Culture Cats of the Day:
Henry Wellcome (d 1936) was a London millionaire who chose to live in a Portland Place hotel while maintaining a palatial Regents park residence for the sole occupancy of his three beloved cats.
Wellcome was a collector, entrepreneur, philanthropist and even inventor, and the archetypal cat owner.
Nestling in the recesses of his personal papers are page after page of instructions for successive pet-sitters.
One memo notes that the cats were “accustomed to eating cooked beef, ox & lamb liver & kidney, boiled hake and cod, salmon & sardines”, and, occasionally, “a little raw beef, if it is finely cut up”
Fresh meat and fish was delivered to No. 6 Gloucester Gate daily by Wellcome’s butcher and fishmonger (‘NOT from a ‘cats meat’ butcher”) .
On Sundays, by which time the patience of the cook was presumably wearing thin, the cats were treated to a tin of salmon.