Platypus diplomacy The strange tale of Churchill's 'magnificently idiotic' plea

When Winston Churchill asked Australia for a platypus in 1943, Canberra hatched a plan to ship a lively male named Winston to Downing Street. In the end, Winston (the platypus, that is) never made it.

- Tory Shepherd

"Platypus found dead in water," read the ship's logbook on 4 November 1943.

Now recent research has revived the tales of platypus diplomacy, with Australia deploying monotremes Winston and Splash – who made it to London, albeit in stuffed form – in order to secure the attention and affection of the British prime minister.

The connection between Churchill and the platypuses was "weirdly compelling," said associate professor Nancy Cushing, an environmental history specialist at the University of Newcastle.

"I think one thing we would have loved to have found, and is fabled to exist, is a photograph of Splash on Churchill's desk," Cushing said. Splash sat on Churchill's desk while Operation Platypus – a series of reconnaissance missions in Borneo – was under way, academic research has found.

Churchill famously kept a menagerie, which included kangaroos and black swans. In 1943, he asked Australia's external affairs minister, Herbert "Doc" Evatt, if he could have not just one platypus, but half a dozen, a request described by the zoo owner and author Gerald Durrell as "magnificently idiotic".

Monotremes, which include echidnas as well as platypuses, are distinct from other mammals because they lay eggs. With their duck-like bill, flat tail and partially webbed feet, they are so strange looking that many early European scientists studying specimens suspected they were a hoax.