By Ellie Jones, Cathedral Archivist
Every Cat-hedral has its cat stories (sorry, I couldn’t resist!) and Exeter is no exception. From unnamed cats on the medieval payroll, to Tom, the famous Cathedral cat who roamed the Cathedral and Close throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.
The fact that Tom is still well-remembered today is largely because he was immortalised in stone when the Chapel of St James was rebuilt after the Second World War. Visitors to the Cathedral can still see Tom – permanently pitted against a rat – on either side of the exit from the chapel. The legend goes that Tom got into an altercation with an owl over the rat and lost his eye as a result.
Tom was quite the character. A big tabby cat belonging to Mr Hart, the Head Virger, and his wife, Tom was sometimes friendly, but more often aloof. Visitors loved him all the same, and local newspapers gave over plenty of column inches to reporting on his adventures. One journalist reported how Tom, with his scarred eye “opened his mouth in a contemptuous yawn, looked up at me like a spectre from Edgar Allan Poe”. Tom was well known for guarding the collection boxes, perching on the archdeacon’s hat during meetings, and for sitting unperturbed on an air raid shelter when the city and Cathedral were bombed in 1942. Such was his popularity that the newspapers even published an obituary when he died of cat flu in 1951, at the age of 11.
Photographs and news cuttings about Tom appear in several of Mr Hart’s scrapbooks. Some of these will be on display as part of a celebration of the joy and value of scrapbooking at this month’s Library & Archives In Focus event on Tuesday 19 August.
International Cat Day was established in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and, since 2020, has been supported by International Cat Care.