ORIENTAL SHORTHAIR
Oriental Shorthair was born on a winter’s night in 1950 when a British cat fancier named Baroness von Ullman decided to create a new variety of cat: a brown shorthair with green eyes and Siamese body type. Nearly four years later photographs of two kittens answering to this description appeared in the August 1954 issue of the British journal Our Cats. The kittens were called Bronze Leanve and Bronze Wing, and even though they had not been produced by the baroness, their color and conformation met her original design. The mother of these kittens was a seal point Siamese named Our Miss Smith. Their father was a brown hybrid called Elmtower Bronzed Idol. He was a seal point Siamese male out of a black domestic shorthair female who had a seal point Siamese father. At first the chestnut-brown kittens were called Havanas after the rabbit of the same color, according to some authorities; after Havana tobacco, according to others. For some reason, when the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy in England recognized the rabbit/tobacco-colored cats for championship competition in 1958, it issued the name Chestnut Brown Foreign to this breed instead.
Posted November 8, 2000
