photo #8736255

A cat’s meat man outside a poor home in the East End, 1901. These men travelled the streets with their barrows, selling leftover scraps of meat from slaughterhouses as cat food. It was often horsemeat and therefore unfit for human consumption. The lettering on the side of the house marks the coronation of King Edward VII, and the well-dressed man in the centre is a missionary from the London City Mission. Once upon a time, Street sellers in London included watercress sellers, costermongers, and baked potato sellers, but one of the most popular street sellers of the 1800s was the cat’s meat man or cats’ meat woman (sometimes spelled cats-meat). If you think they sold cat meat lol , you are entirely wrong. What a cats’ meat seller sold was meat to cats. According sources, it was horse, cats meat that the seller acquired from horse slaughterers, known as knackers. Hence the saying, I am absolutely knackered. “A knackers yard is where you would take your old horse when he/she could no longer work, subsequently it ending with the horses demise and the meat being used for dog and cat food, Anyway.. In 1860s, it was estimated there were 300,000 cats in London alone. To feed this multitude of cats, it was “stated that 26,000 horses, maimed, or past work, “were” slaughtered and cut up each year to feed … household pets and because it was a highly profitable business, it also involved some 1,000 cats’ meat sellers. 📷© Museum of London © Historic UK #archaeohistories