07-07-2025
Never employ a cat. They are ‘unreliable, capricious and liable to absenteeism'
Do you ever wonder if something you are doing now will be remembered in 100 years? When humorist William L Alden sat down to write a jokey article in 1876, he hardly thought it would still be cited today. And yet here we are.
His article in the New York Times wondered why no effort had been made to develop the intellectual powers of the domestic cat. He then spun a yarn about the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat investigating the possibility of using cats to deliver the post. A sort of Postman Cat, if you like.
He claimed 37 cats were called into service in Liège as part of the great experiment. They were released a long way from home and tracked to see how long it would take them to arrive back. They all returned within 24 hours. This was proof, he declared, that their homing instinct could be harvested to deliver messages from nearby villages. The letters would be fastened around their necks in waterproof bags.
No doubt the article provoked a chortle from a few readers and was then promptly forgotten about. Until 2018. This was when the Twitter account of the New York Times's archive posted a screenshot of the article. And from then on, it was reposted regularly as fact by people you think might know better.
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As expected, some people were outraged at the harnessing of cats to do the work of humans, while others used it to promote their anti-cats agenda or to disparage the population of Belgium. And to this day, the article is still being reposted as fact on the platform, now known as X.
But cats have found gainful employment with at least one post office network – the institution that is the British Post Office. According to the Postal Museum in London, the Post Office employed cats from 1868 to keep the mice at bay. They started with an allowance of one shilling a week and got a 6d per week pay rise five years later.
The matter arose in the House of Commons in the 1950s when it was noted with some outrage that the cats had not had a pay rise in decades. Defending the pay scheme the Assistant Postmaster-General told the MPs that the cats were 'frequently unreliable, capricious in their duties and liable to prolonged absenteeism' and he also noted that there had been no complaints about the wage freeze from the cats.
Tibs, who was stationed at Post Office headquarters, was the most famous feline employee of them all and received an obituary in the Post Office magazine when he died in 1964.
Our own An Post could find no evidence of similar arrangements when I inquired if the GPO ever had any cats on the payroll. Perhaps the Irish cats were too busy being muses for the literary establishment? From WB Yeats to James Joyce to Maeve Binchy, there is scarcely an Irish writer who has not written about cats or been photographed with a feline friend.
Brendan Behan owned a cat called Beamish, according to his biography by Michael O'Sullivan. Apparently Behan taught him to stand on his hind paws and 'give the IRA salute'. He was so proud of the cat that he entered it in the Mansion House cat show. As he didn't own a cat basket, he brought the cat to the show in a meat safe. Records do not show if Beamish won a prize, or if arriving in a meat safe took away some of his prestige.
But the most outrageous story about writers' cats belongs to Oscar Wilde – if it actually happened at all. It was reported that Wilde once found a cat happily dozing on his favourite fur coat. He needed the coat but did not want to disturb this peaceful tableau and so he cut the sleeve from his fur coat and left with the rest of his coat. He must have looked a bit lopsided when he arrived at the soirée but no doubt he charmed everyone present with another sparkling anecdote.
There is more than one hole in this story – and that's not counting the armhole of the fur coat. Surely a flamboyant clothes horse like Oscar Wilde would have had more than one coat to choose from? The man had more capes and cloaks than a Harry Potter convention. And surely such a style icon wouldn't be caught dead wearing a coat with one sleeve hacked off?
I fear Oscar Wilde's one-armed fur coat belongs with the 37 post cats of Liege. At least the non-existent cats will be kept warm by the imaginary fur coat.
