The Devon Rex story began much like the histories of many rex breeds: nature did something unusual first, and people then tried to understand what had happened.
In the late 1950s, near the town of Buckfastleigh in the English county of Devon, people noticed an unusual curly-coated stray tom living by a disused tin mine. His curls made him particularly memorable. On 15 July 1959, an ordinary domestic cat gave birth to a litter containing one unusual kitten — dark, with a wavy coat. Beryl Cox took him in and named him Kirlee. The curly tom from the area around the mine is believed to have been Kirlee’s father.
The most interesting part came a little later. Another curly breed, the Cornish Rex, already existed in neighbouring Cornwall. The first Cornish Rex, Kallibunker, had been born in 1950. Devon and Cornwall are close to each other, so the obvious assumption was that Kirlee carried the same mutation.
Beryl Cox learnt about Cornish Rex cats from a report about a show at which a curly kitten was described as virtually the only animal of its kind in Britain. She wrote to the breeders to say that she, too, had a curly cat. Kirlee was acquired by the well-known breeder and judge Brian Stirling-Webb, who hoped to use him to broaden the still very small Cornish Rex population.
What happened next is why the Devon Rex exists today as a separate breed. Kirlee was mated to females from the Cornish Rex breeding programme. If both coats had been caused by the same recessive mutation, the relevant matings should have produced curly kittens. Instead, the kittens had ordinary straight coats. In 1961 Kirlee was mated to the established Cornish Rex female Broughton Purly Queen, and once again the entire litter was straight-coated. It became clear that curls which looked similar had arisen through completely different genetic routes.
For its time, this was an elegant genetic demonstration. The Cornish Rex mutation became known provisionally as Gene 1 and Kirlee’s mutation as Gene 2. The two lines were then separated and developed independently: one became the Cornish Rex, the other the Devon Rex.
Decades later, molecular genetics confirmed just how accurate those early breeders’ observations had been. The Devon Rex coat is associated with a variant of the KRT71 gene, whereas the Cornish Rex has a different cause: a mutation in LPAR6. To the human eye the two cats might simply have looked curly, but genetically they were two distinct stories.
Kirlee differed from the Cornish Rex in more than his coat. He had enormous, low-set ears, large eyes, a short muzzle and a very distinctive head. The look that makes people compare modern Devons to elves, pixies or tiny aliens was already visible in the breed’s founder. His coat was different too: less ordered than the Cornish wave, with a more tousled curl.
In later breeding, therefore, breeders tried to preserve not only Kirlee’s unusual coat but also his own type. This matters: the Devon Rex did not become merely another variety of curly cat. Large ears, high cheekbones, a short muzzle, wide-set eyes, a compact muscular body and a particular coat texture gradually formed an unmistakable whole.
There is a remarkable fact here: modern Devon Rex cats trace back to Kirlee. One chance kitten born to an ordinary cat in Devon became the starting point of a worldwide breed.
Recognition came comparatively quickly. In Britain, the GCCF recognised the Devon Rex as a separate breed in 1967. The first Devons arrived in the United States in 1968. ACFA granted championship status in 1972, while CFA — which for a time grouped different rex cats together — accepted the Devon Rex for championship status in 1983.
There is one part of this history that I especially like. Today, when people look at a Devon Rex, the first thing they notice is the appearance: huge ears, large eyes, a short muzzle and a wavy coat. It can seem as though someone spent years deliberately designing a cat to look exactly like this. In reality, an unnamed curly tom first lived near an old mine, then Kirlee was born to an ordinary cat, and only afterwards did people begin to understand the oddity they had been given.
In a sense, the Devon was fortunate twice. First, Beryl Cox noticed and kept the unusual kitten. Then breeders did not settle for the obvious explanation that he was probably simply another Cornish Rex: they tested the idea through matings. The straight-coated kittens provided the answer — no, this was something different.
That is perhaps why the history of the Devon Rex seems to me such a good example of genuine breeding work. Sometimes everything begins with appearance — with one unusual kitten. A breed emerges only when people begin to see the genetics, ancestry and type behind that unusual trait, and recognise the need to preserve them through generations.
If the Selkirk Rex began with a curly girl from Montana, every modern Devon stands at the end of a line that began with a dark curly cat named Kirlee, born near an old mine in Devon, England.
Sources used to verify the facts:
— GCCF, Devon Rex: breed history and chronology of the early matings.
— TICA, Devon Rex: the history of Kirlee and the breed’s development.
— Gandolfi et al., ‘The naked truth: Sphynx and Devon Rex cat breed mutations in KRT71’, Mammalian Genome, 2010.
— Gandolfi et al., ‘To the Root of the Curl: A Signature of a Recent Selective Sweep Identifies a Mutation That Defines the Cornish Rex Cat Breed’, PLoS ONE, 2013.
