White Feather Pets Club (picture)

August 1965

South Yorkshire Times Aug 14th, 1965.

White Feather Pets Club

Img_0936 hancock

We told our readers exclusively a fortnight ago, how Michael Hancock (14) of Leslie Avenue, Conanby, was rearing a young partridge and how he had taught an owl to act as an ‘alarm clock’ before releasing it when it was old enough to fend for itself. Now he and three of his pals are doing all they can to tend sick animals and they have called themselves The White Feather Pets Club.

His pals are Stephen Pratt (14), Tommy Armstrong (13), and Stephen Buckley (11), all of whom live in Leslie Avenue. They plan to comb the district and perhaps to camp out in the local countryside, looking for animals in need if care. Tommy, of 24, Leslie Avenue, told the ‘South Yorkshire Times’ in a letter, ‘I think the White Feather Pets Club is a sort of R.S.P.C.A. – only on a smaller scale.’

On Monday Tommy, like his pals a pupil of Conisbrough Northcliffe County High School, told our reporter, ‘We are now thinking of forming two groups to go out looking for injured pets. And if we can earn enough money from our paper rounds, we want to buy some huts to keep the animals in. We should also like to go camping to look for animals, but what we really need is some more good members to help us.’

Tommy himself has a dog, a cat and two kittens, a hen and three chicks. Michael Hancock, of 3, Leslie Avenue, has the partridge (hatched out in the school incubator) while fellow founder member Stephen Pratt of number 11, has a terrapin with a cracked shell, a fan-tail pigeon, and some ordinary pigeons, one of which he cared for after it had been pecked.