100 Cats Who Changed Civilization (17 page)

Though thousands were killed and wounded, the nightly attacks failed to break the spirit of the people. Many, in the face of great danger, displayed unforgettable courage. And the heroism wasn’t just confined to humans. One of the most famous stories concerns a church cat named Faith. In 1936, the little tabby found her way to St Augustine’s and St Faith’s Church in London. She took up residence in the rectory.

Faith attended all services in which the rector, Father Henry Ross (who had originally taken her in), took part. If her benefactor wasn’t speaking, she sat in the front pew. If Ross was preaching, she sat in the pulpit at his feet.

In August 1940, Faith gave birth to a single male kitten, which the church choir celebrated the next Sunday by singing
All Things Bright and Beautiful
. The black and white puff ball was named Panda.

But on September 6 of that year, something strange happened. Faith, for no discernable reason, led Ross to the church basement and begged him to open the door. He complied, and later saw the mother cat carry Panda from his comfortable upstairs basket down to the dusty, dark sanctum. Three times Ross took the kitten back upstairs, and three times Faith carried him back down. Finally the pastor admitted defeat, took the kitten’s basket to the basement, and tried to make the two as comfortable as possible.

Within days, however, Faith’s odd behavior would seem more like clairvoyance.

On September 9, while Ross was away, his church took a direct hit from a bomb. He arrived to find emergency crews scrambling around the still-burning structure. Ross told them that to his knowledge the only creatures inside were Faith and Panda. The fireman he spoke to said there was no chance they could have survived.

But Ross couldn’t accept that. Risking his life, he entered the building’s sagging, flaming remains and called out for Faith. He heard a faint answering meow and dug through the rubble until he found the two felines buried under a pile of singed sheet music. Faith, grimy but uninjured, was sitting with her kitten beneath her, in the same place she’d scouted out days earlier. Ross quickly carried both cats to safety, getting clear just as the roof collapsed.

The story of the church cat’s selfless devotion to her kitten soon spread across the United Kingdom. On October 12, 1945, before a packed house at the rebuilt St Augustine’s and while nestled in the arms of the Archbishop of Canterbury, she received a special medal for her courage.

Panda, once grown, became the mascot of a retirement home. And Faith remained at the church until her death on September 28, 1948. Her passing was worldwide news, as was her burial near the churchyard gate. The feline described as “the bravest cat in the world” can spend eternity at the place she loved.

MRS. CHIPPY

THE CAT WHO EXPLORED
THE ANTARCTIC

Few adventure stories are as gripping as that of the Imperial Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1914–1916, led by famed explorer Ernest Shackleton. The expedition’s original plan was to take the ship
Endurance
to the coast of Antarctica, then dispatch a team to sled from one end of the continent to the other. But a series of disasters turned the voyage of discovery into a battle for survival. In the end, it would claim the life of a much-loved crewmember—the
Endurance
’s cat, Mrs. Chippy.

The feline came aboard with the ship’s carpenter, Henry McNeish. The crew called the cat Mrs. Chippy
(chippy
being slang for
carpenter)
, and kept the
Mrs
. even after they realized the cat was a male. But whatever his sex, the feline earned his keep by killing the mice and rats that threatened the expedition’s food stores.

When he wasn’t hunting vermin or chumming around with the crew, Mrs. Chippy seemed intent on finding new ways to risk his life. The ship’s deck was lined with sled dog kennels, which the cat loved to walk nonchalantly across. And one night, as the ship traversed the icy South Atlantic, the feline jumped out a porthole and into the inky sea. By some miracle he was spotted, and the ship
turned in time to pick him up. He spent roughly ten minutes bobbing in the water—more than enough to kill an average human.

But his luck didn’t hold. In January 1915, the
Endurance
got stuck in the ice far from the Antarctic coast. Months passed, but the grip of the elements never slackened. Finally, stores began to run low, and the weight of the floes started crushing the ship’s hull, forcing the crew to live in tents out on the ice sheet. Shackleton decided to risk everything by abandoning ship and taking the entire crew, along with whatever gear and provisions they could carry or drag, 350 miles by open boat and sled to the nearest land. Everyone would go. Everyone except Mrs. Chippy. Shackleton decided that on such a desperate mission there was no place for a cat.

On the appointed day, the entire crew filed by to gaze their last upon the luckless feline, who had shared all their travails without complaint. After everyone said their goodbyes, the ship’s steward served him his favorite meal—a bowl of sardines. And then, according to most accounts, Mrs. Chippy was dispatched, as humanely as possible, to that great scratching post in the sky. The
Endurance
crew abandoned ship shortly thereafter. They spent the next few months traversing the bitterly cold ocean in open boats and trudging across windswept tundra. But in the end, the entire (human) crew made it back to civilization alive.

Shackleton’s leadership made him a hero. But he was no hero to Mrs. Chippy’s owner, Henry McNeish. Apparently the ship’s carpenter bore a grudge against his commanding officer for the rest of his life. After the expedition, he settled in New Zealand, where he lived until his death in 1930. Any mention of the polar expedition would inevitably bring up a bitter complaint about how Shackleton killed his cat.

The old carpenter did receive some solace, and come company, in the afterlife. In 2004 an addition was made to his Wellington grave. The slab that marks his final resting place was adorned with a life-sized bronze sculpture of his beloved companion, Mrs. Chippy.

FELIX

THE FIRST CAT IN SPACE

At the dawn of the space race, numerous nonhuman species, from chimps to dogs, were bundled aboard experimental rockets and fired into orbit. But while many remember Laika the dog and Ham the chimp, few now recall the otherworldly exploits of Felix, the first feline in space.

The former Paris street cat (there’s some controversy as to whether it was a male or female) was scrupulously trained for his trip. On October 18, 1963, he was strapped into a Veronique AG1 sounding rocket at a French base in Algeria and blasted into the great beyond. Felix didn’t go into orbit, but he did fly more than 130 miles into space. Then the capsule reentered the atmosphere, deployed a parachute, and returned to terra firma. No one is sure what happened to Felix afterward, but one thing is certain: He fared better than the second cat in space, whose rocket
broke up in flight on October 24 of the same year.

Felix’s journey is a bright spot in the history of catkind—tarnished only by the fact that the French put the first
rat
into space two years earlier.

THE CLIMBING
KITTEN

THE CAT WHO CONQUERED
THE MATTERHORN

Few mountains boast as fearsome a reputation as the Matterhorn. Straddling the Swiss/Italian border, its forbidding slopes defied mountaineers until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was finally scaled. Yet even today, the 14,693-foot peak still claims several unwary climbers each year. Clearly, this challenge is not for the young and inexperienced.

Unless you happen to be a cat.

The first feline ascent of this famous Alpine peak was accomplished in August 1950 during an expedition led by Edmund Biner. While guiding his group up the Matterhorn, he paused at 12,556 feet to get his bearings. It was then that the adventurers realized they were being followed—by a kitten. A four-month-old kitten belonging to one Josephine Aufdenblatten of Geneva.

History doesn’t explain why the kitten elected to follow the men—only that it eventually pursued them all the way to the summit. Figuring the beleaguered creature had used up more than a couple of its nine lives, one of the climbers carried it back down to sea level in his rucksack.

SCARLETT

THE CAT WHO BECAME
AN ACTION HERO

Overnight, a scrawny New York City feline went from anonymous stray to international hero. The transformation happened, literally, in a flash.

A flash of fire, that is. The saga began in March 1996, when a blaze consumed an East New York garage. As the battle against the conflagration wound down, firefighters noticed three four-week-old kittens huddled near the building’s front door, crying in fear. Across the street sat two more. A badly burned calico female paced nervously between the two groups.

It didn’t take long for firefighter David Giannelli to figure out what had happened. Giannelli, whose soft spot for pets earned him the nickname “the animal guy” in East New York’s Ladder Company 75, guessed that during the fire, the mother cat had dashed repeatedly into the blaze to rescue her kittens. Now she was in the process, in spite of her severe injuries, of moving them to a new hiding place.