Short Stuff: Camberley Kate

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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 Camberley Kate, and she seems like a pretty boss person. Yeah, she sure was. If you found yourself in Camberley, England, which is about 35 miles southwest of London. In Surrey. That's right. If you found yourself there in, let's say, the mid-1970s, you might have seen, causing a traffic jam in town, a 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, 15 or 20 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. Her 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 were 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 them happened to them. 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 50 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 30-something years. Oh, really? Yeah. That's a lot of dogs. And apparently, here's 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 masse dog rescue person. And, you know, from what I read, people would, of course, take in 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, 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 1943, she had bought a cottage. It was her first house. And then she said, went up the road and 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 ax in the air in 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 doggy's name? I couldn't find it anywhere. No, I couldn't find the greyhound's name. Okay, but this is her first dog. We'll call him Primo. And she and Primo were like inseparable for 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. And so his passing was sad in and of itself, but it wasn't as sad as if he'd been put down for being lame eight years earlier. Yeah, for sure. And she said, and, you know, a lot of this comes from this great BBC interview from the mid-70s. 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 going to 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 500 dogs by the time of this interview. And then I think four years later, that had grown to 600 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. All the stuff we learned from Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know Our listeners love puzzles, paradoxes, and hidden patterns almost as much as we do. On TikTok, those fascinations come to life. People are breaking down physics, exploring geology, and explaining why the world works the way it does. 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Yeah, and this season, the stories go even deeper, showing us what resilience truly looks like through setbacks, breakthroughs, and the communities that make all the difference. So listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so 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 80 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 600 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. 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 seem to live a little longer than most, an average of about 16 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 Bryant's personal history of 20th 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, was that she had quite a personality in and of itself. 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 or something, she 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. 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 VI, 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 1947. and it says that one of the dogs sent a wedding gift, a dog leash, to those corgis that Queen Elizabeth loved. So that's pretty cute. You know, she lived on a pension. Not a lot is known about her early life. I think I found that she was, sadly, both of her parents had died when she was a young age and was raised by her aunt and kind of worked as, 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 belong to him. And then 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 or there. And I don't know that she was occupied much after that once she bought her house for 600 pounds, by the way. But there is a this is from a House of Works article. And there is a person named Heather Driscoll Woodford who curates a Facebook page to Kimberly 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. Um, people just abandoned dogs. Maybe you would take a stray in, like you said, I think, but, uh, 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, um, or let alone not just fostering them, keeping them for the rest of their lives. Uh, but she definitely inspired people in that respect for sure. Yeah, very sadly she passed, I guess she was about 84, because this was in 1979. She had a series of strokes in the BBC. She was 80 and 75. So a nice full life saved a lot of dogs and cats. So we salute Kimberly Kate. Yes, we take our berets off to her. And short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. 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