Crimean Tom

When Allied troops finally entered Sevastopol in September 1855, after a siege lasting almost a year, they walked into a ruined city with almost nothing left to eat. The Russian defenders had withdrawn, the supply situation on the Allied side was notoriously bad, and men who had survived the winter in the trenches now faced starvation in the place they had spent a year trying to capture.

In the rubble of a collapsed house, Lieutenant William Gair of the Royal Navy found a fat, healthy grey tabby cat sitting comfortably among the debris. A well-fed cat in a starving city was, as Gair immediately recognised, a piece of intelligence. He took the animal in, named him Tom, and began to pay attention to where he went.

Tom led his new companions to a cellar concealed beneath the wreckage, where a substantial store of provisions had been hidden away. Further searches, guided by the same method, reportedly turned up more caches around the city. The accounts that have come down to us are second-hand and were retold with enthusiasm in the years that followed, so the details have almost certainly grown in the telling — but the core of the story was recorded by men who were there, and Tom was credited with keeping a considerable number of soldiers fed at a moment when there was very little else to eat.

Gair brought Tom back to England at the end of the war. The cat died not long afterwards, and rather than being buried he was preserved by a taxidermist, which is why he still exists: Crimean Tom was eventually presented to the Royal United Services Institute, and he remains on display at the National Army Museum in London, one of very few individual animals of the Crimean War to be remembered by name.

He belongs to a tradition that runs right through military history — the ship's cats, mascots and regimental animals who were valued for morale as much as for mousing, and who were sometimes credited with rather more than they can plausibly have intended. Tom's contribution, whatever its exact scale, was to be a well-fed cat in a place where that was the most useful thing an animal could possibly be.