Simon

He was found on the Hong Kong dockyards in 1948, thin and about a year old, and smuggled aboard the sloop HMS Amethyst by a seventeen-year-old ordinary seaman called George Hickinbottom. He was good at the job — he left rats on the beds of the crew as gifts, slept in the captain's cap, and was rated by the ship's company as the best ratter they had had. In April 1949 the Amethyst went up the Yangtze to relieve the guard ship at Nanking and was shelled by a People's Liberation Army battery. Twenty-two men were killed, including Lieutenant Commander Skinner, whose cabin took the shell that also put four pieces of shrapnel in Simon and burned his face and back. He was not expected to live the night. He came out of the sick bay after a few days and went back to work, because the ship — aground, then trapped on the river for ten weeks with rationed stores — had a serious rat problem, and the stores were what the crew had. He killed them steadily, including one so large the sailors had named it Mao Tse-tung, and spent the rest of his time in the sick bay with wounded men. The Amethyst broke out down the river at the end of July and came home to a great deal of attention, most of it for the cat. He was promoted to Able Seacat, awarded the Dickin Medal, and answered thousands of letters through a naval officer appointed as a “cat officer”. He died in quarantine at Hackbridge in November 1949, weeks before the presentation, of a virus complicated by his wounds. He was buried at Ilford with full naval honours, the crew standing at attention.

Loved by · George Hickinbottom, The crew of HMS Amethyst

Honours

• 1949Wounded by the shell that killed the Amethyst's captain, and returned to duty
• 1949Kept the rats off the crew's rationed stores through ten weeks trapped on the Yangtze
• 1949Promoted to Able Seacat by the ship's company
• 1949Dickin Medal — the only cat ever to receive it
• 1949Buried with full naval honours at the PDSA Animal Cemetery, Ilford

Their kind

No breed at all — the ordinary cat of the world's ports and farmyards, which is exactly why ships carried them.

A life in seasons