Winston Churchill was a great animal lover. As he once said: “Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs look on us as equals”. But it was his cats that he held dearest of all.
Visitors would find him sitting up in bed in a dressing gown emblazoned with dragons, top-secret papers strewn over the bedclothes and a favourite cat “Nelson,” or “Munich Mouser” — curled up at his feet. It is rumoured that he refused to start dinner until a favourite cat had taken it’s place at the table!
He was so fond of his cats, Jock and Margate, that when one of them fell asleep while sitting on the dressing gown he was wearing, he chose to cut off that part of the dressing gown rather than disturb it’s slumber!
Churchill’s private secretary Sir John Colville’s remarks exemplify the great man’s behaviour. The diary entry is from the morning of July 27, 1940, as the Battle of Britain was approaching its height: I went into the PM’s bedroom at around 10. He was lying in bed in a red dressing gown, smoking a cigar and dictating to Mrs Hill, who sat at his feet with the typewriter. The PM’s black cat Nelson, which he brought from the Admiralty and which has quite usurped the position of No.10′s official black cat, was stretched out across the bedcovers, and from time to time Winston would look at it lovingly and murmur: “Cat, darling”.
