Simon, Able Seacat
One cat has ever received the Dickin Medal. He earned it over 101 days on a shelled and stranded frigate, and he is the naval cat story that actually holds up.
Ships carried cats for as long as ships carried grain. Rodents ate the stores, gnawed the ropes and spread disease, and a cat was the only pest control that worked unsupervised at sea. The Royal Navy kept the practice going for centuries before ending it on hygiene grounds in the 1970s.
Most of the famous naval cat stories are, on inspection, very thin. One is not.
The Yangtze, 1949
HMS Amethyst was sailing up the Yangtze to relieve the guard ship at Nanking when People’s Liberation Army batteries opened fire. The frigate was hit repeatedly, ran aground, and lost a substantial part of her crew, including her captain. She spent 101 days trapped on the river before running the gauntlet downstream at night to escape.
Aboard was Simon, a young black-and-white cat picked up in Hong Kong the previous year and smuggled aboard by a seventeen-year-old ordinary seaman. He had already made himself popular by leaving dead rats in sailors’ bunks, which was received better than it sounds.
What he actually did
Simon was in the captain’s cabin when a shell struck it. He took shrapnel to the leg and back, and his whiskers and fur were burned off. He was not expected to survive the night.
He did. Once he could walk he went back to work, on a stranded ship with damaged stores and a serious rat problem. The crew credited him with killing off an infestation that was threatening rations they had no way of replacing — including one large and persistent rat the sailors had nicknamed after the Communist leader.
He also spent the siege sitting with injured sailors, several of them teenagers, on a ship that had lost its captain and could not leave. The crew were explicit afterwards about what that was worth.
The medal
Simon was awarded the Dickin Medal, the decoration instituted by the PDSA for animals showing conspicuous gallantry in military service. It has gone to dogs, horses and a great many pigeons. Simon remains the only cat ever to receive it.
He did not live to be presented with it. Amethyst reached Britain in November 1949, and Simon — like every animal arriving in the country — went into quarantine, where he developed an infection and died within weeks. He was buried with military honours at the PDSA animal cemetery in Ilford. The crew attended.
And the one that probably is a tall tale
Compare the story of Unsinkable Sam: a cat said to have survived the sinking of the Bismarck, been rescued by HMS Cossack, survived her sinking too, transferred to Ark Royal, and survived that as well.
It is repeated everywhere and the documentary trail is close to non-existent — no contemporary record from the ships involved, and an account that only really surfaces decades later. Most careful writing on it now treats the cat as at best heavily embellished.
The test is boring and reliable. Simon has a ship’s log, a named crew, a medal citation, newspaper coverage and a grave. Sam has an anecdote.
Both stories serve the same purpose — they make a violent and frightening job feel survivable, by giving it a small animal who came through. Only one of them happened.
This is general information, not a diagnosis.
Every cat is a specific animal with a specific history. Use this to ask your vet better questions — not to replace the examination. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it in public.
