Winston and the platypus: how a bizarre WW2 diplomacy mission to influence Churchill ended in death and tragedy

It was in this context that a strange and secretive mission was launched: a live platypus called Winston was to be shipped across the globe from Australia to meet his namesake before entering the care of the Zoological Society of London. According to Harrison Croft, the author of a new academic paper – ‘Winston and Churchill: The Journey of a Platypus Gifted to the British Prime Minister in the Middle of the Second World War’ (Environment and History) – the goal of the plan was to flatter and charm, and assuage the simmering tensions.

An ambitious Australian envoy

The year was 1943. The Australian government had recently withdrawn its troops from North Africa to defend its own shores and support the Pacific front from the threat of Japanese expansion. The decision had deeply frustrated Churchill, who remained squarely focused on defeating Hitler in Europe.

Australia’s Attorney General HV Evatt stepped in with an idea. The platypus – baffling to European scientists and rarely seen outside Australia – was both a symbol of national distinctiveness and scientific fascination. Why not send one to Churchill?

The British prime minister, known for his interest in exotic creatures, would surely be delighted, assumed Evatt, with this unique gesture of goodwill. But the mission was never destined to succeed.

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Winston the Platypus was captured from the Watts River near Healesville, Victoria, and housed in a specially built “platypusary”: a temperature-monitored crate filled with fresh water, artificial burrows, duck-egg custard and live worms. The effort was overseen by naturalist David Fleay, one of the only people at the time with experience keeping a platypus alive in captivity.

But platypuses are infamously difficult to care for. No one had ever successfully bred one in captivity, and most died shortly after being captured.

Still, with the diplomatic mission relying on him, Fleay wrote up meticulous instructions for the ship’s caretaker, stressing dietary needs, habitat requirements and warning about the venomous spur on the male’s hind foot.

How was Winston cared for?

Winston the platypus began his journey aboard the MV Port Phillip, a merchant vessel charting a path through war-torn oceans toward Liverpool. To avoid spoilage, worm rations were replenished during a stop in Panama, where a team of 15 spent two days digging up 8,000 fresh worms. Winston was fed 750 per day.

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The Zoological Society of London, meanwhile, was preparing for the arrival. British schoolboys were enlisted to gather worms, and memos confidently declared that the animal’s safe arrival from Australia would be “a great achievement, as all previous attempts at getting a live specimen to England have failed”.

On board, the crew took careful measurements of the water and air temperature within Winston’s habitat. They replaced hay and monitored his appetite. The caretaker was promised a £5 bonus if the animal survived the voyage.

But survival was never guaranteed. The journey took the platypus from Melbourne’s spring through equatorial heat to the North Atlantic winter – a sudden series of temperature shocks that proved too much for a species finely attuned to cool, stable conditions.

The death of Winston

On 6 November 1943, Winston was found dead in his tank.

The news was relayed to Churchill, who wrote that the loss was “a great disappointment to me”. The animal’s body, preserved in fluid, made it to Britain’s shores, but the grand gesture ended in anticlimax.

In his research, Croft examines the causes of death of the platypus, assessing why this doomed diplomatic task ended in tragedy.

He explains that Fleay would later speculate that depth charge detonations from nearby naval action had startled Winston to death. Others pointed to more simple causes: spoiled food supplies, declining worm quality, or cumulative stress from extreme temperature swings.

The ship’s caretaker downplayed any nearby combat activity but noted that food stocks had become “naturally degraded” and had to be rationed to fewer than 600 worms per day.

Croft clarifies that platypuses are known to be highly sensitive to environmental stress. Even in peacetime and on land, keeping one alive was a major feat.

Doing so in wartime, aboard a moving ship, proved a stretch too far.

Why was Winston chosen?

The story of Winston the Platypus slots into a much older tradition of animal diplomacy. From Cleopatra’s giraffe to Caesar and the legends of the white elephant to Cold War-era panda exchanges between China and the West, Croft explains that animals have long served as soft power emissaries used to bridge cultures and reinforce strategic relationships.

The choice of a platypus, however, was a very specific one.

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When specimens were first sent to Europe in the late 18th century, naturalists assumed they were hoaxes stitched together from parts of other animals. One 1799 description described it as “[a] deceptive preparation by artificial means”.

In Australia, though, the platypus had long been understood through Indigenous knowledge, which European science often overlooked. The decision to send one to Churchill reflected both the enduring scientific mystique and a rising sense of Australian identity, separate from British imperial narratives, structures and institutions.

As Croft notes, the mission “reveals much about the mystery that shrouded the platypus”, and about the fragility of colonial ties in a fraught wartime context.

The tragedy of Winston

The diplomatic breakthrough never came. Winston the Platypus died far from home, alone in a ship's tank.

In the end, the plan to unite two nations with a platypus collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions. Winston, deployed as a gesture of friendship, became an accidental casualty of Second World War diplomacy.

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In the years following the war, Australia would deepen its strategic ties with the US, while Britain turned its gaze toward Europe as its imperial power finally fizzled out. What remained was a shifting, sometimes strained relationship, built less on imperial nostalgia and shared history, and more on pragmatic cooperation.