Working people protecting cats in the nineteenth century
Current alley off Lincolns’ Inn Fields where locals apprehended a cat-skinner
I’ve been researching much archival material on animals, including cats, in the 1800s, particularly in London. After a good zoom conference I became far more interested in the specific streets in which both working class people lived, but were also often the nearby places where cat skinners undertook nightly slaughter. As a Londoner I became even more engaged with the C19th street names since I knew those places still existed nearly 200 years on. I’d often walked near them but clearly hadn’t thought about those particular pasts.
Gravel Lane in Southwark where hundreds of corpses were held by a cat-skinner , who was then imprisoned. Now called Great Sutton St but the Gravel Lane is still noted in the sign …
Apart from the streets I have found many references to not only those who attempted to rescue cats and hold and obstruct skinners but also gave witness statements in courts. Court statements were not primarily undertaken by charity officers, employed for example by the RSPCA ,but by working class people, usually undertaking ordinary jobs, such as butcher’s porter, a wood chopper and a fringe weaver or they were teenagers watching local cats – and their attackers.People often found not just the cat corpses with their skins removed but helped demonstrate and organise against the skinners. Yet such accounts of working class people’s action seem to have rarely appeared in Marxist and socialist or social histories of earlier times. For example, while A.L. Morton’s work such as A People’s History of England , was well known explaining that “it was in London… that the new movement had its centre and main support” the nature of various action in local streets and feline – human relationships seemed not to have been recognised.Yet such past political action surely still needs to be recorded now…
My short article Voices for the Voiceless, has recently appeared not in an academic journal but in a popular magazine The Cat, now organized by the Cats Protection League. Hope you, like me, are a member and able to read it !
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