An alternative title to this post would be: ‘Why are there no cats’ cemeteries?’
Three weekends running we have visited local stately homes that were inhabited in the Edwardian period, and each of them had a Pets Cemetery in its grounds. However, it was clear from the statuary, from one or two still legible tombstone inscriptions, and the photographs in the house itself, that these were dogs’ cemeteries. Where were the cats?
I am not an expert on the history of British domestic animals, but one explanation that instantly occurred to me was that until Louis Wain cats were just regarded as mousers, as farmyard killers who didn’t, for instance, necessarily live inside your house. (The only reason I know about Wain is that the most plausible hypothesis for why George signed himself Peter in his letters to Kittie is that in Late Victorian times Wain’s Peter was the most famous tom’s name you could put with a female cat, a ‘kitty’.) As you will see from my link, Wain felt his hugely popular cat drawings had helped to ‘wipe out the contempt’ in which he considered the cat had been held in Britain.
But the more likely explanation of the lack of Victorian/Edwardian cats’ cemeteries is that the cats didn’t want to be buried in cemeteries!
It is difficult to deny, I think, that dogs want to dedicate their whole existence to their owners — they want to live and die inside their owners’ lives — whereas cats are only interested in manipulating their owners’ deluded belief that they, cats, wish to do the same. If dogs had their way, they would actually be buried with their owners. Dogs must die in the family, preferably at their owners’ feet. Cats, when they know they are near to death, disappear. They just want to go off somewhere and die a cat, not a humanoid.
All of this set me thinking about what it is that dogs give their owners; why the bond with a dog is so individual and strong; why George and Kittie always had a dog.
Bunty, taken at ‘Kay’s Crib’, Petersfield, c.1925
Actually, the last statement needs qualifying. I don’t think George had ever had a dog before he married Kittie, and ‘their’ first dog was Kittie’s and Archie’s. Jones was a thoroughbred Aberdeen terrier that Kittie and Archie had bought in the first year or so of their marriage (1895/96). Perhaps the breed had been recommended by Kittie’s mother, Mary Hamilton, who was Scottish. Anyway, Jones was a very intelligent and playful dog whom (which?) they both loved and who (which?) was a great bond between them.
After Archie Ripley’s death in 1898, as a close friend of Archie’s George was given the task of looking after Jones at Eastcote and exercising him on the golf course when Kittie, living in central London, was away. George evidently took to Jones, and Jones became a great bond between Kittie and him, as one can tell from the fact that in visitors books he always features with their names. Nevertheless, when Jones died in 1909 whilst Kittie was staying with Jones at Acton Reynald, Nina Corbet wrote to her from London:
I do indeed feel for you — I know so well too how he was so part of the past — in a way how he was part of Archie and your Mother — you will know what I mean though I put it clumsily. But you made him so happy — and after all that is a big thing to have done for anyone — and you taught him to love.
Just to confirm: in the last sentence Nina is talking of Jones, not Archie. Nina herself had a leash of Pekes. Jones appears to have been buried in the Pets Cemetery at the Corbets’ family seat, Acton Reynald.
I have a hunch that the Calderons’ next dog, Tommy, started out as George’s dog, so to speak. All we know about him is his name and the fact that, in Percy Lubbock’s words, he was an ‘old, tangle-haired scapegrace’. When the Calderons were living in the Vale of Helath, next to Hampstead Heath, George had taken Jones for a walk there first thing every morning. When Jones died, therefore, perhaps George came across Tommy as a stray on the Heath and took him in? George mentions Tommy in the last sentence he ever wrote Kittie, on 3 June 1915 from Gallipoli: he wished he was ‘back in the bosom of Tommy, Shady, Elizabeth & Co.’.
These words tell us, incidentally, that he and Kittie were not just ‘dog people’, since Shady was their cat Shadrach. They had three cats (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego), but it is not known whether they owned them simultaneously or consecutively; in the early 1920s only Abednego features on a photo.
Kittie’s last dog, the Cairn terrier Bunty, was very special to her indeed. In 1922 Kittie decided she must at all costs leave London, where she and George had always lived. Her life had fallen apart in 1921 when Nina Corbet died suddenly. It is also possible that she was sickened by London literary people’s insensitivity to George’s memory and his sacrifice. There is little doubt that her decision to leave London was a terrible mistake influenced by her state of stress. Very recently a fragment from Christmas 1922 was discovered in which she writes: ‘Bad times have descended on my head with a wump — and I have cast myself out of London into Kay’s Crib/Little Sheet/Petersfield.’ But she had bought herself Bunty to go with her, Bunty became a further bond between Kittie and her general maid, Elizabeth Ellis, and somehow you can tell how ‘humanly’ close Kittie and Bunty were from this photograph at the end of Bunty’s life.
A few years back, I managed to speak on the phone to the person who had just bought Kittie’s last house, White Raven. She asked me whether I thought there could be a dog’s grave in the garden, because, without digging it up, it seemed that that might be indicated. Yes, I answered, it’s probably Bunty’s.
The differences between dogs and cats have been expatiated on for centuries, of course. So I hesitate to generalise… For instance, it’s tempting to feel that with a dog you have a bond, with a cat you have a relationship, and that you most commonly hear of people wanting to share a life beyond the grave with their dog, not their cat. But in a well-attested instance of the opposite, a bachelor Fellow of my old college, at the point of death in hospital, raised his arms, stared into mid-air, and cried: ‘It’s Ginger! It’s Ginger my cat!’ (However, because the college’s regulations forbade cats, Ginger had officially been a dog.)
Despite the fact that I was born on a bed that had a large dog under it, who growled menacingly at the G.P. as he attempted to approach my mother, and despite the fact that I was given a Yorkshire terrier when I was about ten that lived to be twenty-one, I think I am really a cat bloke. I confess to not understanding what it is that dogs give their owners; why their owners need them. I find the bond rather mysterious. Here, to sign off, I offer words from my recent dialogues with scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne:
PM: And what about the rest of creation? I mean the created world on this planet other than humans?
JP: Yes, well, I feel sure that – perhaps in a slightly sentimental way – there will be animals in the world to come. But I don’t think every animal ever will be there, and certainly I hope not every virus is there. I mean the important thing is, I think, that Christianity doesn’t simply see the whole of created order as a ‘backdrop’ for the human drama which could then be rolled up and stored away… And nothing of good is lost in God. If there are worthwhile things in the physical world – and I think there are – then they will be retained in some appropriate way. It’s difficult to think that the fulfilment of creation, the life of the world to come, doesn’t include animal life in it. I have never thought animal life is simply a means of getting to human life. It has value in itself.
PM: Oh, that’s very interesting.
JP: This is a celebrated conundrum, and of course nobody knows the answer. But when people say, ‘I don’t want to go to heaven unless my doggy comes with me’, they’re expressing a real relationship with that animal and what I would always wish to say is that nothing of good is lost, and how it finds its further expression is not by any means foreseeable, so…it’s an open question but not a ridiculous question. You know, you don’t laugh at the person who says to you ‘I can’t go to heaven without doggy’, or you don’t say ‘my goodness, that’s nonsense’, you just take it.
PM: What I think is interesting is that you don’t have a doctrinal answer. If you were a Russian priest, you would say: ‘Animals have unbaptised souls. FACT. So, of course, these souls will survive in the next world.’ But you lay the emphasis on the human nexus…
JP: Well, eschatological hope doesn’t mean everything that exists in this world has to exist beyond it. Again the wait and see, leave it to God argument, though infuriating to critical inquiry, is nevertheless an inevitable result at some stage in this argument.
When I came to post the tweet about this entry I was going to mention the dog is in a “basket” but I wasn’t sure, especially as the caption says “Kay’s Crib”. What is Bunty sitting in, here?
Thank you. My original caption was perhaps an example of ‘biographer’s tunnel vision’, because I’d forgotten that most people would not know that ‘Kay’s Crib’ was the name of Kittie’s house (she renamed it thus in 1922; it had previously been ‘Hurst Cottage’). I would think Bunty is in an egg basket, or some sort of shopping basket, in which perhaps she was carried around when still a young dog. Obviously, she’s also got ‘her’ blanket there and ‘her’ brush. In most of the other shots, she is not posing so perfectly. We don’t know who took the photo.
I enjoyed your piece about cats and dogs, and share your view that the slavish dependence of dogs on their owners is not very appealing. We didn’t have pets at home, but we did once take in a Siamese cat inappropriately called Billy. It terrorised the local cats and it terrorised us. It settled on your lap quite companionably but if you tried to move, it stuck its claws into your shoulders. As cats go, it soon went.
Patrick – after chuckling aloud as I read your blog post, I got into an interesting discussion with savvy teen daughter Xan on Pope Francis’s recent pronouncement (so we both believed) that dogs can go to Heaven. We’d heard that he’d comforted a boy whose dog had died, but how specific was his remark to dogs as opposed to the rest of creation?
We did not get anywhere near the insightful analysis in your discussion with JP, but turned immediately to google.
Here is the boy and dog story: “Pope Francis says dogs can go to heaven” USA Today, 12th December 2014:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/12/12/pope-francis-dogs-can-go-to-heaven/20296955/
Awww. The main body of the article tells us: ‘During a recent public appearance, Francis comforted a boy whose dog had died, noting, “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”’
***BUT** at the top of the page is an addendum:
“Corrections & Clarifications: New information refutes reports Pope Francis said animals go to heaven. Those remarks were once made by Pope Paul VI. Reports also call into question whether John Paul II made remarks that animals have souls.”
Check out “Sorry, Fido. Pope Francis didn’t say pets go to heaven” USA Today, 13th December 2014:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/12/13/pope-francis-animals-heaven-debunked/20352275/
Apparently there was no boy bereaved of dog. This retraction examines the “trail of digital bread crumbs” that led to the “journalistic train wreck”, involving Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the British press, and The New York Times. It concludes that “There should have been warnings signs: Francis has frowned at the modern tendency to favor pets over people, and he has criticized the vast amounts of money spent by wealthy societies on animals even as children go hungry.”
Back on Patrick’s “why are there no cats’ cemeteries” theme, it was interesting to read “It’s a dog’s afterlife: Pope Francis hints that animals go to heaven” The Guardian, 27th November 2014:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/27/pope-francis-hints-animals-heaven
I have to say this article is blameless regarding the build-up of the boy and dog story, as it doesn’t mention it. It does state that Corriere della Sera, in their write-up of the pope’s public audience, is “in no doubt about [the pope’s] meaning”, quoting “the hope of salvation and eschatological beatitude to animals and the whole of creation”. But it says that “Others were not convinced”. It concludes: “it is unclear whether it will decide for once and all whether those who get to meet St Peter can expect to find a dog nearby lifting its leg on the pearly gates” thereby choosing to have both doggy title and conclusion.
Not too doggy is the official Catholic voice: “Pope Francis ‘did not say pets go to heaven” Catholic Herald, 15-Dec-2014:
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/12/15/pope-francis-did-not-say-pets-go-to-heaven/
Vatican commentators say, “There is no evidence that Francis repeated the words [of Pope Paul VI] during his public audience on November 26, as has been widely reported, nor was there was a boy mourning his dead dog.”
Xan was surprised that the dog and boy story is untrue. Of course, it lives on anyway. I can’t post a pic in this comment, but check out the featured image of blog entry “A heaven for all – Pope Francis has finally laid to rest the debate over whether or not animals can go to heaven” U.S.Catholic, 11-Feb-2016 ( http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201602/heaven-all-30553 ) to really feel the dogginess of the pets in Heaven idea.
Here’s a quote from the blog article: “This is a hugely important step for Fido and for those who love him. Thanks for Pope Francis and his love for animals (which is reflected in the name he chose to bear as pope) I can finally confidently say, with a comforted smile one my face, ‘all dogs go to heaven.’” And there is a lot of agreement in the many comments (as well as some regrettable hate for fellow humans, that Pope Francis would surely lament).
Well, Patrick has excellently summed up the difference in dogs and cats from ownership perspective : “It is difficult to deny, I think, that dogs want to dedicate their whole existence to their owners — they want to live and die inside their owners’ lives — whereas cats are only interested in manipulating their owners’ deluded belief that they, cats, wish to do the same.” So, perhaps not surprising that dogs win a cemetery spot more often than cats.
I’ll admit that I’m in a loyal and caring relationship with a dog myself. That doesn’t mean I enjoy sitting in a café with my canine family member while she barks enthusiastically at every other person and dog in the café. I quite see how Patrick has managed to keep a sense of perspective on dog-love, as presumably family activities were compromised quite a bit by a large dog who was even allowed to attend his birth. (Yes, that was the laugh-out-loud bit of the blog! Along with Ginger the Cat/Dog!)
Jenny, your unpicking of the myth of the Pope, the Boy and the Dog is both salutary and exemplary. But then – you go and believe unquestioningly in the tale of Ginger the Cat!
Well-attested is only a synonym for oft-told. Who was this bachelor don? When did he die? Are his last words footnoted in a biography? Has Patrick spoken with an eye-witness? Or did one of his Ginger-hating colleagues say, over coffee and newspapers perhaps, ‘Old so-and-so loved that cat so much, I bet he’s going to see it on his death bed… ’. And so it begins.
Such stories – pithy – witty – bitchy – are the very stuff of Oxbridge common rooms. More than a decade after his death a book was published to contain all the amusing anecdotes about and sayings of one of George’s Trinity tutors and one-time-at-least-friend, Herbert Blakiston. George would doubtless have found it hilarious.
My favourite common room story relates to that familiar trope, the world-weary college head. One morning the butler comes in and says, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, Master, but one of the fellows has died.’ To which the Master replies, ‘Don’t tell me! Let me guess – ”
Dear Jenny,
Wonderful to have you back onboard ‘Calderonia’, as it were! Thank you for such a long, deeply researched, and fascinating Comment! I am rather tempted, after this Comment-essay of yours, to ask you if I can interest you in doing a guest post…
It is, as Clare says, deeply instructive to follow the twists and turns of this dog-canard, as it were. (By the way, a teen who can have such a savvy discussion of this subject should surely consider reading Theology at university? I am told it’s quite a popular subject these days, even with students who do not actually BELIEVE it all, because it’s such a mental workout.)
The press story does, I think, bear out John Polkinghorne’s remark that this is a ‘conundrum’ — a conundrum even for Popes, whereas the Orthodox, I believe, have it doctrinally well sussed. When I told a clerical-theological friend of mine the other day what I believed to be the Orthodox position, he said ‘Well, yes, that’s the Catholic position, too, more or less…more or less..’ Now I think that ‘more or less’ knowingly concealed a Papal doubt!
However, a Catholic friend has emailed me with what surely is the final theological word on the subject. An old lady, Mrs Mortley, aware of her imminent demise, consulted her vicar about the possibility of Fido going with her to heaven, but received the standard Anglican answer that animals don’t have souls, so there are no dogs in heaven. She then consulted an Anglican bishop, with the same outcome. In despair she found a Jesuit priest whose response was that if her perfect happiness required the presence of Fido, then the Lord would surely find a way to accommodate that.
This, of course, is a well attested story as so admirably defined by Clare in her response to your Comment.
Bless!
Patrick
Give us today our daily dog meat.
I’m afraid this comment isn’t about dogs and cats, or even about George and Kittie; it is a question for John Polkinghorne. Your juxtaposition of theology and pet dogs throws up some unsettling parallels between those two reciprocally-loving relationships – God and Human – and Human and Dog.
• Faithful adoration on one side; all-powerful benevolence on the other.
• Simple rules. The Ten Commandments; Sit! Beg! Heel!
• Fawning; prayer.
The Bible teaches that humans are made ‘in the image’ of God. If John Polkinghorne could tell us why God needs humans, might that go some way to answer your question, why do dog owners need dogs?
Dear Clare,
I love it! If you started a blog of your own — say, ‘Archivaria’ — I am certain it would be more entertaining than this one!
Your inversion reminds me of turning up to my normally rather stern Russian supervisor one morning in 1967 to find him roaring with laughter. He couldn’t wait to tell me why. There was a Student Christian Movement campaign on at the time under the slogan ‘My God is Real’ and my supervisor had just come down King’s Parade, where in the high-up window of a student room visible to all was a large SCM poster with the first and last letters of ‘God’ neatly cut out from the slogan and transposed…
I will certainly ask John Polkinghorne your question when I next have an opportunity. However, I must warn you that he is quite capable of saying ‘I don’t think that is a relevant question, Patrick’, or ‘I think that’s far too abstract a question for me to be able to answer’. Of course, I could suggest an answer myself, but wouldn’t that presuppose God exists?
Thank you very much for both scintillating Comments,
Yours aye
Patrick
Ah, I do like a ‘well-attested story’! Such stories need no investigation. It is a matter of personal choice as to which of them can become your personal baggage, shoring up your value system, or maybe illustrating your thoughts and feelings to others.
I guess it’s important to keep dates & exact names & locations out of the ‘well attested story’. Otherwise, you end up with FAKE NEWS! …which is how my daughters immediately labelled the Pope & Dog & Boy story, once debunked.
I doubt if any of my daughters will study Theology but it is good that they have ample levels of doubt about the petabytes of data swirling around them and their phones.
Ginger the Cat remains a pure story, of course. It perfectly illustrates lifelong loyalty, and the tolerance of friends to those who are different S:)
This is very interesting, Jenny. I agree, it’s so encouraging that the young have ‘ample levels of doubt’ about the Webo-sphere. Tempered in this area myself by Soviet media lies and disinformation, I confess my immediate reaction to the Pope-and-doggies story was ‘fake news!’. But does the story still tantalise by its suggestion that two very recent Popes could hold differing ‘truths’ about something that you would have thought had been decided doctrinally years ago? It is a bit worrying if one’s instant reaction to such a doctrinal difference is ‘it must be fake news’… Is that actually what the whole story was trying to provoke — doubt about papal infallibility?! ‘I think we should be told.’ Many many thanks. Patrick
Patrick: I hope you and your readers will forgive me for coming in rather late with a further comment on your cats and dogs (it has been raining comment, one might say, in a curious reversal of the metaphor).
My first thought, in response to your question as to why there are no cats’ cemeteries, was that of course there are–in Egypt, where the cat was revered as a symbol (even a goddess) of fruitfulness and maternity. Not only were cats therefore ritually mummified, and buried in special cemeteries (Herodotus records the existence of one such), but the Egyptians took things to a logical conclusion and mummified mice as well to accompany them on their journey into the afterlife. (I do not venture into the theological implications of all this).
Less of a dog person, I do however keep a special place for the dog Bendico from Lampedusa’s The Leopard. (The author insisted that ‘the dog Bendico is a very important character and is almost the key to the novel.’) Not only is the dog described with great affection and attention throughout the book–his energy, intelligence, and fidelity–but after the Prince’s death, his (deceased) dog is not exactly mummified but made into a rug by one of his sisters; and the novel is only allowed to reach its bleak and moving conclusion when, finally, this moth-eaten rug is thrown out of the window, and disintegrates in the air. Plenty of work for theologians as well as taxidermists here.
In the spirit of Greek theatre, where exhausting tragedy was followed by inspiriting farce, I cannot resist descending from an account of this most literary canine to the story of a demotic dog once owned by our family, in pre-Pinteresque Sidcup. My father ran a small private school in our large house, for close on thirty years, the accumulated anecdotes of which I have intended for years to put together (you better than most, Patrick, understand the delays and diversions). He was one has to say an old-fashioned disciplinarian; but the one living thing which escaped his discipline altogether was the dog–aptly named Nero–which, though amiable enough to those who respected his anarchic spirit, knew neither master nor limitation. On one of his explorations, he discovered Sidcup station, and thereafter took (so alarmed porters told us) to chasing trains; coming back on one occasion–like a Roman general showing his scars–with his coat singed by the live rail. But his career ended with less dignity than Bendico’s. One of our neighbours complained (justly) about his invasion of a chicken-run, and when the police arrived to check on this allegation the honest dog vomited feathers all over the mat. I cannot construct much of an afterlife here…
Having begun with an apology, I should end with another, hoping that this anecdote has not caused distress to any of your readers.
Thank you very much, Damian, for correcting the Christocentrism of my post. Yes, of course, the Egyptians had their cat-acombs! Although I see from the Web that eight million mummified dogs have also been found in Egyptian catacombs. But these were around the temple of the dog-headed God of death, Anubis. What I don’t know, of course, is whether the ‘value’ was projected onto the cats and dogs from their respective cat-goddess and dog-headed god, or the other way round. My impression from the subtlety of Egyptian cat-sculpture, though, is that the Egyptians were cat-people — they really understood the Cat. Whereas in Greek and Roman literature all I can think of is dogs…
I find the interplay between your father’s pedagogical disciplinarianism (the mind boggles Dotheboyswards!) and his failure with Nero completely hilarious. This relationship and the Life of Nero are surely begging to be immortalised in a 3000-word essay for, say, London Magazine?