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What did Napoleon and Churchill have in common? They both kept busts of Horatio Nelson.
Napoleon kept one on his dressing table, it is said, as a daily reminder of the man whose genius had caused him the most suffering in the early stages of the Napoleonic War. Churchill, meanwhile, kept his Nelson bust on his writing desk, as a reminder of what could be achieved through nous and gumption.
In the spring of 1940, nous and gumption were about the only reliable resources Churchill had at his disposal. Upon being made prime minister, Churchill moved into No.10 Downing Street not wholly expecting to survive the summer. An alarming photograph of Nazi generals surveying Dover with binoculars suggested invasion was imminent.
Having spent the best part of a decade bad-mouthing Adolf Hitler, Churchill knew he was unlikely to be treated kindly when the Wehrmacht armies marched through central London.
Among Churchill’s daily comforts during that haunted, sunny spring of 1940 were scotch & soda, Pol Roger champagne, cigars, and Nelson.
But not Horatio Nelson.
During the early months of the war, Winston had adopted a stray black street cat after seeing it ‘chase a huge dog out of the Admiralty’. Churchill adored the cat’s pluck (in both senses of the word). He knew he had to name it ‘after our great Admiral’.
‘Nelson is the bravest cat I ever knew,’ he told an American war reporter over dinner at Chequers. The journalist also noted how ‘when Mrs Churchill was not looking, the prime minister sneaked pieces of salmon to Nelson’.
When the time came, the feline Nelson moved into No.10 with as much surliness as his new master. Within days, Nelson had forced the existing Downing Street resident cat – known as the ‘Munich Mouser’ – to live next door.
Nelson is said to have had free rein in the house, with some reports suggesting he sidled his way into cabinet meetings. For the new prime minister, Nelson could do no wrong. ‘My cat is at least a hot water bottle to me,’ Churchill scolded the now-legendary Conservative politician, Rab Butler, ‘and you do damn little for the war effort’.
Sadly, the Nelson story appears to end untold. There’s no information on what became of the cat post-war. There are no surviving photographs. The most famous Churchill-cat photo (see below) was taken aboard the Prince of Wales.
Our current prime minister might do well to note that the job has always come with unrelenting criticism. Upon seeing the above picture, the Cats Protection League complained that Winston should have ‘conformed to the etiquette demanded by the occasion’ by ‘offering his hand and then awaiting a sign of approval before taking liberties’.
The Prince of Wales crew were less reproving, and renamed the cat ‘Churchill’ (personally, I would have named it Purr-chill). The cat became the ship’s unofficial lucky mascot. Within the year, their vessel was attacked by Japanese planes and sunk off Malaya.
One suspects Nelson would never have allowed any such naval mishap to happen.
In Britain’s finest hour, he was Churchill’s finest meow-er.
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Nelson The Sailor 