大象传媒

Christmas Day 1937 in Sheffield I received as my present a bulldog puppy whom I named 'Judy'.
We moved. The War came. I went to boarding school and the parents had a difficult time feeding a boisterous dog. Eventually in 1942 my father wrote to the War Office offering a grown Bulldog as a mascot, hoping to get an Army section with a Bulldog flash.
Judy, however, joined the Senior Service and went smartly to join a new battleship HMS Howe; an article about which appeared, at the time, in the Picture Post magazine with a picture of Judy sitting proudly beneath the ship's bell.
Despatches of her activities came regularly;she was being looked after by the ship's butcher, had her own kennel and was behaving impeccably and a favourite with the crew. What was not said, of course, that the ship was, at that time, assigned to Russian Convoy duty with all its hazards.
The final communique can to say that alas, during a particularly bad engagement she had gone berserk with the noise of battle and had to be put down. She was buried in Greenland with due honours. She had always hated the firing of the local ack-ack guns which protected Leeds.
My father was guilt ridden and I was heartbroken.

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