20: Jenny the Titanic Cat
Supposedly Aboard the Doomed Ship
Birth and Death Dates and Locations Unknown
As most of you know, I consider myself a bit of a Titanic expert, and while I knew the stories of many of the dogs onboard, a cat was a different story.
Supposedly, as the story goes, Jenny was the ship’s mascot and was cared for by a laborer named either Jim or Joseph Mulholland. Jenny lived near the ship’s galley (or kitchen) and was brought on board to help fight rodents. She had previously served in the same capacity aboard the Olympic.
During Titanic’s Sea trials, Jenny gave birth to a litter of kittens. Jim found the tiny family a place to keep warm near the galley.
Everything seemed fine, and Jenny and her kittens stayed abord the ship as it docked in Queenstown and Cherbourg. However, things changed when the ship docked for a final time in Southampton.
Apparently, Jenny could sense the coming danger. One by one, she picked each kitten up by the scruff of their neck and carried them down the gangplank, to dry land and safety, disappearing into the annals of history.
Jim decided that Jenny must have had a sixth sense about the ship, and supposedly he also took his belongings and left the ship as well.
Supposedly, the source for this story (according to Facebook) is what I am assuming was a newspaper called “Irish Road” that talked to Jim as an old man, who claimed his life had been saved by a mama cat and her babies.
Yahoo News and Mental Floss both state that the famous survivor Violet Jessop saw Jenny and her kittens, but I have no idea how anyone could actually verify that claim. Yahoo and Mental Floss also states that Jenny and her kittens were still abord the ship when it sank and so their fate is unknown.
It is very likely that there were multiple cats onboard Titanic, as mice and rats were a very real problem on ships in that day and age. Whether or not any of them survived the sinking, or what the names of those other felines would have been, is lost to history.
Just like the story of Signalman Jack the Baboon, Jenny’s story is recounted on a number of pop culture websites, but I haven’t been able to see any reliable cited historical sources about her story. The photo included in this article was posted on The Vintage News, but apparently there are no known actual photos of Jenny, and this one honestly looks like it might be photoshopped anyways. If Jenny and her kittens were real, I really hope they were able to escape the doomed ship with their lives!
What I was able to verify is that Joseph Mullholland was a real crew member, and he did disembark in Southampton. According to his Encyclopedia Titanic entry (linked below), Joseph left the ship partially because he saw the ship’s cat (presumably Jenny) leaving the ship, but also because of several other crewmembers making comments that worried him about the safety of the ship—including Thomas Andrews himself.
There is very little other information about Joseph in the article, and Encyclopedia Titanic even admits they do not have a death date for Joseph as he disappeared from history after 1962. Well, at least there is a grain of certifiable fact in this story!
Sources:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tragic-story-jenny-titanic-cat-193714174.html
https://titanic.fandom.com/wiki/Jenny_(Cat)
https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/titanic/jenny-titanic-cat
https://www.facebook.com/groups/catsaddicted/posts/1605414517504486
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_aboard_the_Titanic
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2022/07/25/jenny-the-cat-titanic
https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-biography/joseph-mulholland.html