The Surrey Puma: Ernest Jellett's Sighting and the Big Cat Wave

The Surrey and Hampshire border had cat stories long before the 1960s. William Cobbett, writing from Farnham, recalled a cat at Waverley Abbey from his boyhood: "a big grey cat, the size of a medium-sized spaniel". In August 1959 a witness named A. Burningham saw a cat "approximately the size of a Labrador dog" crossing a country lane. Later it was seen crouching in some trees, watching lambs.

July 1962. The sources cannot agree on the day, the 15th or the 16th. Ernest Jellett, a water board worker and a keen naturalist, was walking up a country lane towards the Heathy Park Reservoir. The North Downs. Not far from Farnham.

Then he "saw a huge, cat-like animal pursuing a rabbit down the lane toward him." It had "a sort of round, flat face." The tail was long and thin, not bushy, and the paws were big. Jellett was convinced it was no ordinary domestic cat, but a genuine big cat, possibly a puma.

He shouted. The cat, obviously frightened, bounded off into the undergrowth at one side of the lane. Police later went to the lane. They found a patch of flattened undergrowth where a large animal could have rested.

That winter a big cat made several nocturnal visits to Bushylease Farm, between Ewshot and Crondall. In August 1964 a bullock there was found severely lacerated. One account tells of a stampede and a dead steer, its wounds attributed by a vet to "an animal which was not to be found in this country". The press gave the creature a name. The Surrey Puma.

Other names followed. The Crondall Cougar. The Munstead Monster. In September 1964 a blackberry picker on Munstead Heath described an animal "three feet high, five feet long with a cat's face and a long tail". In early August 1966 Ian Pert, a former police photographer, took a pale, blurry, grainy picture of a cat at Worplesdon. It was published in the News of the World.

Surrey Police logged the reports. On 7 September 1964 they took plaster casts of paw prints near Munstead. London Zoo experts identified one as a puma. Between September 1964 and August 1966 the force reviewed 362 sightings. Yet no animal was ever caught. Guildford Museum curator Matthew Alexander put it plainly: "No specimen (was) ever caught, alive or dead."

The doubts came with the evidence. Dr Maurice Burton pointed out the dog-like grouping of the toes in the casts. In the mid-1970s Burton wrote to Fortean Times founder Bob Rickard that every eyewitness account he had checked turned out to be an "otter, badger, fox, deer, or feral cats and dogs". George M. Eberhart judged that the Pert photograph resembles a feral domestic cat, not a puma. Others pointed to escaped circus or safari-park animals, or pets let go by collectors once they became dangerous. In 1968 a farmer claimed to have shot the animal. No body was ever produced.

Sightings fell off in the 1970s, but the legend did not. Gary Ridley, of Surrey Panther Watch, says he has logged 133 witness testimonies since August 2019. He believes five species live wild in Surrey. For many, the story still starts in the same place, a lane near Farnham, with a rabbit running and a big cat that bounded into the undergrowth.