Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and it's us, but we're joined by a third person today in spirit. Her name is Camberly Kate, and she seems like a pretty boss person.
Yeah, she sure was.
If you found yourself in Camberly, England, which is about thirty five miles southwest of London.
In Surrey, that's right.
If you found yourself there, and let's say the mid nineteen seventies, you might have seen causing a traffic jam in town. Beret wearing, gray haired senior citizen with a handmade push cart with Ward stray dogs painted on the
side of it. And then some dogs in that cart riding along, and maybe another, I don't know, fifteen or twenty dogs, some on leashes, some not on leashes, but very good boys and girls walking along with this, you know, for lack of a better word, crazy dog lady in the best way.
Yeah, crazy dog lady. Your name was Kate Ward. And the reason she was a crazy dog lady, in addition to walking all these dogs around, is that all of these dogs were hers. She wasn't like helping out a friend by taking these dogs on a walk. She had taken in all these dogs because they were all strays, they're about to be put down, they had been abandoned, and she took them in as her own. And what's really cool about this too, is she took really good
care of them. This wasn't like a situation where she was just collecting dogs and you know, whatever happened to him happened to him. Like, she took excellent care of each one of these dogs. And over the course of her lifetime, actually over the course of just something like fifty years, I think she rescued hundreds of dogs and kept them in great health and gave them great lives.
Yeah, it's amazing. It was more like like thirty something years. Oh really, Yeah, that's a lot of dogs. And apparently here's you know, the little secret is apparently there were hundreds of cats. I couldn't find a lot of evidence of that, but I did read a couple of articles where they said, you know that no one ever talks about the cats, but there were just as many cats over the years. So you know, one of England's first,
probably the first en mass dog rescue person. You know, from what I read, people would of course taken a stray here and there and that kind of thing, But there weren't these big dog rescue organizations. People would like either abandon a pet's very sadly or just drop it off at the vet, or drop it off at the front door of the police station. And that's where she sourced them. She got dogs and cats from police stations,
from veterinarians out on the streets, just randomly. And it all started with this greyhound at the very beginning, I think in nineteen forty three, she had bought a cottage. It was her first house. And then she said, went up the road on the doorstep of the vet. Someone had abandoned this little lame, skinny greyhound that was set to be put to sleep. And she was like, no, no, no, that's coming with me.
Yeah the vet I heard is very dramatic. The vet had the axe in the air in the mid swing when she stopped him and said, no, no, I'll take this little greyhound in. That became, from what I can tell, her first dog at the very least of her adult life, and she and the dog. Did you see the little doggie's name? I couldn't find it anywhere.
No, I couldn't find the greyhounds name.
Okay, but this is her first dog. We'll call him Primo. And she and Primo were like inseparable for eight over eight years, like they were just the best of friends. And then sadly, as things happened Primo died, she gave him an extra eight plus years of great life. He had a new best friend. So his passing was sad in and of itself, but it wasn't as sad as if he had been put down for being lame eight years earlier.
Yeah, for sure. And she said, and you know, how did this come from? This great BBC interview from the mid seventies. You can watch on YouTube if you want to hear Kate in her cantankerous ways, kind of spill this story out. But she said that at the time everyone kind of thought like, well, that's it. You know, no one's gonna like this woman isn't going to get another dog.
And she was like, that was just the start.
And at this point, it was five hundred dogs by the time of this interview, and then I think four years later that had grown to six hundred by the end.
Nuts, man, it's so great too. I say, we take a little break and come back and talk a little more about Kimberly Kate and her saga.
Let's do it, okay, Chucks.
At some point back there, you had said that she sourced her dogs from different places, and I couldn't help in my mind think that it sounded like she was running a farm to table operation out of her house. Yeah, that's not at all what she was doing. She was doing the opposite of that. She's not eating dogs. She was taking really good care of them, as we said. And one of the really crazy things about this, or neat things about this, is she could rattle off the
names of all the dogs she'd ever taken care of. Yeah, she's being interviewed at age eighty, and she's not only rattling off their names like Patch and Daddy, she's also talking about where she got each one or how she found each one too. So it's quite obvious that each one of these dogs that she took in and would have dozens at a time, meant something very important to her. Each one.
Yeah for sure.
I mean, just to be able to remember six hundred things at that age is pretty remarkable, Yeah for sure. You know, and you know she couldn't do this without help. It seems like there were townspeople who would donate money for food, although one of them was keen to point out that like, she never took anything for herself even when people tried to help her out. Yeah, she didn't have a whole lot of money, but she did have the help of a local vet, a guy named Jeffrey Craddock,
who did pro bono care for her dogs. And he's interviewed and basically was like, these are some of the healthiest dogs I've come across.
He said.
They seemed to live a little longer than most, an average of about sixteen years, and they're in better shape than the average dog. She feeds them well, he said, but like not too much, he said, none of them are overweight, and they're all very well behaved because you know, as you see on these dog walks, like a lot of them even aren't on leash. And in fact, she battled a leash law that came around at one point that I don't think was necessarily targeting her, but would have affected her.
No, that's the other reason why people remember her. In addition to being mentioned in Sir Arthur's Personal History of twentieth century England called the Lion and the Unicorn. He gave her that nickname in the book. One of the reasons she became kind of a legend in addition to being the first like basically solo animal rescue person, yeah, was that she had quite a personality in.
And of it.
Yeah, Like she was known to be rather vocal and defensive, and anytime somebody threatened her dogs with putting them on a leash or taking them away from her something, she'd let them know in no uncertain terms that they were not going to do that.
Yeah.
I think it's interesting, like she didn't seem personality plus, but kind of in a lovable way because she's like, don't screw with my dogs.
Yeah.
Apparently she would, you know, the cars would honk at her and stuff because she would cause like, you know, a bit of a traffic jam at times when she has all these dogs on these walks and she would ram that cart into the cars and not be too nice sometimes, and was not nice to the city council. Like I said, with that leash law, It's not like she went in there with hat in hand. She even petitioned the royal family at times, right.
Yeah, apparently she would regularly write to them and I don't know that they ever wrote back, but there was an incident where a teacher said publicly that they saw Kate beating one of her dogs with a stick, and she got so incensed about this and was so concerned, I guess about what people thought of how she was taking care of her dogs. She wrote to King George the sixth, Queen Elizabeth's father and said like that did not happen. Unequivocally, that didn't happen, nor would it ever happen.
So she would appeal to them too if the city council wasn't behaving. And I don't know what effect it has, but it's definitely worth mentioning.
Yeah, apparently she even sent Queen Elizabeth when she got married, well before she's queen, I guess in November nineteen forty seven, and it says that one of the dogs sent a wedding gift a dog leash to those corgies that Queen Elizabeth loved. So that's pretty cute, you know. She she lived on a pension. Not a lot is known about
her early life. I think I found that she was sadly both her parents had died when she was a young age and was raised by her aunt and kind of worked as a when she became a teenager, worked as a housemaid at various places and institutions, and apparently it was pretty religious, because she did say that, you know, capital h him, these animals belonged to him, and that I'm just sort of caring for them, you know, the best I can.
I'm just cleaning up their poop exactly. She Yeah, you mentioned that, and I think it's worth pointing out again she was not wealthy. She was living off a pension from the government from what I can tell, Like you said, she'd been a housemaid here there, and I don't know that she was occupied much after that. Once she bought
her house for six hundred pounds. By the way, but there's a this is from a House of Works article, and there is a person named Heather drisk gold Woodford who curates a Facebook page to Kate Camberly Kate and has a lot of information about her, but basically points out that Kate was like the forerunner to the people who are rescuing dogs today, and like you said before, like this just did not happen. People just abandoned dogs.
Maybe you would take as stray and like you said, I think, but she just came out of nowhere and made such an impact and became so memorable that she inspired other people to do the same, not nearly to the degree that she did, Like there's very few animal rescue people with a couple dozen dogs at any given time, but or let alone, not just fostering them, keeping them for the rest of their lives. But she definitely inspired people in that respect for sure.
Yeah, very sadly she passed.
I guess she was about eighty four because this was in nineteen seventy nine. She had a series of strokes in the BBC she was eighty and seventy five. So a nice, full life, saved a lot of dogs and cats. So we salute Kamberly Kate.
Yes, we take our berets off to her. And short stuff is.
That stuff you should know?
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