Is this a story about female intuition?
We don’t know if it is true, but if it is it would tell us a lot about cats and maybe female intuition!
It is another story that has come to us from the Titanic Disaster, but this one is different.
It was usual in those days for there to be a resident cat on a ship, they were there to kill the rats that always seemed to find a way to get onto ships.
Of course, that meant that the Titanic had one, she was called Jenny, she had previously been the cat on another White Star Line ship, the Olympia. The crew bought her over, they claimed, she would be a mascot for the new ship and, of course, the real reason was to control the rodents on the ship.
She came on board in Belfast and soon became a favourite in the kitchen, close to where she stayed by the engines. There she became a friend and was looked after by a stoker called Jim Mulholland, who regularly pinched scraps of food for her.
Unfortunately, and nobody knew this, but she was pregnant!
Not long after they left Belfast for her initial sea trials Jenny produced a litter of kittens, Jim loved this as it broke the monotony. He found Jenny a comfortable and pleasant little berth for a cat to look after her kittens.
Everything seemed to be going well, Jenny appeared to be happy looking after her kittens by the warm ship’s furnace, until the Titanic arrived at Southampton.
Then suddenly Jenny decided to disembark. Slowly, she took each kitten by the scruff of the neck and one by one took each one down the gangplank to land. Everyone was fascinated by her repeated trips down the gangplank as the passengers were going up.
As Jim watched his cat slowly disembark her litter, he felt that there must be something she knew that no one else did, so even though jobs were hard to come by for a ship’s stocker he decided to stay with Jenny and leave the ship.
Did jenny have intuition because in the night of April 15th that year the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.
She saved her kittens and Jim.
Is this a true story or just another legend from the Titanic?
We don’t know, but we do know that in April 1912 the Daily Mirror ran a story with the headline “Clever Mother Cat Saves Her Kittens from the Titanic” along with a picture of a cat watching the Titanic leaving port.
Was this Jenny and was it female or cat’s intuition?
Our sister site Educational Musicals has a musical about the Titanic Disaster click on The Ship of Dreams where you will hear two songs and read two pages of script.
You could be rehearsing it today.
Isn’t history fun?
10 questions on this blog:
- What role did Jenny the cat play on the Titanic before it set sail?
- How did Jenny’s actions before the Titanic’s departure suggest she might have predicted the disaster?
- What was the historical role of cats on ships in the early 20th century?
- Who was Jim Mulholland and what decision did he make after observing Jenny’s behaviour?
- How did the Daily Mirror contribute to the story of Jenny and her kittens in 1912?
- What reasons did the crew of the Titanic have for bringing Jenny aboard?
- What significance does Jenny’s disembarkation hold in the context of the Titanic disaster?
- How does this story illustrate the concept of intuition, particularly regarding animals?
- What impact might this story have on our understanding of the events leading up to the Titanic disaster?
- Is there any historical evidence or documentation supporting the story of Jenny and her kittens?
For more on this:
https://catingtonpost.com/the-remarkable-story-of-jenny-the-titanic-cat/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/jenny-titanic-cat
https://titanic.fandom.com/wiki/Jenny_(Cat)
© Tony Dalton