Tibs the Great

Tibs the Great was, by the reckoning of the General Post Office itself, its 'number one cat' — the most celebrated of the long line of official felines Britain's Post Office kept on the payroll to protect the mail from mice. Based at the Post Office headquarters in London, Tibs spent some fourteen years on active service, and in that time kept the building completely mouse-free, an achievement that earned him a small weekly allowance and a genuine institutional fondness.

He was the son of Minnie, herself a Post Office cat, and so was born into the job. What set Tibs apart, beyond his diligence, was his sheer size: he grew into an enormous cat, tipping the scales at around 23 pounds, a bulk that no doubt added to his air of unhurried authority as he patrolled the corridors and sorting rooms. For staff, he was as much a mascot and companion as a mouser, a warm and constant presence in a vast, busy workplace.

The Post Office had employed working cats since the 1860s, when three cats were first taken on to control mice in the money-order office, and Tibs became the most famous of them all. When he died in 1964, his passing was treated as news: several newspapers ran obituaries for the great cat, a mark of just how much affection a humble office mouser had gathered over his long career.

Tibs endures as the best-known of Britain's civil-service cats, a reminder of an era when a talented mouser could earn a wage, a name and, in the end, a printed obituary — and a distant ancestor, in spirit, of the modern Downing Street mousers who still hold official titles today.