Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Camberley Kate

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

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! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, Harry Potter fans. Huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions, are all being released on Audible, on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

is already out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect. Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy and is Baltimore, Riz Ahmed is Snape,

and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score, and the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform 9 and 3 quarters, and it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizardry even more magical. Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out, and the next installments in the series will be released every month

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radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Camberley Kate, and she seems like a pretty boss person. Yeah, she sure was. If you found yourself in Camberley, England, which is about 35 miles southwest of London. In Surrey. That's right. If you found yourself there in, let's say, the mid-1970s,

you might have seen causing a traffic jam in town, a 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 riding along And maybe another, I don't know, 15 or 20 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. Yeah, crazy dog lady, her 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 were about to be put down, they had been abandoned, 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 them, happened to them. 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 50 years, I think, she rescued.

hundreds of dogs and kept them in great health and gave them great lives. Yeah, it's amazing. It was more like 30-something years. Oh, really? Yeah, and that's a lot of dogs. And apparently, here's the, 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, no one ever talks about the cats, but there were just as many cats over the years. So, you know, one of England's first, probably the first, on-mass dog rescue person, you know, from what I read, people would, of course, take in 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, very sadly, or just drop it 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 1943 she had bought a cottage. It was her first house. And then she said went up the road. And 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. Yeah. The vet, I heard it's very dramatic. The vet had the axe in the air in mid-swing. And 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 doggy's name?

I couldn't find it anywhere. No, I couldn't find the greyhound's name. Okay, but this is her first dog. We'll call him Primo. And she and Primo were like inseparable for 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 if he'd been put down for being lame eight years earlier. Yeah, for sure. And she said, and a lot of this comes from this great BBC interview from the mid-70s. 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 going to, like this woman isn't going to get another dog.

And she was like, that was just the start. And at this point, it was 500 dogs by the time of this interview. And then, I think, four years later, that had grown to 600 by the end. It's 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. Let's do it. From Josh and Chuck

Stuff you should know Hey, Harry Potter fans, huge news. Harry Potter, the full cast audio editions are all being released on Audible on a monthly basis, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is already out. You have never experienced the wizarding world like this before. They've taken it to another level. The cast is perfect.

Hugh Lorry is Dumbledore, Matthew McFaddy in his Baltimore, Riz Ahmed as Snape, and Cush Jumbo as the narrator. And there are too many others to name. There's even a brand new musical score. And the sound design, you'll feel like you're right there. Footsteps echoing down the halls of Hogwarts, a golden snitch flying past your ear. The Hogwarts Express rumbling out of platform 9 and 3 quarters, and it's all in Dolby Atmos, which makes the wizardry even more magical.

Plus, these are the unabridged versions, even more awesomeness. As I mentioned, the first book is out, and the next installments in the series will be released every month until all seven are out. Go to audible.ca slash HP1 and start listening now. Lines and Times with Spencer Graves on the IHAR Radio app is a podcast designed for hunters and fishermen to enjoy success. I like the idea of like, hey, put me on a big deer, you know, hey, there's a big deer out here. He's doing this. Be looking for this deer. But I also love doing it on my own.

I love going out there and saying, running my cameras, I love patterning in the deer, I like showing up at the right time, checking the win, knowing what stand I need to be in, and then whenever it all comes together and it happens, that's the most satisfying thing ever. So when you do it on your own, it's like, I then can hang my hat. But if I had somebody say, hey, pull up on these dots and catch them right here, and you're going to win, and then when I go win, it's like, yeah, that's cool. I won the tournament. The ultimate goal is done.

But it's like, dude, when you find them and you make them bite, that's the puzzle. I love it. Listen to Lines and Tines with Spencer Graves on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 names of all the dogs she'd ever taken care of. Yeah. She's being interviewed at age 80, 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, each one. Yeah, for sure. I mean, just to be able to remember 600 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 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. He said, they seem to live a little longer than most, an average of about 16 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 that I don't think was necessarily targeting her but would have affected her.

No, that's the other reason why people remember her. In addition to being mentioned in Sir Arthur Bryant's personal history of 20th 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 um was that she had quite a personality in and of itself 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 yeah 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. 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 card 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? 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 the 6th, Queen Elizabeth's father and said like that did not happen unequivocally that didn't happen nor would it ever happened so she 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. Yeah, apparently she even sent Queen Elizabeth when she got

married, well, before she's Queen, I guess, in November 1947. And it says that one of the dogs sent a wedding gift, a dog leash, to those corgis that Queen Elizabeth loved. So that's pretty cute. You know, she lived on a pension. Not a lot is known about her early life. I think I found that she was, sadly, both of 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, capital H, him, these animals belong to him. And then I'm just sort of caring for them, you know, the best I can. I'm just cleaning up their poop. exactly she um 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 the government from what i can tell um 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 600 pounds by the way but there's a this is from a house of works article and there is a um a person named heather driscoll woodford who uh curates a facebook book page to Kimberly 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 like this just did not happen people just abandoned dogs maybe you would take astray in 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, 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. Yeah. Very sadly, she passed, I guess she was about 84, because this was in 1979. She had a series of strokes in the BBC. She was 80 and 75. So a nice full life, saved a lot of dogs and cats. Yeah. So we salute Camberley Kate. Yes. We take our berets off to her. And short stuff is that.

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