September 19, 2024

Fiona Bowler: From Cold War History to Reg the Cat

Meet Fiona and her cat Reg.

Dr. Fiona Bowler is a historian with a love for all things chaotic — thanks to her cat, Reg. “There’s never a dull moment with him around,” she says. During the interview, we often had to pause to find out what mischief the little “chaos monster” was up to. But Reg isn’t just a social media sensation; he’s also helped shine a light on Fiona’s work with the often-forgotten Cold War nuclear testing, British nuclear test veterans, and the struggles they face.

Her project goes beyond individual stories. It examines how the movement for compensation evolved in the 1980s and what it reveals about Britain in the post-war era, touching on topics like Cold War militarism and national identity. And lucky for us, we sat down with Fiona to learn about the project and the book she’s working on. We also had a front-row seat to watch Reg being Reg. For Fiona, it’s more than a job — it’s a labor of love, and Reg is right there, reminding us that sometimes, chaos is the way forward.

Life as a historian

I'm a historian. I work mostly on Cold War history. My PhD was on British atmospheric nuclear testing. At the moment, I am working on a project that is recording oral history interviews with nuclear test veterans. So they’re all British servicemen, a few civilians, and scientists who were posted to Australia and Christmas Island in the 1950s and 1960s to watch nuclear detonations, essentially during the Cold War. They’re all in their 80s and 90s now and we go and we sit down with them, and we record their kind of life history. So right from their childhoods. Most of them kind of grew up during the Second World War. We record that all the way up to sort of the present day, including the experience of watching nuclear tests and nuclear weapons go off, which is kind of an amazing thing to get to do.

I absolutely love the job that I do. And then obviously, I’m also the owner of this absolute menace to society, Reg, who is currently got his head in a box. And that kind of came about, I did some volunteering with Cats Protection, which is a UK-based charity that looks after cat populations in the UK, and helps with the sort of rehoming of feral cats. Rehoming cats that kind of can’t be kept by their owners. And I was a fosterer for them. I fostered Reg, and he started out as this really, really sweet, kind of innocent baby who wouldn’t come out of his box, and then slowly, he just revealed that he was actually a complete menace. The first thing he did was he nearly flooded the kitchen because he managed to turn the tap on, which was pretty impressive.

The first night that we left him downstairs, I had a little camera that I always leave with the cats we foster in the kitchen, and came down, and he just knocked the camera off the side and broke it so that he couldn’t be watched overnight. He knocks tea towels down, he will climb up the oven, and there’s a video of him pulling tea towels off, quite high off the oven.

He stole a pair of scissors and took them to his bed, which is perhaps one of the more kind of concerning things that he did. He’s just so inquisitive. He wants to be like involved in everything. He wants to be in everything. He’s very, very intelligent, super intelligent. And I just, it kind of got to the point where I was like I can’t let him go somewhere else because we have a bond. We’ve bonded over him being a menace to society, basically.

I posted a thread on Twitter about the various things that he’d done, and it sort of went quite viral. And I gained a lot of Twitter followers. Everyone just kind of is obsessed with him. I think because he is so cheeky, and I get a lot of replies being like, Oh, I love hearing about Reggie’s exploits, but I’m really glad he doesn’t live with me. He is a handful, but he’s great. So at night, we sort of put everything away, all his toys are still out and stuff, but anything that he could, like hurt himself on or break is put away. But still, sometimes it’ll be like 3am and I’ll hear this massive crash from the spare room and I’ll go in and he’s like knocked his toys out of the room. It’s like onto the floor, and it’s kind of having sort of an Olympic training session, just like running from one side of the room to the other.

The other day I heard this massive crash from upstairs, and I went upstairs, and he opened, well, so the window was kind of on the vent, but he’d opened the window. He’s not allowed; he’s mostly an indoor cat. He goes in the garden a little bit, but he’s really not; he doesn’t like being outside. And he jumped out of the window onto the roof, onto like the kind of lower bit of the roof. So I went outside, and he was up on the roof, and he was just screaming his head off. I thought it was my fault that he’d gone out the window. He wouldn’t move, he was just standing there screaming. So I had to get a ladder, climb up so I could get him off the roof. I nearly fell off the ladder trying to get him off the roof. This was just like a work, like I was in the middle of working, I was just trying to work, and he’d just fallen out of the window, basically.

So at the minute I’m in the process of moving. Hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll move to my new house, and then yeah, the intention is to get Reg, I think probably a little baby sister. Because obviously, Reg is from Cats Protection, so probably go through Cats Protection, get him a little baby sister, because I do think he would benefit from having another cat to keep them entertained. When I was growing up, we had two cats, Sandy and Millie, and that’s kind of where my love of cats came from, really. I wouldn’t have Reg if I hadn’t had Sandy and Millie, because they were my cats right from when I was six to when I was 21. I think two cats is the ideal number of cats. The more cats the better, I think, maybe I’ll end up with kind of eight or nine, but as long as they’re not all like Reg because that would be carnage. It’s strange because cats are kind of, they are sort of like solitary creatures in the wild. They would just live on their own, but they can learn to kind of get on with other cats. And Reg, he came from a multi-cat household. So the place that he came from before he came to Cats Protection, there were lots of cats. So he is used to being around other cats. I think he would probably adapt to it quite well. But obviously, it’s a process introducing two cats, and I’m sure it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

Since I got him, he’s definitely put on weight. We’re not exactly sure how old he is, but they reckon he’s about two. But I think I’m kind of biased because my parents have a Siberian forest cat, and he’s huge, like massive. That’s Percy. Whereas Reg is kind of, I guess, average domestic cat size. He’s like three and a half kilograms, something like that, whereas Percy is like seven and a half kilograms. So I think Reg just looks tiny compared to Percy. I’m hoping he will calm down as he gets older, I guess time will tell. I’ll probably just have to kind of see what, who’s at Cats Protection at the time — who needs a home, because they get kittens quite a lot when sort of pregnant. If there are pregnant mother cats on that, they’re kind of strays, they’ll take them in, they have their kittens somewhere safe, and then rehome the kittens and rehome the mom. If the mom is kind of domestic. If the mom is feral, they get rehomed to what are called like feral homes. So it’d be homes on farms or kind of large outdoor areas where there’s someone to keep an eye on the cats, but they’re not house cats. They kind of look after themselves, fend for themselves. But they can get vet treatment if they need it and things like that. It very much depends.

” It’s chaos. There’s never a dull day.

Reg’s adoption story

I remember when I had a foster cat and Smudge, and then she left. And then it was time to go and get another one. I went to Cats Protection because I used to go and kind of help out at the pens, and Reg was in his pen, and he was actually, it’s sort of like a wire door. And he was sort of just halfway up the wire door just sort of hanging on and I was like that’s the one I want, that’s the one I’m gonna foster. So this was about March and he’d come in, in sort of December and then he’d been homed, but he’d been brought back because he hadn’t got on with the person who’d adopted him, their other cat. And so I think a part of me was like, oh, that’s really sad that he’s kind of had a home and then he’s had to come back to the pens. So I took him home and he was really, really shy and really sort of sweet and just quite kind of timid. And he just stayed in his bed for like the first couple of days. And then just slowly he just got more and more chaotic and more and more friendly. Like he’s so, so friendly. He’s very, very anxious around new people. He’ll kind of hide away from them. I don’t know what he’s doing. But yeah, he’ll kind of hide away from new people until he sort of gets to know them a bit more. But he’s just always purring, always kind of wants fuss and attention. And you know, it became, I couldn’t cope with the idea of him going to a new home somewhere else. I just knew that I, was gonna keep him. And when I’d got him, I’d kind of gone through like a really difficult time with a relationship breakup and I just thought we need each other basically. I have been thankful for him ever since.

He came with a name. I didn’t name him. I don’t know who named him. I think he arrived at Cats Protection with his name. It’s the perfect name for him. I don’t think you could get a better name. He embodies Reg, and he has lots of nicknames that I like to call him, but I think he would absolutely thrive in ancient Egypt when they worshipped cats. I think he would be adored and he would love being worshipped as well. I feel like he would, he would make a good ship’s cat as well. I think he’d be quite good, maybe on a pirate ship or something. I think he’d be quite good. I think he’d suit that. Cause he’s quite sort of like impish and obviously very naughty. So I think he’d probably do well there. Although I don’t know how good his hunting skills are. In terms of, you know, having to be a mouse or I don’t know quite how good he’d be at that. Because he’s never caught anything in his life. He sometimes has sort of sparring matches with spiders, which they seem to come off better in. He seems to get a bit scared of them.

Reg's daily routine

So, in the morning, I normally go in for him to see what destruction he’s caused overnight because he’s not allowed, and I can’t sleep in the same room as him. Because I just wouldn’t sleep, because he just never not doing something. So I normally go in and see what chaos, what destruction he’s caused, what he’s broken in the night. Give him some food, which he always wolfs down. And then we normally just hang out. And then if I’m working, he’s normally, sometimes he’ll be around, or sometimes I’ll have to just like shut the office door, otherwise, he’ll just kind of cause too much chaos as he is right now. And then sometimes I’ll like take him out into the garden for a bit. He quite likes going in the garden, just have a little explore, get him some more food.

Normally like 8 o’clock, he has this like crazy, I mean, he’s always quite, he always has crazy 5 minutes, but he’ll have this kind of period of like half an hour where he is just literally running from one side of the house or from one side of the room to the other, doing like gymnastics, flips, like chaos. Every day is different because you never know what he’s gonna decide to do on a certain day. I work from home predominantly. So I’m normally just kind of getting on with work, whether I’m writing or whatever. And he’s normally just distracting me from whatever I’m trying to do. That’s sort of my usual routine.

” Despite the sort of all of the things that he’s broken, all of the chaos that he has caused, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Cold War history and the upcoming book

So, in terms of how I got into the kind of subject of nuclear testing, my grandfather was at Christmas Island. He was in the RAF, so he was on Christmas Island during the bomb tests in the 1950s. And so I’d kind of grown up with an awareness of it, always sort of knew it was something that had gone on, but it wasn’t until my last year of my undergrad degree, I ended up doing my dissertation on Christmas Island. I just kind of fell in love with the subject, the topic. I had always been kind of interested in the Cold War and sort of nuclear weapons, and it really just sort of blew my mind. picked up then. I did a master’s dissertation was on the Manhattan Project, the plutonium injection experiments, which was when the US injected plutonium into essentially what they deemed to be terminally ill patients in American hospitals. In order to work out the toxicity of plutonium, essentially. But the people that they injected had no idea. And it was, it became a huge scandal in the sort of 90, early 1990s. There’s an archive of oral history interviews with some of the scientists who did the experiments.

For my master’s dissertation, I looked at kind of ideas of national security and ethics around those experiments. And then for my PhD, I went back to British nuclear testing, and I interviewed nuclear test veterans, and I wrote about the kind of campaigns that they’ve been involved in, for the kind of perception of radiation exposure that they have, and the difficulties that they’ve had in getting compensation. For what they view as, as kind of radiation exposure that’s caused all sorts of illnesses and diseases among that community. And then this project kind of grew out of that. We’re very lucky to be working with the British Library. So all of the interviews that we do will be available on the British Library website. And all of those interviews as well, I’m using for the book that I’m writing, which is basically a history of British nuclear test spectrum activism. So it starts off with the kind of test themselves and then it looks at how in the early sort of 1960s, late 1950s, there were sort of a handful of cases of British servicemen dying of things like leukemia, that their parents or themselves attributed to their time at the nuclear tests. And then it sort of grew and built as a movement in the 1980s around the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, which started campaigning for compensation for veterans who had been disabled, or who had died, or had children with genetic disorders. And it looks at the kind of development of that community, and kind of within a context of sort of Britain in the post war era and what that means for things like kind of Cold War militarism, masculinity in post war, national service, that sort of thing. So it’s something that’s kind of grown directly out of my own kind of involvement I suppose in it, being the granddaughter of a test veteran.

It’s been really nice, having had Reg go quite viral on Twitter, being able to kind of promote the project through that and otherwise wouldn’t have sort of heard of it has been amazing. And I shared something quite recently—it was a photograph of a cat on HMS Koala, which was one of the Australian ships during Operation Hurricane. So Britain’s first nuclear bomb test. And it was a photo of a cat being sort of run over with a Geiger counter following the destination. They’d been found in the Australian archives.

And so kind of sharing that and finding a link between cats and the history that I look at was quite exciting and quite interesting. You know a lot of people have said, they wouldn’t have known about this kind of testing, unless they’d seen Reggie on Twitter. So that’s quite cool.

The book will be out next year, still finishing it up at the moment. It will be kind of an academic monograph, so it’s quite a long process writing them, but yeah, it’s exciting. It’s getting made longer by Reg.

” It’s definitely been a sort of labor of love. You know, one of the best things about the job that I get to do is I get to sort of meet the veterans and talk to them and be involved in that. That’s really special and something that, you know, not a lot of people can say that they really love the job that they do and they wake up and they’re excited to do the job they do, but I’m very lucky in that I am and I feel like our project team is doing something very, very important and very significant.

The last video on your phone

The last video that I took of Reg was him playing with his — he’s got like a spinny, got like balls in it, and it’s like spinning, and it’s him playing with that, and he’s very focused on what he’s doing. It’s not particularly good quality because it was quite dark. You look at my camera reel and it’s just like Reg all the way down. There are very few photos that don’t feature Reg. My entire camera roll is just photos and videos of Reg. You’re probably the same when you’ve got a cat. They’re just such time wasters. They just take constant videos of them.

It’s lucky Reg’s cute, because he’s such a chaos monster. I never really expected it to go, for him to become such a sensation, and it’s nice that other people are kind of interested in him. What he does, because I do think he’s a very cool cat, when I initially posted him with links to Cats Protection and I think we raised like quite a lot of money for Cats Protection, like 500 pounds. People donating because they thought they wanted to help cats like Reg. I would say donate to your local cat shelters, always adopt, don’t shop. And stay chaotic, because as Reg has proven, chaos is the way forward.

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