Tom Quartz

Theodore Roosevelt's White House was famously overrun with animals — badgers, snakes, a pony taken upstairs in a lift — and among them was a small grey kitten named Tom Quartz, borrowed from Mark Twain. Twain's sketch 'Dick Baker's Cat' features a mining cat of that name, and Roosevelt, an enthusiastic reader, applied it to a kitten of similar character.

The kitten earned his place in history through a letter. Writing to his son Kermit in January 1903, Roosevelt described Tom Quartz lying in wait on the staircase for Joseph Cannon — the formidable, cigar-chewing Republican who would shortly become Speaker of the House and one of the most powerful legislators of the era — and ambushing him as he descended, seizing his leg and being shaken off with some difficulty. The president's evident delight in the scene is the most charming thing about the account: he described the kitten as the most rampageous creature in the house and Cannon as bearing it with good humour.

The letter survives as part of Roosevelt's correspondence with his children, a body of writing that did a great deal to shape the public image of the president as a family man, and it remains a favourite anecdote of White House historians. Roosevelt kept a second cat, a six-toed grey named Slippers, who was known for sprawling in corridors during state dinners and obliging diplomats to walk around him.

Between them, the two cats gave the Roosevelt White House a reputation for informality that suited its occupant exactly.