Battersea Dogs Home

Royal Affection

The most famous animal shelter is also the oldest. Battersea Dogs & Cats Home was founded in Victorian times, when people began to think seriously about how we treat animals. Queen Victoria herself treasured her pets. She had many during her long reign, from her childhood companion Dash, a King Charles spaniel, to her favourite little Pomeranian, Turi, in old age.

Dickens’ dutiful dogs

Charles Dickens was already 30 years old when he got his first dog, Timber, but after that he always had dogs, sometimes several together. Once he got frostbite from walking a long way in the snow, and instead of bounding ahead in their usual lively way, his dogs Turk and Linda walked slowly and anxiously beside him as he limped home. He was deeply touched. It is hardly surprising, then, that he did something to help the many stray dogs that roamed London’s streets.

As well as writing novels and Christmas stories, Dickens ran a popular weekly magazine called All the Year Round. One of the articles for the week of 2 August 1862 was entitled ‘Two Dog Shows’, and it compared a fashionable dog show held in Islington, north London, with a not-so-fashionable dogs’ home, recently founded in nearby Holloway. At the ‘Monster Dog Show’ more than a thousand dogs were displayed (including a whole pack of foxhounds, according to The Times of Saturday 2 August), and the writer saw many ‘beautiful and rare animals’, looking comically proud when they won prizes. But at the refuge there were only ‘the Lost Dogs of the Metropolis… poor vagrant homeless curs’, picked up from the roadside where they were dying of starvation. Like other contributions, the piece was anonymous, and, for many years, readers felt sure that Dickens had written it himself. It was great publicity for the dogs’ home.

T’riffic Tealby

In those days, not everyone thought it worthwhile to help strays. They thought the police should take them away and deal with them (you can imagine how)! But Mary Tealby, the woman who had started the Holloway refuge in 1860, felt differently. After seeing a friend tending to an abandoned puppy, she found a nearby stable yard where she could take such dogs, feed them and bring them back to health. Sometimes, they were just lost. Seeing advertisements for the refuge, their owners arrived and were overjoyed to be reunited with their pets. More often, Mary was able to settle her dogs with new and loving owners.

Thanks to continuing publicity, support grew. After all, the RSPCA had been founded as early as 1824, and attitudes to animals were changing. Other important people, like Emily Tennyson, sister of the great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, came forward to help. Before long, there were just too many dogs for the small stable yard. So in 1871 a larger space was found on the south side of London, at Battersea. From now on the home would always be associated with this new place. In 1874, John Hollingshead, the journalist now thought to have written the original article in All the Year Round, commented in a collection of his own stories and essays, ‘This charitable refuge for lost and starving dogs is now a permanent London institution’.

Royal approval

In 1885, the Battersea home began taking in cats, too. Not long afterwards, in December 1885, Queen Victoria gladly agreed to become its patron. According to The Times newspaper of 22 February 1990, in 1896 alone, 42,614 animals were taken in, and by the end of the 20th century as many as 70,000 visitors a year were coming to see the pawed patrons!

The article in All the Year Round had praised the home as an ‘extraordinary monument’ to English people’s affection for dogs. It also became a monument to the particular individuals involved in its history, from kind-hearted, hard-working Mary Tealby, to Dickens and Hollingshead — who never stopped campaigning for it, describing it in 1895 as ‘an old and favourite asylum of mine’. Following Queen Victoria, our own queen, Elizabeth II, became a patron of the home in 1956.

Battersea Dogs & Cats Home is now very different from the original stable yard, with centres in Berkshire and Kent as well as in Battersea. Thanks to public support, the animals have comfortable quarters, and all the attention they need until they can be taken to new families. Not just for Christmas, of course, but for years of companionship and pleasure — which will more than repay the care they require!