Jack Black was a rat-catcher and mole destroyer from Battersea London during the middle of the nineteenth century.

In 1851 Henry Mayhew published London Labour and the London Poor, an examination of the condition and lives of London’s poor. One of the people interviewed was Jack Black, self-described “rat catcher to Her Majesty Queen Victoria” But he never actually held a Royal warrant.

Black was reported to be “the most fearless handler of rats of any man living” Jack Black had started catching rats at the age 9, and by the early 1840s he was rat catcher for various Government Departments in London which included the Royal Palaces occupied by the Queen. 

To advertise his business, he would take to exhibiting in the streets Jack Black cut a striking figure in his self-made “uniform” of a green topcoat, scarlet waistcoat, and breeches, with a huge leather sash inset with cast-iron rats.

Jack Black had an interesting business on the side- if he caught any unusually coloured rats, he bred them. He would sell his home-bred domesticated coloured rats as pets, mainly, as Jack observed, “to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages as pets”.

The more sophisticated ladies of court kept their rats in gold cages, and even Queen Victoria herself was rumoured to keep a rat or two.

Beatrix Potter is believed to have been one of his customers, and she dedicated the book Samuel Whiskers to her rat of the same name.