The Singapura
From Houston with Love

By Phil Maggitti
Photograph by Isabelle Francais
Cats & Kittens Magazine, November 1999

P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) once volunteered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could make him the butt of his own famous phrase, "There's a sucker born every minute." Not long afterward Barnum received a letter from a gentleman in Maine who claimed to have a cherry-colored cat that would be just right for exhibition in Barnum's circus. Barnum replied that he would be happy to exhibit the cat if it were, indeed, cherry-colored, and he asked the gentleman to send the cat to him. Several days later a crate marked "live animal" arrived at Barnum's office. When he opened the crate, there was a frightened black cat inside, accompanied by a note that read, "Maine cherries are black. There's a sucker born every minute." Barnum cheerfully remitted the ten grand.

Fish to Fry

Had Barnum lived in the present century, his $10,000 prize might have gone to the purveyors of another kind of cat, the Singapura, alleged to have been discovered on the streets of Singapore - 244 square miles of high population density comprising one main island and 50 adjacent islands off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Singapore's 3.4 million inhabitants live 13,934 to the square mile in a wet, tropical climate that averages 81 degrees and a quarter of an inch of rain each day.

The Singapura was said to have been discovered in the summer of 1974 by two Americans - Tommy Meadow and her husband Hal - who lived on the island at the time. According to their story, Hal Meadow, a geophysicist who worked for an oil company, had been transferred to Singapore on business in 1972. Some time after he and Tommy had arrived there, Tommy, a former Cat Fancier's Federation allbreed judge, became involved with the Singapore Feline Society, for which she served as registrar.

In a conversation with a British pilot and his wife who were members of the cat society, Tommy first learned about a small, brown-ticked feral cat with large eyes. Known as the "drain cat" after its habit of taking refuge in the island's drains, this cat "had been seen in the streets by people who know cats by at least 1965," said Meadow. She pointed out, however, that the drain cat, "which exists in small pockets on the island, is not the typical Singapore street cat. The predominant cats over there look like Japanese bobtails or like magnificently colored ruddy Abyssinians."

Curiosity, which affects cat people as much as it does cats, led Tommy and Hal Meadow to spend "a bunch of time going behind restaurants with fish in our smelly pockets because that's where you usually found the street cats," said Tommy. At last in June 1974 the Meadows spied their first Singapura, outside a Thai restaurant.

"Hal rushed back into the restaurant to get some fish," said Tommy, "and I tried to hold the cat's attention." After lengthy negotiations the Meadows were about to retire defeated when a small, brown-ticked kitten emerged from a nearby drain.

"That was our first Singapura," said Meadow. "We named her Pusse, with an accent mark over the e. She was about six weeks old when we found her."

Tommy and Hal were walking near the waterfront one evening about a month later when they heard "some squeaking." They followed the sound to a nest of four kittens. A female and a male from that litter, whom they named Tes and Ticle, became their second and third Singapuras.

At the time the Meadows didn't plan to make any big deal or even a special breed out of their new cats. "We just liked their looks," said Tommy.

Home Cooking

The fall of Saigon in April 1975 had a domino effect on the oil-exploration industry in Singapore, so the Meadows returned to the United States with Tes, Ticle, and Pusse, and two of Pusse's kittens - the more primly named Gladys and George, who had been sired by Ticle. "Hal had decided to bring this breed back [to the United States] and perpetuate it," said Tommy. "I asked him, 'Do you know what you're getting into?' But he finally convinced me."

Encouraged by a cat fancier in Houston, where they were living at the time, the Meadows showed two of their Singapuras in the new-breed-and-color class in an American Cat Fanciers Association show in Colorado. After Hal Meadow had been transferred to California in 1976, he and Tommy showed a few of their cats in Los Angeles. They were well received, and before long Singapuras had been granted registration status in four cat associations in this country. Finally, in 1979 The International Cat Association and the Cat Fanciers' Federation became the first cat registries to recognize the Singapura for championship competition.

The Straits Skinny

The story of their encounters with the drain cats was told and retold by the Meadows, who might still be telling it today were it not for a reporter for The Straits Times in Singapore named Sandra Davie; a longtime official of the Singapore Cat Club named Lucy Koh; and an American Singapura fancier from Georgia named Jerry Mayes.

Mayes, who is now deceased, went to Singapore in 1987 to look for street cats like the ones the Meadows had brought home a dozen years earlier; but people on the island looked at him as though he had a third eye when he started asking about little, brown-ticked street cats that lived in drains. One question led to others and those led to the Primary Production Department of the Ministry of National Development. That's where Mayes discovered importation papers for six cats that the Meadows had with them when they entered Singapore on November 1, 1974. Three of those cats went by the unforgettable names of Tes, Ticle, and Pusse.

Mayes' friend Lucy Koh was not particularly surprised by his discovery. Koh told Cats & Kittens in a telephone interview last October that she suspected "from the beginning that Tommy hadn't found Tes, Ticle, and Pusse on the streets of Singapore." What's more, said Koh, she was in possession of a copy of a personal letter that Tommy Meadow had written to the editor of Cat World magazine in March 1975, a month before leaving Singapore.

"I'm trying to get some of these people out of their ruts," wrote Meadow, "and the only way I know how to do it is to appeal to their pride through notoriety because the place is wide open and anyone could make a killing in fame as well as money by importing a pair of any one of the more spectacular cats." Or, perhaps, by passing off a cat made in the USA as Singapore's national mascot.

Lucy Koh had written to cat magazines in the United States and England from time to time seeking to correct misinformation in some of the articles Tommy Meadows had written, but this effort might have gone unnoticed by the world at large if the tourist board of Singapore hadn't decided to anoint the Singapura as the island's national mascot. The tourist board, envisioning a full-monty promotion, had plastered the Singapura's image all over posters, and had commissioned sculptors to produce two dozen cat statues that were to be set out along the river way.

"The tourist board called me about it first," said Koh, "and I told them the truth: 'This is not a natural breed of island cat. It's a hybrid.' They didn't want to hear that, so they reached Tommy and then came up with this Singapura promotion. One woman from the tourist board said to me, 'Don't give us problems. We can do this without you.' So I went straight to Sandra Davie and let her know what was going on. I gave her all my papers, then she wrote the article, and I had a good laugh on the tourist promotion board."

Red Carpet Treatment

Davie's article convinced some cat fanciers in the United States that the Singapura ought to have been Houston's mascot because Tommy Meadow had cooked the cats up in her basement there, using Burmese and Abyssinians in her recipe. Before long a protest was filed against the Meadows with the Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA), and the couple was issued a nonbinding invitation to explain themselves at a CFA board meeting in February 1991.

What happened next was enough to send P.T. Barnum reaching for his checkbook. "We had to lie," said the Meadows cheerfully because Hal Meadow had been sent to Singapore in 1971 on work of such a sensitive nature, "involving data acquisition for an oil company," that no one was supposed to know he had been there. While Hal was busy acquiring data, he had also acquired three, brown-ticked cats. He paid a crewman on a ship that was bound for the United States to transport these cats to his friend Tommy (the Meadows weren't married at the time), who was living in Houston. There were no import or export papers sent with the cats, said the Meadows; nor was there any other record of their origin, but the Meadows did have passports and visas to prove that Hal Meadow had been in Singapore in 1971.

Tommy went on to explain that she was so intrigued by the appearance of the kittens Hal had sent her, she allowed them to reproduce. She kept no records of these breedings because she didn't intend to seek recognition for the kittens. When Hal Meadow was sent back to Singapore in the fall of 1974, she went with him. Expecting to be there for "as long as 10 years," the Meadows took six cats to Singapore, including three grandchildren of the cats that Hal Meadow had shipped to this country in 1971. Those grandchildren, about four months old, were the aforementioned Tes, Ticle, and Pusse. According to their import papers they were the products of an Abyssinian- Burmese cross.

Tommy Meadow further claimed that someone in the Singapore Feline Society (SFS), which later became the Singapore Cat Club, suggested that because these brown-ticked cats resembled a variety seen on the streets in Singapore, they would make a swell new breed. As a result her cats were given initial registration status by the SFS, which called them Singapuras.

Lucy Koh maintains, however, that Tommy Meadow, while serving as registrar of SFS, had "[drawn] up a standard for her 'new breed'" by herself and had "revised and made alterations to registration procedures."

After hearing only the Meadows' testimony, CFA chose not to censure, much less to suspend them. Nor did the organization feel obliged to change the Singapura's description from "naturally occurring" to "hybrid" cat. One CFA official went so far as to say, "Everyone generally agrees that the gene pool that created the Singapura has always been in southeast Asia. Naturally it came from the Burmese gene pool, the Copper Cat has been there since 1350 that we know of, and the Abyssinian. Whether they mated on the streets of Singapore or whether they mated in Michigan, it doesn't really matter. In addition, there is at least one documented cat that is behind many Singapura pedigrees, and it was picked up at the pound [in Singapore]. Even with none of the cats the Meadows brought in, we still have a legitimate cat from Singapore behind our Singapuras."

There's an argument P.T. Barnum would have loved. Bill Clinton, ruminating in his study late at night about the precise meaning of the word is, would no doubt love it, too. Some people, however, want more proof than Tommy Meadow was able to provide that her revisionist Singapura history is the truth. They argue that Meadow's second coming was not strengthened by her lack of recall.

"Here is this woman who started a whole new breed," said Sandra Davie, "and she doesn't even remember the names of the first cats her husband sent her. That's quite strange."

Also strange is the lack of any records, veterinary or otherwise, to indicate that those cats ever existed; but Tommy Meadow, who claimed to be a member of MENSA, brushed that sort of technicality aside.

"You're talking 20 years ago," she said in 1991. "I don't even remember what vet I was using then."

Quick now, do you remember who your vet was 20 years ago? I don't recall his name, but I can tell you where his office was, and I remember distinctly that he wore an altogether unconvincing rug.

The Building Code

The Singapura is a small-to-medium-sized, muscular cat with a sparkling appearance and strikingly large eyes. Its fine, short, close-lying coat embraces alternating bands of color: a warm, old-ivory tone occupies the band closest to the skin and all the odd-numbered bands, while dark brown ticking occupies the even-numbered bands and must be in evidence at the tip of the hair shaft. Each hair in the coat should accommodate at least two, dark brown bands.

Commanding, large, almond-shaped eyes, set not less than an eye-width apart dominate the Singapura's expression. These yellow, green, or hazel jewels are mounted in a small, appealing face with a rounded skull, definite whisker break, medium-short, broad muzzle, and a blunt nose with a slight stop well below eye level. Large ears–slightly pointed, wide open at the base, and deeply cupped–are positioned with their outer lines extending upward at an angle just wide of parallel.

The largeness displayed in the Singapura's shimmering color and its generous eyes and ears stands in contrast to its small-to-medium-sized, moderately stocky frame. Often referred to as the smallest recognized breed, the Singapura is well-muscled and balanced for its size.

Personality Profile

The Singapura combines, as one suspects that it would, the sweetness of the Burmese with the playful and inquisitive nature of the Abyssinian. "These cats are tuned into people's moods," said the breed's co-founder, Tommy Meadow. "They're gentle; they're very, very curious; and they stay playful when they're grown."

Phil Maggitti is a freelance writer living happily ever after in the land of virtual reality. His forwarding address is http://home.ptd.net/~heyphil/

The Singapura. Cats & Kittens Magazine, November 1999, by Phil Maggitti