The Shooters Hill "cheetah": a golden big cat and a 126-officer hunt at Oxleas Wood

Shooters Hill rises 132 metres above south-east London, near Woolwich and Eltham. On its slopes lies Oxleas Wood. In the early 1960s, southern England was also living through the Surrey Puma, a long run of big cat reports. Shooters Hill would soon join that chronology.

July 18, 1963. About 1:00 am. A lorry driver, named in most retellings as David Beck, was travelling up the western side of Shooters Hill. A large animal was lying by the side of the road.

The driver assumed it was an injured dog and went closer. Then came the realisation. It was a large cat, with a long, upward curling tail. Later accounts say it was golden in colour, with prey in its mouth, disturbed whilst it was feeding. It got up. It ran off into Oxleas Wood.

The same night, a police patrol car met the animal again. The officers were amazed to see a "large golden animal" jump over the bonnet of their car.

What followed was, in the words of author Merrily Harpur, "a magnificent affair." It covered 850 acres. It involved 126 policemen with 21 dogs, thirty soldiers, ambulance men and RSPCA officials. The BBC carried the story in its news that year.

A check with zoos and circuses confirmed that no animals had escaped. The hunt found no big cat. It did find spoor. The paw prints were some seven inches across, the size usually associated with a lion or tiger. Yet they showed claw marks, "the characteristic not of a lion's, but of a cheetah's paw print." Claw marks on a tree were also reported on the southeastern slope of Shooters Hill. The "cheetah", however, was never caught. The hunters dispersed.

The name "cheetah" did not come from the witnesses. Harpur says the press supplied it. In 2007, Kent Big Cat Research pointed out that no report from the time actually described a cheetah. Decades later, the BBC Archive captioned its own 1963 clip in a lighter tone: "Everybody in England turned out to chase an imaginary cheetah at Shooters Hill, near Woolwich."

No source offers a firm explanation for this case. The driver's first impression was a dog. Dog prints also show claw marks, the very feature used to argue for a cheetah, a point Dr Maurice Burton raised about Surrey Puma prints in 1964. An unreported exotic pet remains possible too. Zoos and circuses were checked. Private owners, it seems, were not.

The sources still disagree on the details. The driver appears as David Beck, David Back or Mr Black, and Londonist dates the night to 16 July. Harpur's 2005 book Mystery Big Cats keeps the main account alive. Local writers place the case beside the Beast of Bexley, the Palace Puma and the Nunhead Panther. In 2012, writing about plans for an Olympic missile site at Oxleas Wood, the Transpontine blog remarked that "it wouldn't be the first time the military had turned out on Shooters Hill on a phantom hunt." One reader added a quieter memory. The policeman with the dog, they wrote, was their grandad, with his dog Major.