08/11/2026
In November 1940, a 19-year-old woman was searching the ruins of bombed London houses for survivors. The ones she was looking for had four paws.
Her name was Iris Davis, and by November 8, she had reportedly rescued 600 cats.
London was enduring the Blitz. Night after night, German aircraft attacked the city, leaving homes shattered, families displaced and streets buried in rubble. Amid the enormous human suffering, another population was struggling to survive: the pets trapped inside ruined buildings or wandering through neighborhoods they no longer recognized.
Iris lived in Clapham, south London, and volunteered with Our Dumb Friends' League, an animal welfare organization. Her work took her into the wreckage, where frightened cats could be difficult to reach, let alone catch.
She developed a practical solution: a long pole fitted with a loop, described in the original press caption as a “lassoo.” With it, she could retrieve cats from places her hands could not safely reach.
Her work was photographed on November 8, 1940. The accompanying caption identified her as a 19-year-old volunteer and reported the astonishing total of 600 rescued strays. The photograph, distributed by Fox Photos, survives in the Imperial War Museums collection.
That number is especially striking when set against what had happened a year earlier. As Britain prepared for war in 1939, fear of bombing, evacuation and food shortages had led owners to have hundreds of thousands of pets put down. Animal charities were overwhelmed. Yet here was a young woman spending her time trying to save animals whose homes had disappeared.
The surviving record tells us frustratingly little about Iris beyond that photograph. We do not know how many more cats she rescued, what became of them, or how her life unfolded after the war. And the figure of 600 comes from the contemporary caption, rather than a surviving independent tally.
But we do know that, on a November day in the Blitz, someone thought her work important enough to photograph and preserve.
Eighty-six years later, Iris Davis deserves to be remembered among the people who helped London survive, one frightened cat at a time.
