Simon of HMS Amethyst: The Cat Who Earned the Dickin Medal Under Siege

August 8, 2026

He was not supposed to be on the ship. He was seventeen months old, severely underweight, and small enough to be hidden inside a sailor's peaked cap. The ship was HMS Amethyst. The cat was Simon. And what was about to happen to that ship would last 101 days.

Hong Kong, 1948

George Hickinbottom was a seventeen-year-old sailor from Birmingham. Sometime in early 1948, while HMS Amethyst was docked in Hong Kong, he found a stray kitten on the docks, tucked it inside his cap, and smuggled it aboard. The ship's crew named him Simon.

Simon was not in good health when he arrived. He was thin, covered in fleas, and had a badly infected ear. The ship's medic treated him. He recovered quickly, put on weight, and became a fixture of the lower decks, chasing rats, sleeping in the crew's hammocks, and sitting in on the officers' meetings uninvited.

April 20, 1949 — The Yangtze

HMS Amethyst was sailing up the Yangtze River toward Nanking in the early morning when Chinese Communist artillery on the riverbanks opened fire at 9:30 a.m. The ship was caught in an exposed stretch of river with nowhere to go. More than fifty shells hit the vessel. Captain Bernard Skinner was killed at the bridge. Twenty-two men died in the attack. The ship ran aground on a sandbank.

Simon was found later that day in the captain's quarters with four shrapnel wounds and burns across his face and body. The ship's doctor cleaned his wounds, treated the burns, and noted in the record that he did not expect the cat to survive the night.

101 Days

Simon survived. He was moving through the ship again within days. Lieutenant Commander John Kerans, who took command after the captain's death, credited Simon with keeping the crew's morale from collapsing during the siege. The ship sat grounded under siege for 101 days, unable to move, surrounded, running low on supplies. Simon walked the sick bay, sat with the wounded, and maintained his rounds of the lower decks, catching rats that were getting into the food stores.

July 30, 1949

Under cover of darkness and a heavy thunderstorm, HMS Amethyst made a run for the open sea. No charts. One hundred and four miles down the Yangtze River, past Communist artillery positions on both banks, in the dark. HMS Concord was waiting at the river mouth. They made it.

Simon received the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. He is the only cat ever to receive it. He arrived in England on November 1, 1949, and was placed in quarantine as required by law. He died in quarantine on November 28, 1949. He was two years old. He was buried with full naval honors at the PDSA Animal Cemetery in Ilford, Essex.