On January 10, 1901, twelve days before Queen Victoria did the unthinkable and died, 250 cat’s meat men sat down to a slap-up dinner at a restaurant in Holborn, on the edge of central London. A cat’s meat man was an itinerant vendor who pushed a cart of cheap offal and horsemeat around residential streets while calling out something that sounded like “CA-DOE-MEE!” Sometimes he stopped at a house and delivered a pre-ordered package of meat, often threaded onto a long skewer. At the same time, his shout was the signal for householders and domestics to come out onto the pavement and buy their pets’ food straight from the barrow. For all that cats were supposed to cater for themselves by catching kitchen pests, urban owners increasingly found the money from the household budget to supplement their board.

Within minutes of the cat’s meat man embarking on his circuit, the barrow would be surrounded by felines, some of whom had perfectly good homes to go to and others who did not but still hoped that a sliver of flesh might fall their way. Although there were plenty of grim jokes circulating about how cat’s meat men supplied the toughest meat they could get away with, the fact was that many of these rough diamonds were known for their tender hearts. It was not unusual to spot a cat’s meat man slipping scraps to the hopeful strays that wound around his ankles. He was their guardian, their special friend. Sometimes he could even bring about fairy-tale transformations: no less a lady than the Duchess of Bedford had recently adopted a stray that had been rescued by her local London cat’s meat man.

During the middle years of Victoria’s reign, the cat’s meat man, in his livery of blue apron, shiny black hat, and corduroy trousers, had become a gift to investigative journalists of an anthropological turn. In his London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew plunges deep into their visible yet still mysterious world. According to Mayhew, there were a thousand such traders in London, serving about 300,000 cats, one for every house (allowing for multiple cats in some homes, plus strays). This sounds lucrative, but when Mayhew pumps his informants for details, he finds a story of dogged hard work. One carrier told him that he seldom went less than thirty, and frequently forty miles, through the streets every day.

The best districts were among the houses of tradesmen, mechanics, and labourers. The coachmen in the mews at the back of the squares were particularly good customers. “‘The work lays thicker there’, said my informant. ‘Old maids are bad, though very plentiful, customers. They cheapen the carriers down so, that they can scarcely live at the business. They will pay one halfpenny and owe another, and forget that after a day or two.’” Cat ladies, as ever, were to blame for imperilling capitalism and the men who served it.

Over the next two decades, as magazines increasingly included articles about cat’s meat men, further details emerged. While mostly respectable, they were well down the pecking order. Some were “born into the trade” but others went into it at the scrag end of their working lives. Two common scenarios were butchers who had failed in business and lost their shop, or carriage painters whose health had been broken by the noxious paints they had been inhaling for decades. By the end of the century, it was not unusual to see women, often widows, in charge of a round. Some used old prams from which to sell their wares.

Those cat’s meat men who could keep away from the pub had a decent chance of building up a nice little surplus that allowed them to lead stable lives. Some were even Sunday School teachers. There was a strict code about who “owned a walk”, and woe betide anyone who tried to muscle in. Very profitable rounds might be sold for a premium by means of a small ad in the local paper. Occupational hazards included being ambushed by hungry stray dogs or, on those occasions when a barrow accidentally overturned, watching helplessly as your stock was gulped down by your feline clientele who clearly had no intention of paying.

This nightmare scenario, in which domestic cats morphed into a pride of ravenous lions, touched on a whole line of macabre associations with the cat’s meat trade which never completely went away. The first and most crucial was this: were cat’s meat men selling meat made of cats or meat made for cats? The confusion was enough to keep Victorian children awake at night, fretting that stray cats and even much-loved pets might find their way onto the family dinner table, disguised as a Lancashire hotpot. Sensible parents and nursery maids soothed away these fears as best they could, but at the back of their minds they were pondering recent newspaper stories in which cats did indeed end up as human food.

The most notorious occasion had been in 1871, the very year in which Britain’s most pampered pusses were fluffing up their whiskers at the first Crystal Palace show. Just across the Channel, food supplies were running dangerously low, thanks to the German army’s siege of Paris in the desperate final months of the Franco-Prussian War. In need of new protein sources, beleaguered Parisian chefs started putting cat, dog, and rat regularly on the menu. On the night before the city finally capitulated, Mr Washbourne of the US embassy attended a smart restaurant and reported that the second course was a perfectly decent “ragout of cat”.

For right-minded Britons this was horrific although somehow expected. It was exactly the sort of practice that the French, with their filthy taste for horse and frog, might go in for. The only thing to do was to try and make it up to any cat that was lucky enough to have escaped to British soil. Just two years later, in 1873, the papers were full of a tabby that had recently been entered at Birmingham’s highly popular cat show. The hopeful contestant had a tearjerking backstory, which its owners may have hoped would win it the sympathy vote: the tabby’s mother had been eaten during the Siege of Paris. Unfortunately, this was not enough to melt the flinty hearts of the judges and the orphan failed to win any prizes.

It was, though, in Whitechapel — an area of London that so often stood in for the whole of the East End — where a gruesome reminder emerged about the fragile threshold between cat’s meat and human flesh. On September 8, 1888, Annie Chapman, a middle-aged alcoholic who subsisted on crochet work, flower-selling, and casual prostitution, was found murdered and disembowelled on the back-door steps of a terraced house in Hanbury Street. The front room of the ground floor of number 29 doubled as a cat’s meat shop. From these premises, fifty-one-year-old Harriet Hardiman sold horse flesh intended for those lucky pets whose owners could afford to buy it for them. Hardiman came from a family of cat’s meat men and she was busy bringing up her sixteen-year-old son to the trade. Every morning, young James Hardiman, who shared a room with his mother, loaded up a cart and set off on his round.

Annie Chapman is generally agreed to be the second of Jack the Ripper’s victims: her mutilation bore all the signs of his murderous work. At the inquest, it was revealed that she had been completely disembowelled, with a section of the flesh from her stomach being placed upon her left shoulder and another section of skin and flesh, plus her small intestines, being removed and placed above her right. The doctor giving evidence said that, while the injuries could have been done by the sort of knife a medical man used for postmortems, they were just as likely to be the result of one used by an animal slaughterman. This juxtaposition of Annie Chapman’s exposed viscera and a cat’s meat shop was enough to keep Victorian grown-ups, never mind the children, awake at night.

Seventeen years after Mayhew’s prospecting operation of 1851, his friend Charles Dickens fleshed out the supply chain by which the cat’s meat men generally acquired their stock. In his weekly magazine All the Year Round, Dickens ran an account of a visit to a central London abattoir to watch the midnight ritual of horse slaughter. The article is anonymous, but there’s a good chance that the novelist himself wrote it: as a little boy he had been fascinated by the mythic shimmer of the cat’s meat man.

On the night of the All the Year Round visit there were three dozen elderly or ailing nags waiting to be stunned, killed, stripped, rendered, and boiled. Legally this work should not have been done in the small hours, but as the cheery abattoir owner Mr Potler tells Dickens (or his stand-in): “the London tabbies are so dainty that they don’t like horse that’s been killed too long over-night”. After the flesh has been cut up into manageable chunks, it is piled into a light trap and at 6 a.m. Mr Potler sets off to deliver meat to the forty or so vendors who have put in their orders for “undred and a arf ” or “arf a undred . . . and three penn’orth”. The cat’s meat men then spend an hour or so threading the chunks onto wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha’penny snack to a three-penny feast. At 8 a.m., hand carts loaded, they rumble off on their rounds.

The dinner on 10 January 1901 in London was arranged in a spirit of cooperation, as a gesture of thanks to these rough Franciscans. An advertisement placed in the upmarket Morning Post explained that “anyone wishing to recommend a particular cat’s meat man will receive a ticket on forwarding the name and address with a donation of 2 shillings to the advertising secretary”. The official sponsor was Our Cats, the new weekly magazine dedicated to felines, and no less a person than Louis Wain — the commercial illustrator who, according to H. G. Wells, “invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world” — had agreed to give the address in his role as president of the committee of the National Cat Club (NCC).

The event turned out to be wildly oversubscribed, with 400 benevolent members of the public competing for 250 tickets, each of which would buy a seat at the table for their local cat's meat man? The atmosphere on the night, according to the man from The Morning Post, was boisterous. Two hundred and fifty cat’s meat men, in their best bib and tucker, sat down at long tables and greeted “the appearance of the soup, the roast beef, and the boiled legs of mutton with prolonged cries of ‘Mee-att!’ in the familiar notes of the street”. At one point during the dinner, the Duchess of Bedford rendered invaluable assistance by passing round the sprouts. Her Grace also made a brief speech in which she urged the men to report and rescue any cats that they suspected were being ill-treated behind closed doors. Entertainment was provided by the classical musician Natalia Janotha, who turned up with both her cat and her fiddle.

After dinner Louis Wain rapped on the table with a soda bottle and said a few words. This gathering was “not a charity, but the guests were invited as cat lovers, and met as ‘pals’”. He particularly thanked them for the way they habitually sneaked titbits to starving strays. To emphasise just how socially elevated the whole business of being nice to cats had become, a letter from the Princess of Wales was read aloud expressing her disappointment at being unable to attend. To be fair, Princess Alexandra probably had more pressing matters on her mind. Within a fortnight she would become Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Empress of India.