Maria Dickin and the PDSA
During the Victorian era and after, it was a tradition for the well-heeled to enter the East End to do good works. And though for many one visit was enough, many stayed to leave a lasting legacy - their institutions outliving them and even growing far beyond the boundaries of Tower Hamlets. The names of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett and Thomas Barnardo come to mind, Angela Burdett-Coutts and the ‘East End Squires’ who started Oxford House.
All had entered the East End and been appalled at what they saw - the poverty, disease, drunkenness and exploitation. This was a world of high infant mortality and low life expectancy. But Maria Dickin was different. Visiting Whitechapel in the early years of the last century she saw plenty of pain and suffering, but it was the animals that caught her eye. She found goats and rabbits huddling sick and injured in backyards. There were the costermongers’ and coal delivery men’s donkeys and horses, often crippled and lamed by heavy loads and overwork. It was a horror her sheltered Victorian childhood had ill prepared her for, as she would describe in her book ‘The Cry of the Animal’. The suffering and misery of these poor, uncared-for creatures in our overcrowded areas was a revelation to me. I had no idea it existed, and it made me indescribably miserable.’
The eldest of eight children of a Free Church minister, Mia (as she was known) was born in 1870, and showed a fierce independence from the start. Women of her class weren’t expected to work in the 1890s, but Mia opened a sucessful voice production studio in Wimpole Street - one of her customers was the famed singer Clara Butt. But at 28 she married her cousin, Arnold Dickin and was encouraged to give up work to run the house. It wasn’t enough, and like many bright and industrious women of the time, Maria had turned to charity work as a conduit for her energies. So in the early years of the 20th century she found herself in Whitechapel.
Mia had been forced to have her own sick Yorkshire terrier put down. Bad enough, she thought. But how much worse for those whol couldn’t afford vets’ bills. The response of those she spoke to was derisory. The poor don’t have any sick animals and if they did they would not bring them for treatment,’ was one comment. But after a long struggle for funds, Mia finally opened her first ‘People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor’. Outside the dimly lit cellar in the Whitechapel district of London, a notice read:
Bring your sick animals.
Do not let them suffer.
All animals treated.
All treatment free.
The shop was mobbed, with police called to control the crowd. More than 100 animals a day were now coming in, and there was a rush to find larger premises. And Mia was ambitious, writing: ‘I must have dispensaries throughout the whole of East of London … no, throughout the whole of London, then I became very bold - why not - throughout England - then the British Isles, the British Empire?’
In 1921 she took a gypsy caravan and, accompanied by a vet, travelled the length and breadth of Britain treating animals and setting up clinics along the way. By 1923 there were 16 PDSA dispensaries and a motor caravan dispensary. By 1935 there were PDSA hospitals, 71 dispensaries and 11 motor caravan dispensaries, and the PDSA was spreading abroad.
In 1943, Maria endowed the Dickin Medal to honour animals’ war work, and it became popularly known as ‘the animals’ Victoria Cross’. By February 2008, the medal had been awared 62 times, often posthumously. The first award of the medallion, bearing the words ‘For Gallantry’ and ‘We Also Serve’, was to Winkie, a messenger pigeon who flew 120 miles to deliver an SOS from a crashed bomber. Messenger pigeons were big winners in the early days. In 1949, Simon became the only cat to win the medal having survived the shelling of the HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident. In modern times, sniffer dogs from the Royal Army Veterinary Corps have won a lion’s share of Dickin Medals. In 2003 in Iraq, Buster nosed out a cache of weapons and explosives, while in 2007, Sadie uncovered a bomb planted outside the UN HQ in Kabul.
But the medal is not without its controversies, most famous among them the medal awarded to Rob, the SAS dog who supposedly completed 20 successful parachute jumps into Italy and North Africa during World War II. On the ground, the enterprising collie would lick the cheeks of sleeping commandoes to waken them at first scent of danger. An oil painting of the fearless hound would later accompany his medal at the centre of the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Animals War’ exhibition. The only problem was, it never happened. It was all a scheme cooked up by the SAS barracks’ quartermaster, who had grown attached to Rob and didn’t want to send him back to his owners. Ex SAS man Quentin Hughes helped devise the story, and laughingly remarked years later that “Nobody survived 20 parachute drops, let alone a dog. You were lucky to survive three!”
By the time Mia died in 1951, aged 81, she had been made both OBE and CBE. She had established a huge and lasting legacy, but as ever, she was looking ahead. Writing for children toward the end of her life she said: ‘oday we are all thinking about what each of us can do towards making the world a better place for every man, woman and child to live in. We must not forget to include the animals in our programme, they too must have a better world to live in.’
Read more on Rob the SAS Dog and the PDSA Dickins Medal.
Tags: barnardo, oxford house, philanthropists, toynbee hall