Ming the wartime visitor to London

A postcard shows Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret paying a visit to the London Zoo and meeting the Ming the Panda in 1939. FILE PHOTOS

She was black, white, furry, far from home and loved having her tummy tickled, especially by Royal princesses.

Ming the Giant Panda, who brought so much joy to Londoners, particularly children, during the dark days of the German bombing campaign against the British capital during WWII, spent much of her time in ZSL London Zoo from 1938 to 1944.

Ming was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1937 and, at a time when there was less emphasis on preservation, was captured by hunters and eventually was given to an American, Floyd Tangier-Smith, a banker turned adventurer.

She and five others were to be sent to European zoos, but their journey was, to put it mildly, eventful. By the time the Chinese were fighting the Japanese invaders so Tangier-Smith decided to avoid the obvious route down the Yangtze River to Shanghai, and instead embarked on a dangerous journey by road to Hong Kong.

Tangier-Smith write at the time that the pandas were put in cages, and loaded onto the back of trucks for a journey to Hong Kong "on roads that were often nearly impassable through bandit-infested country."

A truck overturned and two of the pandas enjoyed temporary freedom until they were recaptured.

When it came to loading the pandas onto a ship in Hong Kong bound for London, one of the six was dead.

The survivors, known to their captors as Grandma, Happy, Dopey and Grumpy, and the baby who would become known as Ming, were loaded in open cages onto the deck of a cargo ship, arriving in London at the height of a raging blizzard, according to the Daily Mail newspaper.

Grandma, the oldest giant panda, not surprisingly caught pneumonia and died two weeks after arriving in London, and the bear known as Happy was acquired by a German zoo owner.

The Zoological Society of London, which runs the zoo in Regent's Park and Whipsnade Zoo, in the Bedfordshire countryside, north of London, took over care of Ming and her older siblings, Sung and Tang. They named them after three Chinese dynasties.

Ming was the first-ever baby giant panda to come to Britain, and she created a massive amount of interest.

Her image was reproduced in cartoons and picture postcards, soft toys were made, and her story appeared in newspapers, magazines and on the fledgling television service broadcast from Alexandra Palace in north London.

Bert Hardy, one of Britain's best-known photographers, managed to capture a shot of a playful Ming behind one of his cameras on a tripod, seemingly taking a picture of his son Mike. The photograph went around the world.