September 30, 1897

Today's  Cat Lover's Almanac subject, Alfred Wintle (September 30, 1897 to May 11, 1966) was one of "London's greatest eccentrics." We read this here, though the description is mentioned often and elsewhere. Wintle prayed "on his bended knee every night to thank God for making him an Englishman, 'the greatest honour He could ever bestow. After all, he might have made me a chimpanzee, or a flea, a Frenchman or a German!'"

Wintle's heroics during both World Wars have been written up. Regarding the first:

'Ironically enough, Wintle, the son of a diplomat (secondary irony) was born in Ukraine in 1897, a fact he naturally liked to keep hidden. During his service in WWI, a German shell left him without the fingers of his left hand and his left eye. His right eye was so damaged that he had to wear a monocle for the rest of his life. ... What upset him far more was that his injuries were keeping him from the Front. He made an attempt to escape the hospital disguised as a nurse, but his monocle (not to mention his mustache) gave him away. Wintle's politically-connected father was eventually able to persuade the army to allow him to return to battle. Wintle returned the favor by single-handedly capturing thirty-five of the enemy, a feat that earned him the Military Cross.

'Wintle was probably the only person on the planet who was sorry to see the war end. Never was there a less peaceful man. His reaction to the Armistice was to write in his diary, "I declare private war on Germany!" He made such a pest of himself nagging his military superiors to restart the conflict that they finally posted him to Ireland, just to be rid of him. Wintle handled his exile in characteristic style. During a spell in Aldershot Military Hospital (he had broken his leg when falling from a horse) he saw in a nearby bed a young man named Cecil Mays. Mays was suffering from a combination of mastoiditis and diptheria, and simply waiting for the end. Doctors had written the boy off as a hopeless case. Not Wintle. He considered a soldier dying away from the battlefield as a violation of army regulations. Wintle indignantly hobbled over to the stricken boy and bellowed, "You will stop dying at once! And, when you get up, get your bloody hair cut!"

'Such was the Power of Wintle that the boy obeyed. Mays went on to make a full recovery and lived to the age of 95. He was, Mays later said, "too terrified to die."

'During his convalescence, Wintle turned to writing fiction, hiding his identity behind the pseudonym "Michael Cobb." (He explained that "For a cavalry officer, to be literate, let alone write, is a disgrace.") He achieved a fair amount of success. One of his novels, "The Emancipation of Ambrose," was even turned into a movie.

'Wintle's dearest wish came true in September 1939, when hostilities towards his archenemies, the Germans, were resumed. Much to his disgust, however, when he sought to reenter active service, he found the army had little desire to take on a half-blind, half-fingerless man in his forties. He contemplated forming his own private platoon to fight the Nazis, but--unfortunately for the history books--that particular plan came to nothing. Wintle sulked on the Home Front until the British disaster at Dunkirk. Aflame with rightous fury at this debacle, Wintle marched up to the Air Ministry and demanded they give him a plane. He wished to fly to Bordeaux and order all the French airmen there to instantly join the RAF.

'The Air Commander, A.R. Boyle, showed a lack of enthusiasm for the idea. Wintle pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot Boyle. Wintle was then escorted to the Tower of London to await his court martial.

'On his way to his cell, Wintle learned that his arrest warrant had been lost. The exasperated prisoner marched off to the warrant office to get a new one. There, he learned that he was the only one present with sufficient rank to issue the order....[H]e did so...Yes. Wintle arrested himself.

...
Wintle's trial went just about the way you'd think. When asked to respond to the charge that he had pointed a gun at Boyle with the words, "People like you ought to be shot," Wintle added a further number of people who would benefit from patriotic assassination--a list which included the War Secretary. His court martial threatened to become such an embarrassing farce for the Government that they reduced his punishment to a "severe reprimand" and packed him off to Syria, where he did intelligence work. In 1941, he was transferred to Occupied France. For reasons that frankly escape me, his superiors thought this least subtle of men would make a good spy.

'Wintle went about the place with gold coins strapped under his armpits and carrying an umbrella. (This last was because he considered it to be a true Englishman's duty to have an umbrella at all times, although "No true gentleman would ever unfurl one.") Surprise, surprise, his cover was soon blown, and he was arrested and sent to a Vichy prison camp. Wintle sportingly informed his guards that he considered it his duty to escape, particularly since his captors were all "swivel-eyed sons of syphilitic slime-frogs" completely unfit to guard the the shining likes of a British officer. ... [H]e went on a two-week hunger strike.

'True to his word, Wintle did escape, and successfully fled into Spain. ...'

I am certain my readers will want to check the secondary source of this narrative, Strangeco.blogspot.com (link above), for if you are just hearing about Wintle, there is much more to the story. And there are other sources of information, available, such as:

The book Michael Joseph published, The Last Englishman. (1968). This book was based on the vast amount of autobiographical writing Wintle left in his papers. Alastair Revie, a friend, complied it into a book.

There is nothing eccentric about having a cat, and so Wintle's cat --at least one--does not feature prominently in Wintle stories. Trust Michael Joseph, himself a cat lover, to include this account Wintle wrote:

[T]here was Dinah, my cat. She was pure Persian and had a pedigree as long as the Edgeware Road....Unlike inferior cats, and possibly all other cats, she never curled contendedly for wasted hours before my log fire. Dinah had more useful things to do in the great outside; and there was a great deal of the great outside, outside Coldharbour.

We hear the assumptions of Wintle's world view, in these words, and they do not seem out of place, referencing a feline.