Prize-winning blue Persian cat carried like a sack of potatoes by owner

by Michael Broad · August 26, 2021

This is another interesting cat show photo from a different era. It shows a blue Persian cat of the traditional style (doll-face). His name is Patrick of Allington. Cat fanciers love their fancy names and rightly so.

Patrick of Allington, a blue Persian wins first prize at a cat show at Holy Trinity Hall in central London in 1933. Photo: Getty Images (cleaned up slightly as it was covered in marks). This is an image from a print as in those days digital photography wasn’t even a glint in the imagination of a techie person.

His attractive female owner carries Patrick on her shoulders as if carrying a sack of potatoes from the shop to the car. Back in those days you bought ‘raw’ spuds covered in earth. You cooked from scratch. In today’s sanitised world individually scrubbed potatoes are gift wrapped in cellophane and priced accordingly. You could’ve bought a television in those days for the price of a couple of spuds nowadays.

It is a good photo. I like the juxtaposition of the pretty woman carrying her cat like a labourer carries coal and her cat who is voicing his opinion. It is as if he is talking to the photographer who appears to have called out to her to ‘look this way please’.

It was taken in 1933, a time when all Persians looked like this: a normal looking cat. Today, you see two types of Persians; the traditional type (as you see here) and the contemporary, extreme-bred type called flat-faced Persians.

The punch-face (as Indians like to call them) did not exist at the time. They were dreamt up by cat breeders and cat show judges. They thought it was a refinement. For many it is a disaster; health issues and a less attractive appearance. But beauty is the eye of the beholder. I just find it hard to believe that people prefer the peke-faced Persian over the traditional.

Note: I have presumed that the photo shows the owner. I think it is a fair presumption as no one else would carry a cat at a cat show like this other than the owner.

P.S. I have taken the liberty of publishing a Getty Images photo here. If someone objects, I’ll remove it but copyright is dead on the internet thanks to Pinterest.

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