December 3, 2025 • 11 mins
Camberley Kate was the nickname for the first independent animal rescuer in England, rescuing hundreds of dogs and cats over her lifetime. Come get acquainted with a great lady!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and it's us, but we're joined by a
third person today in spirit. Her name is Camberly Kate,
and she seems like a pretty boss person.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah, she sure was.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
If you found yourself in Camberly, England, which is about
thirty five miles southwest of London.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
In Surrey, that's right.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
If you found yourself there, and let's say the mid
nineteen seventies, you might have seen causing a traffic jam
in town. Beret wearing, gray haired senior citizen with a
handmade push cart with Ward stray dogs painted on the
side of it. And then some dogs in that cart
(00:50):
riding along, and maybe another, I don't know, fifteen or
twenty dogs, some on leashes, some not on leashes, but
very good boys and girls walking along with this, you know,
for lack of a better word, crazy dog lady in
the best way.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, crazy dog lady. Your name was Kate Ward. And
the reason she was a crazy dog lady, in addition
to walking all these dogs around, is that all of
these dogs were hers. She wasn't like helping out a
friend by taking these dogs on a walk. She had
taken in all these dogs because they were all strays,
they're about to be put down, they had been abandoned,
(01:25):
and she took them in as her own. And what's
really cool about this too, is she took really good
care of them. This wasn't like a situation where she
was just collecting dogs and you know, whatever happened to
him happened to him. Like, she took excellent care of
each one of these dogs. And over the course of
her lifetime, actually over the course of just something like
(01:46):
fifty years, I think she rescued hundreds of dogs and
kept them in great health and gave them great lives.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, it's amazing. It was more like like thirty something years.
Oh really, Yeah, that's a lot of dogs. And apparently
here's you know, the little secret is apparently there were
hundreds of cats. I couldn't find a lot of evidence
of that, but I did read a couple of articles
where they said, you know that no one ever talks
about the cats, but there were just as many cats
(02:14):
over the years. So you know, one of England's first,
probably the first en mass dog rescue person. You know,
from what I read, people would of course taken a
stray here and there and that kind of thing, But
there weren't these big dog rescue organizations. People would like
either abandon a pet's very sadly or just drop it
(02:36):
off at the vet, or drop it off at the
front door of the police station. And that's where she
sourced them. She got dogs and cats from police stations,
from veterinarians out on the streets, just randomly. And it
all started with this greyhound at the very beginning, I
think in nineteen forty three, she had bought a cottage.
(02:56):
It was her first house. And then she said, went
up the road on the doorstep of the vet. Someone
had abandoned this little lame, skinny greyhound that was set
to be put to sleep. And she was like, no, no, no,
that's coming with me.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah the vet I heard is very dramatic. The vet
had the axe in the air in the mid swing
when she stopped him and said, no, no, I'll take this
little greyhound in. That became, from what I can tell,
her first dog at the very least of her adult life,
and she and the dog. Did you see the little
doggie's name? I couldn't find it anywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
No, I couldn't find the greyhounds name.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Okay, but this is her first dog. We'll call him Primo.
And she and Primo were like inseparable for eight over
eight years, like they were just the best of friends.
And then sadly, as things happened Primo died, she gave
him an extra eight plus years of great life. He
had a new best friend. So his passing was sad
in and of itself, but it wasn't as sad as
(03:53):
if he had been put down for being lame eight
years earlier.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah, for sure. And she said, and you know, how
did this come from? This great BBC interview from the
mid seventies. You can watch on YouTube if you want
to hear Kate in her cantankerous ways, kind of spill
this story out. But she said that at the time
everyone kind of thought like, well, that's it. You know,
no one's gonna like this woman isn't going to get
another dog.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
And she was like, that was just the start.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
And at this point, it was five hundred dogs by
the time of this interview, and then I think four
years later that had grown to six hundred by the end.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Nuts, man, it's so great too. I say, we take
a little break and come back and talk a little
more about Kimberly Kate and her saga.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Let's do it, okay, Chucks.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
At some point back there, you had said that she
sourced her dogs from different places, and I couldn't help
in my mind think that it sounded like she was
running a farm to table operation out of her house. Yeah,
that's not at all what she was doing. She was
doing the opposite of that. She's not eating dogs. She
was taking really good care of them, as we said.
And one of the really crazy things about this, or
neat things about this, is she could rattle off the
(05:32):
names of all the dogs she'd ever taken care of. Yeah,
she's being interviewed at age eighty, and she's not only
rattling off their names like Patch and Daddy, she's also
talking about where she got each one or how she
found each one too. So it's quite obvious that each
one of these dogs that she took in and would
have dozens at a time, meant something very important to her.
(05:54):
Each one.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I mean, just to be able to remember six hundred
things at that age is pretty remarkable, Yeah for sure.
You know, and you know she couldn't do this without help.
It seems like there were townspeople who would donate money
for food, although one of them was keen to point
out that like, she never took anything for herself even
when people tried to help her out. Yeah, she didn't
have a whole lot of money, but she did have
(06:18):
the help of a local vet, a guy named Jeffrey Craddock,
who did pro bono care for her dogs. And he's
interviewed and basically was like, these are some of the
healthiest dogs I've come across.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
He said.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
They seemed to live a little longer than most, an
average of about sixteen years, and they're in better shape
than the average dog. She feeds them well, he said,
but like not too much, he said, none of them
are overweight, and they're all very well behaved because you know,
as you see on these dog walks, like a lot
of them even aren't on leash. And in fact, she
battled a leash law that came around at one point
(06:51):
that I don't think was necessarily targeting her, but would
have affected her.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
No, that's the other reason why people remember her. In
addition to being mentioned in Sir Arthur's Personal History of
twentieth century England called the Lion and the Unicorn. He
gave her that nickname in the book. One of the
reasons she became kind of a legend in addition to
being the first like basically solo animal rescue person, yeah,
(07:16):
was that she had quite a personality in.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
And of it.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, Like she was known to be rather vocal and defensive,
and anytime somebody threatened her dogs with putting them on
a leash or taking them away from her something, she'd
let them know in no uncertain terms that they were
not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
I think it's interesting, like she didn't seem personality plus,
but kind of in a lovable way because she's like,
don't screw with my dogs.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Apparently she would, you know, the cars would honk at
her and stuff because she would cause like, you know,
a bit of a traffic jam at times when she
has all these dogs on these walks and she would
ram that cart into the cars and not be too
nice sometimes, and was not nice to the city council.
Like I said, with that leash law, It's not like
she went in there with hat in hand. She even
petitioned the royal family at times, right.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, apparently she would regularly write to them and I
don't know that they ever wrote back, but there was
an incident where a teacher said publicly that they saw
Kate beating one of her dogs with a stick, and
she got so incensed about this and was so concerned,
I guess about what people thought of how she was
taking care of her dogs. She wrote to King George
(08:27):
the sixth, Queen Elizabeth's father and said like that did
not happen. Unequivocally, that didn't happen, nor would it ever happen.
So she would appeal to them too if the city
council wasn't behaving. And I don't know what effect it has,
but it's definitely worth mentioning.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yeah, apparently she even sent Queen Elizabeth when she got married,
well before she's queen, I guess in November nineteen forty seven,
and it says that one of the dogs sent a
wedding gift a dog leash to those corgies that Queen
Elizabeth loved. So that's pretty cute, you know. She she
lived on a pension. Not a lot is known about
(09:03):
her early life. I think I found that she was
sadly both her parents had died when she was a
young age and was raised by her aunt and kind
of worked as a when she became a teenager, worked
as a housemaid at various places and institutions, and apparently
it was pretty religious, because she did say that, you know,
(09:24):
capital h him, these animals belonged to him, and that
I'm just sort of caring for them, you know, the
best I can.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I'm just cleaning up their poop exactly. She Yeah, you
mentioned that, and I think it's worth pointing out again
she was not wealthy. She was living off a pension
from the government from what I can tell, Like you said,
she'd been a housemaid here there, and I don't know
that she was occupied much after that. Once she bought
her house for six hundred pounds. By the way, but
(09:53):
there's a this is from a House of Works article,
and there is a person named Heather drisk gold Woodford
who curates a Facebook page to Kate Camberly Kate and
has a lot of information about her, but basically points
out that Kate was like the forerunner to the people
who are rescuing dogs today, and like you said before,
(10:14):
like this just did not happen. People just abandoned dogs.
Maybe you would take as stray and like you said,
I think, but she just came out of nowhere and
made such an impact and became so memorable that she
inspired other people to do the same, not nearly to
the degree that she did, Like there's very few animal
rescue people with a couple dozen dogs at any given time,
(10:37):
but or let alone, not just fostering them, keeping them
for the rest of their lives. But she definitely inspired
people in that respect for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, very sadly she passed.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
I guess she was about eighty four because this was
in nineteen seventy nine. She had a series of strokes
in the BBC she was eighty and seventy five. So
a nice, full life, saved a lot of dogs and cats.
So we salute Kamberly Kate.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yes, we take our berets off to her. And short
stuff is.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
That stuff you should know?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and it's us, but we're joined by a
third person today in spirit. Her name is Camberly Kate,
and she seems like a pretty boss person.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah, she sure was.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
If you found yourself in Camberly, England, which is about
thirty five miles southwest of London.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
In Surrey, that's right.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
If you found yourself there, and let's say the mid
nineteen seventies, you might have seen causing a traffic jam
in town. Beret wearing, gray haired senior citizen with a
handmade push cart with Ward stray dogs painted on the
side of it. And then some dogs in that cart
(00:50):
riding along, and maybe another, I don't know, fifteen or
twenty dogs, some on leashes, some not on leashes, but
very good boys and girls walking along with this, you know,
for lack of a better word, crazy dog lady in
the best way.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, crazy dog lady. Your name was Kate Ward. And
the reason she was a crazy dog lady, in addition
to walking all these dogs around, is that all of
these dogs were hers. She wasn't like helping out a
friend by taking these dogs on a walk. She had
taken in all these dogs because they were all strays,
they're about to be put down, they had been abandoned,
(01:25):
and she took them in as her own. And what's
really cool about this too, is she took really good
care of them. This wasn't like a situation where she
was just collecting dogs and you know, whatever happened to
him happened to him. Like, she took excellent care of
each one of these dogs. And over the course of
her lifetime, actually over the course of just something like
(01:46):
fifty years, I think she rescued hundreds of dogs and
kept them in great health and gave them great lives.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, it's amazing. It was more like like thirty something years.
Oh really, Yeah, that's a lot of dogs. And apparently
here's you know, the little secret is apparently there were
hundreds of cats. I couldn't find a lot of evidence
of that, but I did read a couple of articles
where they said, you know that no one ever talks
about the cats, but there were just as many cats
(02:14):
over the years. So you know, one of England's first,
probably the first en mass dog rescue person. You know,
from what I read, people would of course taken a
stray here and there and that kind of thing, But
there weren't these big dog rescue organizations. People would like
either abandon a pet's very sadly or just drop it
(02:36):
off at the vet, or drop it off at the
front door of the police station. And that's where she
sourced them. She got dogs and cats from police stations,
from veterinarians out on the streets, just randomly. And it
all started with this greyhound at the very beginning, I
think in nineteen forty three, she had bought a cottage.
(02:56):
It was her first house. And then she said, went
up the road on the doorstep of the vet. Someone
had abandoned this little lame, skinny greyhound that was set
to be put to sleep. And she was like, no, no, no,
that's coming with me.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah the vet I heard is very dramatic. The vet
had the axe in the air in the mid swing
when she stopped him and said, no, no, I'll take this
little greyhound in. That became, from what I can tell,
her first dog at the very least of her adult life,
and she and the dog. Did you see the little
doggie's name? I couldn't find it anywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
No, I couldn't find the greyhounds name.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Okay, but this is her first dog. We'll call him Primo.
And she and Primo were like inseparable for eight over
eight years, like they were just the best of friends.
And then sadly, as things happened Primo died, she gave
him an extra eight plus years of great life. He
had a new best friend. So his passing was sad
in and of itself, but it wasn't as sad as
(03:53):
if he had been put down for being lame eight
years earlier.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah, for sure. And she said, and you know, how
did this come from? This great BBC interview from the
mid seventies. You can watch on YouTube if you want
to hear Kate in her cantankerous ways, kind of spill
this story out. But she said that at the time
everyone kind of thought like, well, that's it. You know,
no one's gonna like this woman isn't going to get
another dog.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
And she was like, that was just the start.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
And at this point, it was five hundred dogs by
the time of this interview, and then I think four
years later that had grown to six hundred by the end.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Nuts, man, it's so great too. I say, we take
a little break and come back and talk a little
more about Kimberly Kate and her saga.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Let's do it, okay, Chucks.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
At some point back there, you had said that she
sourced her dogs from different places, and I couldn't help
in my mind think that it sounded like she was
running a farm to table operation out of her house. Yeah,
that's not at all what she was doing. She was
doing the opposite of that. She's not eating dogs. She
was taking really good care of them, as we said.
And one of the really crazy things about this, or
neat things about this, is she could rattle off the
(05:32):
names of all the dogs she'd ever taken care of. Yeah,
she's being interviewed at age eighty, and she's not only
rattling off their names like Patch and Daddy, she's also
talking about where she got each one or how she
found each one too. So it's quite obvious that each
one of these dogs that she took in and would
have dozens at a time, meant something very important to her.
(05:54):
Each one.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I mean, just to be able to remember six hundred
things at that age is pretty remarkable, Yeah for sure.
You know, and you know she couldn't do this without help.
It seems like there were townspeople who would donate money
for food, although one of them was keen to point
out that like, she never took anything for herself even
when people tried to help her out. Yeah, she didn't
have a whole lot of money, but she did have
(06:18):
the help of a local vet, a guy named Jeffrey Craddock,
who did pro bono care for her dogs. And he's
interviewed and basically was like, these are some of the
healthiest dogs I've come across.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
He said.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
They seemed to live a little longer than most, an
average of about sixteen years, and they're in better shape
than the average dog. She feeds them well, he said,
but like not too much, he said, none of them
are overweight, and they're all very well behaved because you know,
as you see on these dog walks, like a lot
of them even aren't on leash. And in fact, she
battled a leash law that came around at one point
(06:51):
that I don't think was necessarily targeting her, but would
have affected her.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
No, that's the other reason why people remember her. In
addition to being mentioned in Sir Arthur's Personal History of
twentieth century England called the Lion and the Unicorn. He
gave her that nickname in the book. One of the
reasons she became kind of a legend in addition to
being the first like basically solo animal rescue person, yeah,
(07:16):
was that she had quite a personality in.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
And of it.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, Like she was known to be rather vocal and defensive,
and anytime somebody threatened her dogs with putting them on
a leash or taking them away from her something, she'd
let them know in no uncertain terms that they were
not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
I think it's interesting, like she didn't seem personality plus,
but kind of in a lovable way because she's like,
don't screw with my dogs.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Apparently she would, you know, the cars would honk at
her and stuff because she would cause like, you know,
a bit of a traffic jam at times when she
has all these dogs on these walks and she would
ram that cart into the cars and not be too
nice sometimes, and was not nice to the city council.
Like I said, with that leash law, It's not like
she went in there with hat in hand. She even
petitioned the royal family at times, right.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, apparently she would regularly write to them and I
don't know that they ever wrote back, but there was
an incident where a teacher said publicly that they saw
Kate beating one of her dogs with a stick, and
she got so incensed about this and was so concerned,
I guess about what people thought of how she was
taking care of her dogs. She wrote to King George
(08:27):
the sixth, Queen Elizabeth's father and said like that did
not happen. Unequivocally, that didn't happen, nor would it ever happen.
So she would appeal to them too if the city
council wasn't behaving. And I don't know what effect it has,
but it's definitely worth mentioning.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yeah, apparently she even sent Queen Elizabeth when she got married,
well before she's queen, I guess in November nineteen forty seven,
and it says that one of the dogs sent a
wedding gift a dog leash to those corgies that Queen
Elizabeth loved. So that's pretty cute, you know. She she
lived on a pension. Not a lot is known about
(09:03):
her early life. I think I found that she was
sadly both her parents had died when she was a
young age and was raised by her aunt and kind
of worked as a when she became a teenager, worked
as a housemaid at various places and institutions, and apparently
it was pretty religious, because she did say that, you know,
(09:24):
capital h him, these animals belonged to him, and that
I'm just sort of caring for them, you know, the
best I can.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I'm just cleaning up their poop exactly. She Yeah, you
mentioned that, and I think it's worth pointing out again
she was not wealthy. She was living off a pension
from the government from what I can tell, Like you said,
she'd been a housemaid here there, and I don't know
that she was occupied much after that. Once she bought
her house for six hundred pounds. By the way, but
(09:53):
there's a this is from a House of Works article,
and there is a person named Heather drisk gold Woodford
who curates a Facebook page to Kate Camberly Kate and
has a lot of information about her, but basically points
out that Kate was like the forerunner to the people
who are rescuing dogs today, and like you said before,
(10:14):
like this just did not happen. People just abandoned dogs.
Maybe you would take as stray and like you said,
I think, but she just came out of nowhere and
made such an impact and became so memorable that she
inspired other people to do the same, not nearly to
the degree that she did, Like there's very few animal
rescue people with a couple dozen dogs at any given time,
(10:37):
but or let alone, not just fostering them, keeping them
for the rest of their lives. But she definitely inspired
people in that respect for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, very sadly she passed.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
I guess she was about eighty four because this was
in nineteen seventy nine. She had a series of strokes
in the BBC she was eighty and seventy five. So
a nice, full life, saved a lot of dogs and cats.
So we salute Kamberly Kate.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yes, we take our berets off to her. And short
stuff is.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
That stuff you should know?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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