‘Please would you tell me,’ said Alice… ‘why your cat grins like that?’ ‘Because it’s a Cheshire Cat,’ said the Duchess, ‘and that’s why.’
Lewis Carroll was a Cheshire man, born at Hatton, and there have been many attempts to identify a visual inspiration within the county for his Cheshire Cat. One popular explanation connects it with the ‘red cat’ of Brimstage (south-west of Birkenhead), which can be seen inside the fourteenth- to fifteenth-century oratory there. Supporting the ribs of the oratory vaulting are various grotesque corbels, one of which is a grinning red sandstone cat. Although grotesques, often representing demons, were the delight of medieval carvers—grinning cats appear in several churches—some suggest that the Brimstage cat comes from heraldry.
The license to build this chapel was granted in 1398 to Sir Hugh de Hulse and his wife Marjery, who was a Domville, on whose coat of arms appeared a red lion rampant. Possibly the ‘red cat’ was an attempt at a lion by someone who had never seen one. Also to be taken into account is the fact that there was at one time an inn at Brimstage named the Red Cat, which sported ‘a fearsome sign’. It is uncertain whether this sign referred to the cat in the church or to the Domville lion; lions on inn signs were sometimes referred to by local wags as ‘cats’, not only in Cheshire.
Whether Carroll knew the Brimstage carving or not, he did not entirely invent the Cheshire Cat. A popular expression ‘to grin like a Cheshire cat’ was already current by about 1770. Some have explained this phrase in terms of heraldry, as a visual pun on the open-mouthed wolf heads of Hugh Lupus; or others have claimed that the cat represents John Catherall of Chester, a fourteenth-century forester said to have dealt mercilessly with poachers and to have grinned horribly when enraged.
Another theory is that the tribal emblem of the Cornovii who once occupied Cheshire might have been a wildcat; or that ‘cat’ is here a term of abuse related to Old Welsh catau ‘to fight’ and applied by the Welsh to the men of Cheshire when that county served as a springboard for conquest. Other theories link the cat to Cheshire cheese: that miniature cheeses were occasionally made in the shape of cats; that ‘cat’ was a cheesemakers’ term for cheese that had shrunk, causing the cloth wrapped round it to wrinkle so that it looked like a cat face; that when overripe cheese splits it is said to ‘grin’. Eric Partridge conjectured that the expression was originally ‘cheeser cat’, a cat very fond of cheese and grinning with pleasure after enjoying some. (A cat analysing a strong-smelling substance may indeed seem to grin as it breathes through the mouth, pulling its lips back and wrinkling its nose, a process known as flehmening.)
However, none of these arguments is wholly convincing, and both Carroll’s and the proverbial Cheshire Cat are best left at ‘origin unknown’. If we have to put a face on Carroll’s cat, the ‘red cat’ of Brimstage is as good a candidate as any.