Great British Bake Off judge Dame Prue Leith recalls the horrific moment she drowned a bag of kittens as a child

• Dame Prue Leith has recalled the ‘traumatic’ moment she drowned a litter of kittens as a child
• The Great British Bake Off judge, 82, put the sad memory into writing for her memoir I’ll Try Anything Once, writing that she and her mother lowered a bag of baby cats into some water just hours after their birth
• She wrote: ‘My mother and I, then 11, had just drowned some kittens… and for weeks I imagined those poor dead creatures’ 

Dame Prue Leith has recalled the ‘traumatic’ moment she drowned a litter of kittens as a child.

The Great British Bake Off judge, 82, put the sad memory into writing for her memoir I’ll Try Anything Once, writing that she and her mother lowered a bag of baby cats into some water just hours after their birth.

She wrote: ‘My mother and I, then 11, had just drowned some kittens… and for weeks I imagined those poor dead creatures.

Shocking: Dame Prue Leith, 82, has recalled the ‘traumatic’ moment she drowned a litter of kittens as a child

‘Too many kittens was a frequent occurrence and there had come a day when my mother, unable to find homes for yet another litter, decided to drown the latest batch.

‘My protests were met with a firm, “Darling, it has to be done. They are only a few hours old. They will hardly know it’s happening”.’

She added that her mother said they only needed to hold the bag of kittens under the water for a short time to send them to ‘sleep’ but that they ‘fought like the devil for life’.

Looking back: The Great British Bake Off judge put the sad memory into writing for her memoir I’ll Try Anything Once

Dame Prue said her mother then changed her mind but the television personality said they couldn’t stop and she held the bag under until the animals ‘stopped mewing’.

It comes after Dame Prue revealed she almost killed 30 people with food poisoning.  

The restauranteur recalled the event from early in her career when her company, Leith’s Good Food, catered an event.

Kitchen drama: It comes after Dame Prue revealed she almost killed 30 people with food poisoning

She admitted that 28 people ended up in hospital with one man left in a critical condition after she served up an unsavoury chicken mayonnaise. 

Speaking on stage in Bath on the first night of her Nothing In Moderation tour last month, Dame Prue said: : ‘He could have ended up in the morgue! You can’t be in catering for 30 years without something going disastrously wrong.’

She recalled her company being asked to put together a chicken mayonnaise dish for 25 people, however when five more guests were added, the dangerous error occurred. 

Dame Prue told the audience: ‘The cooks poached another chicken while the flesh was still warm, which is a crime, and they mixed with the chicken that was already there.’

Throwback: The television personality founded her company in the 1960s and went on to open numerous restaurants and training companies (pictured in 1985)

She went on to say that the venue had no refrigeration and so the food was left out on an exceptionally hot day. 

‘This chicken sat there and lunch was very late and we managed to poison everybody,’ she said.

She continued: ‘It haunts me that episode as everybody was ill, All 30 people but two of them ended up in hospital and one of them was in critical care as he was very old and was a High Court judge’.  

‘He could have ended up in the morgue and not in hospital. That was a wake-up call.’ 

The television personality founded her company in the 1960s and went on to open numerous restaurants and training companies. 

Screen star: Dame Prue stars alongside her fellow Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood (pictured) on the Channel 4 show

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