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MODEL Celia Hammond gave up her high-flying career in the early Seventies to devote her life to rescuing London's stray animals. She was worried about the city's thousands of feral cats - abandoned pets whose hunger and suffering was, and still is, heartbreaking.
The Celia Hammond Animal Trust has won many awards for its rescue work and opened London's first low-cost neuter clinic in Lewisham in 1995. Here, Celia tells YVONNE SWANN how she aims to set up similar clinics throughout the country to help end these animals' suffering.
I HAD a terrific career as a fashion model in the Sixties. I was discovered by the famous photographer Norman Parkinson and put under contract by Queen magazine.
At 21, I went off to model the Paris collections, working with Parkinson exclusively for about a year.
Then I worked with Terence Donovan and David Bailey, appearing in Vogue and other glossies and spending time in America. It was a wonderfully successful time. Jean Shrimpton and I were the top models of the Sixties.
The fame gave me a platform from which to publicise my rescue work. It still does help enormously.
I have always been animal-mad, and my rescue work began very simply in the mid-Sixties. I was on a bus and noticed a distressed cat locked in an empty house.
I got a friend to help me break down the door. The poor cat's kittens had died of hunger and she would soon have died, too. I took her home and looked after her. I realised this sort of thing must be happening all over London.
People began to contact me when they found cats whose owners had left them behind, and I took them in, too. My friends and acquaintances passed my number on to other good Samaritans who were feeding abandoned cats.
And it all just snowballed from there. My house began to overflow with cats and it became an obsession.
I realised I couldn't live in London any more. I needed more space. So I bought a house in Egerton, Kent, and commuted.
Modelling became more and more difficult. I...