Cats, socialism & Collective Organisation
Michael Rosen (10th April 2022) had a lovely piece in the Sunday Times magazine about his lifelong relationship with cats. I have rarely in my 66 years been without a feline companion myself. Rosen swerves the issue of the politics of cats, though most of those I’ve known have been Anarcho-Syndicalists.
However cats can sometimes be socialists in the sense that they often plan to share a catch- mice or a bird-with their people. At other times they can be iconoclastic. Even so there have been strong links between the left and cats.
The IWW had a wild cat* as their symbol and the Post Office HQ at St Martin’s Le Grand in central London employed cats to catch mice with a carefully negotiated feeding to mice caught agreement.
Engels claimed his cat Tidlums was the terror of Regents Park Rd
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn caused a mild media ripple when he revealed to the Independent that his black and white cat does not have a name but is addressed simply as El Gato. More recently further ripples were caused when the Daily Mail reported that he named a cat he had in the 1970s Harold Wilson
There is a picture of the late British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm with his cat. Perhaps there is something about Marxist historians and cats as E P Thompson also had one:
Such pictures appear to suggest a missing link between cats and socialism
If you were looking for a conspiracy, while Lenin was a cat lover there is no record that it had a name either (no, it was not Joe). However that is most probably due to a failure in cat history rather than anything else.
Not all politicians have been cat lovers. There is no record, for example, of a cat in Tony Benn’s Diaries except an entry where he notes he was given a ‘black woolly’ cat to hold for a photo shot.
Harold Wilson by contrast brought his own cat into Downing St when he became Prime Minister, while Churchill patriotically named his Nelson.
The New Labour period, perhaps inevitably, was beset by cat controversy. It was thought Cherie Blair didn’t like cats much and in November 1997 Alistair Campbell announced that the veteran Downing St cat Humphrey had gone to a quiet suburban location. Journalists inquired whether this was code for ‘cemetery’ and photos had to be produced of Humphrey happily in retirement..
We should however be cautious about assuming an automatic link between cats and any particular trend on the left, Rosa Luxemburg described what happened when her cat Mimi met Lenin:
“She also flirted with him, rolled on her back and behaved enticingly toward him,” Luxemburg writes. “But when he tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and snarled like a tiger.”
Some names of Politician’s cats
Engels- Tidlums
Lenin- cat no known name
Churchill- Nelson
Wilson- nemo (Siamese)
Corbyn Harold Wilson; El Gato
Blair- Humphrey (until Nov 25 1997)
Thatcher Marvin (2007)
Rosa Luxemburg, Mimi
- Thanks to Steve Cushion for the reference
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