To Visit the Queen - страница 146

The appearance of a gray tabby in Parliament on 9 July 1874 is not mentioned in Hansard, the official Parliamentary publication, but is covered in some detail in The Times of London for the next day. Chris Pond at the Public Information Office of the Palace of Westminster says, "In the nineteenth century there were eleven private residences in the building, and I imagine the residents of some of these may have kept a cat, if for no reason other than to control mice numbers." However, there is no clear explanation of how a cat would have got all the way down from the residences into the Commons chamber, unobserved … unless it was not quite an ordinary cat.