexandra Palace shut down at 12.35 p.m. on Friday, 1 September 1939 (a Disney cartoon, ‘Mickey’s Gala Premier’ was the last item to be screened). All that week the BBC had been making live outside broadcasts featuring Freddie Grisewood – from London Zoo at Regent’s Park. The plans made at the time of Munich were being put in place, sandbags filled and war-veteran keepers, Overseer MacDonald and Keeper Austin, were reacquainted with the workings of the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle for fear of a great animal escape. Once again the heat in the reptile house was turned off. Sluggish snakes awaited their fate.
    Newspapers carried stories of deep shelters for animals being dug, and plans for their wholesale evacuation to the Zoo’s ‘country estate’ at Whipsnade in Bedfordshire, 35 miles north of the capital. ‘Enormous crowds,’ were reported, ‘in spite of bad weather and inclement political conditions.’ A name suggested for a Giraffe born on 28 August was ‘Crisis’.
    Thousands of children, evacuation labels round their necks, were saying goodbye to beloved pets. Blackout was declared across the country; the ARP was mobilized. How troublesome it all was for the judges and exhibitors struggling to get to the Harrogate Dog Show, highlight of the north of England dog lover’s year. It went ahead nevertheless on 2 September.
    There was, however, plenty to see in the gloom, including ‘the Penyghent Alsatians in obedience tests’, and a display by the sheepdog filmstar, ‘Owd Bob’. 4
    As
The Dog World
noted: ‘The Border Terrier bitch winning most Challenge Certificates in the breed just before Harrogate closed the shows was Mr and Mrs Jordan’s champion Susan of Shotover, who luckily managed to get her well-deserved title before Hitler interfered.’
    The whole thing was terribly inconvenient. Mrs Brinton Lee of London W10 had already foresightedly despatched her cat, ‘Smout’, by train to friends in the Cotswolds. On Saturday the 2nd, the Mass-Observation diarist left the capital by car for Oxfordshire with the kitten, ‘Dibs’, in a basket. Arriving at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, she discovered the village to be inhabited by strange, wide-eyed children.
    â€˜Our kitten soon disappeared,’ she wrote, ‘and we thought it had been picked up by the Liverpool evacuee children. We went out looking for it in the pouring rain while asking ourselves why should we be bothered [with] such a small thing as a kitten when war seemed so close.’
    Actually, it would have been all that mattered. Then Dibs appeared, ‘after dark, quite dry and cheerful’. The Merseyside urchins were blameless.
    London was emptying, the children leaving by train, the better-off families, like Mrs Lee, scrambling by car for the country via ‘the principal routes out of town [which] areone-way streets for three days’, as an American eye-witness recorded. ‘Cars poured out pretty steadily all day yesterday and today, packed with people, luggage and domestic pets,’ she wrote on