The South West Norwegian Cat Club is one of the older single-breed clubs affiliated to the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy, and the only GCCF-affiliated club in the British Isles devoted solely to the Norwegian Forest Cat and operating out of the South West of England.

Our founders and our first years

SWNCC was founded in the autumn of 1962, at the home of Mrs Dorothy Pellow in Truro, by a group of seven founder members who had come to know the Skogkatt through Scandinavian contacts and private import. This was a quarter of a century before the Norwegian Forest Cat would be formally recognised in Britain, and the club in those early years was a correspondence society as much as anything — a quarterly newsletter typed on a manual Underwood, a small library of Norwegian-language breed texts shared by post, and an annual get-together at the Pellow farmhouse every September.

The club was incorporated as an unincorporated association in 1965 and adopted its first written constitution in 1968.

Recognition and GCCF affiliation

The Norwegian Forest Cat was granted Preliminary status by the GCCF in 1985 and full Championship status in 1987. In the same year, SWNCC was granted its first GCCF affiliation as a single-breed club, and the club has operated continuously on the current affiliation ever since.

The first SWNCC championship show followed in March 1988 at the Devon County Showground. Fifty-seven Norwegians were entered. The Best in Show that year was Gr Ch Fjordsinger Aslak of Penmorrow, bred by the late Mrs Anne Charrington and owned by then-chairman Mrs Margaret Ashton.

What we do today

SWNCC exists to support the Norwegian Forest Cat and the people who live with it. In practice this means four things:

1. Running the Annual Show at Westpoint Arena, Exeter — our only fixed annual event, held on the second Saturday of March.
2. Publishing the quarterly newsletter, the Forest Gazette, which goes to every paid-up member and is archived in full on the Newsletters page.
3. Maintaining the Breeders Directory of member catteries — all are GCCF-registered, all breed to the Breed Standard, all have signed our Code of Ethics.
4. Mentoring new breeders and new owners — we do not teach the breed; we help new people find their feet, introduce them to established catteries, and hold an informal Q&A session at every AGM.

Affiliations

SWNCC is:

• A GCCF-affiliated single-breed club (affiliation renewed 2024)
• A member of the Norwegian Forest Cat Breed Council of Great Britain
• A supporter of the Feline Advisory Bureau (iCatCare) welfare programmes
• A registered data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO registration Z-FICTIONAL-0001 — replace on clone)

Our patrons

The club’s founding patron, the late Mrs Dorothy Pellow, served in that role from 1962 until her passing in 2011. The current patron is Mr Iain MacPherson, GCCF Senior Judge, who accepted the invitation in 2014.