I am a cat person – two of them let myself and my wife live in their house and feed them – and neither one has ever deliberately scratched me. Of course not all cats are quite so affectionate and scratches are part and parcel of living with felines, or interacting with those we meet in the streets. But if a cat does scratch you it is never appropriate to act as Herbert Wallace did in June 1899.

Alfred Bond, a commercial traveller, was being driven along the Harrow Road in his pony and trap on his way home to Harlsden, one Friday evening. He noticed a man, later identified as Wallace, pick something up and throw it to the ground. He then kicked it violently several times.

To his horror, Bond realised that the object of Bond’s violence was a cat. As he got close enough to see the condition of the creature he noticed that it was very badly injured.

‘apparently the back of the animal had been broken, because it scrambled onto its forefeet, but its hindquarters were powerless and it remained on the ground’.

He jumped down from the trap and remonstrated with Wallace, who rewarded him with ‘vile language’. Bond sent his driver to fetch a policeman and told Wallace that he would have him arrested. At this the 20 year-old labourer ran off, with the salesman in pursuit.

Bond caused the younger man down several streets before he caught up with him. As he tried to effect an arrest Wallace cursed him and struck him, threatening to kill him. Eventually three policemen arrived and with some difficult, dragged Wallace away to the station.

Herbert Wallace was brought before the Marylebone Police magistrate on Saturday 24 June, charged with cruelty to a cat. Having heard the evidence presented by Mr Bond he was asked to explain himself. All he could say in his defence was that he had been ‘nursing the cat when it scratched him, so he threw it down and kicked it twice’.

Bond had deposed that he had seen the labourer kick the animal no less than four times but two was bad enough. No one knew what had happened to the poor creature but with a broken back death would have been a deliverance.

I don’t know if the magistrate was a cat lover like me but he acted as if he might have been. He told Wallace that he was ‘guilty of most cruel conduct, and would go to prison for six weeks without the option of paying a fine’. I’d have given him six months, at hard labour.

[from The Standard, Monday, June 26, 1899]