08/23/2026
In March 1948, a scrawny, half-starved kitten was found wandering the dockyards of Hong Kong. A young sailor named George Hickinbottom, only seventeen himself, took pity on him and smuggled him aboard his ship, the frigate HMS Amethyst. The crew named him Simon, and he wasted no time earning his keep, prowling the lower decks and clearing them of rats. He grew into something between a mascot and a member of the crew, known for leaving dead rats as gifts in sailors' beds and for sleeping, uninvited, in the captain's cap.
In April 1949, Amethyst was ordered up the Yangtze River to relieve the guard ship at Nanjing. She never completed the journey. Chinese Communist forces opened fire from the riverbank, and the ship was struck again and again. One of the first shells tore into the captain's cabin. Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner was mortally wounded, and Simon, who had been in the cabin at the time, was thrown across the room, his back and face burned and his legs torn by shrapnel.
He was carried to the medical bay more dead than alive. The surviving medical staff picked four pieces of shrapnel from his body and cleaned his burns, but held out little hope he would last the night. He did. Over the following weeks, as Amethyst sat trapped mid river for over a hundred days under continued threat of fire, Simon slowly recovered, and in spite of his wounds returned to hunting. The ship, cut off and unable to properly resupply, had become infested with rats large and bold enough to attack sleeping and wounded men. Simon went after them regardless, clearing the decks night after night. One rat in particular, a huge and vicious animal the crew had nicknamed Mao Tse-tung after the Chinese Communist leader, had evaded every trap set for it and was destroying what little food remained. Simon hunted it down and killed it. The crew were so struck by the feat that they promoted him to the honorary rank of Able Seaman.
When Amethyst finally made her escape down the river at night, running the gauntlet of shore batteries to reach open water, Simon's story went with her into the world's newspapers. He returned home a celebrity, awarded the Dickin Medal, the Blue Cross Medal, and the Amethyst campaign ribbon, its citation praising him by name for stalking and destroying Mao Tse-tung and ridding the ship of vermin with what it called unrelenting faithfulness. Letters arrived by the thousand, so many that an officer had to be appointed simply to deal with his post.
But like every animal entering Britain, Simon was subject to quarantine. Shut away in Surrey and awaiting a medal ceremony he would never reach, he fell ill with a viral infection, one his weakened heart could not withstand after the injuries of the year before. He died on 28 November 1949, a matter of weeks before he was due to be presented with his award in person.
Hundreds turned out for his funeral at the PDSA cemetery in Ilford, among them the entire crew of the ship he had served. His gravestone simply records that throughout the Yangtze Incident, his behaviour was of the highest order. He remains, to this day, the only cat ever to receive the Dickin Medal.
