When the British guns began to fire, the Germans knew the game was up. As SMS Dresden took on water, its crew jumped ship. One of the last to abandon the vessel was a colossal pig, launching herself into the water from the gunwale.

Three months earlier, the Dresden had been the only German cruiser to escape the Battle of the Falklands. Fleeing south, round Cape Horn and into the Pacific, the Dresden made it to Robinson Crusoe Island in the San Fernandez archipelago off Chile. But it was here that the British vessels HMS Glasgow and HMS Kent caught up with her on 14 March 1915. Forced into unconditional surrender, the Germans scuttled their own ship to avoid its capture by the allies.

While some British seamen went ashore to round up the shipwrecked survivors, others clambered into tenders to recover what booty they could from the water. A medical officer on board HMS Kent recalled the exercise with glee: "We thoroughly enjoyed our tub-hunting expedition," he wrote. Among other things, they salvaged a dinghy, oars, a boathook, buoys, six chairs, hammocks, brooms, fenders and even "a cask of red wine undamaged by its immersion in the sea".

Ratings on HMS Glasgow recovered the pig which, once winched on deck, would become prized as the ship's living, live-in mascot. In spite of its gender, the men of HMS Glasgow took delight in naming her after the head of the German navy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and facetiously awarded her the German military decoration, the Iron Cross, for staying with her ship to the last.

For a time, Tirpitz lived a charmed life on board before taking up residence at the Royal Navy's training facility on Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour in 1916. She was in good company: there were chickens, ducks, geese, even a "wallaby paddock". Unfortunately Tirpitz became a nuisance. When she broke down the chicken runs to raid their food, radical action was required. The Whale Island authorities bundled Tirpitz into a van – "it took 10 men" – and returned the wayward pig to the custody of Captain John Luce, former commander of HMS Glasgow and now commodore of the Royal Naval Air Service Training Establishment at Cranwell in Lincolnshire (which would become RAF Cranwell upon the foundation of the Royal Air Force in 1918).

It is difficult to be sure what Luce felt about this reunion, but a short article in The Times in late 1917 gives a clue. "On the instruction of Commodore Luce," it reported, "the animal will be offered for sale for the benefit of the British Red Cross." Tirpitz was to be sold along with a couple of properties on the estate of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Charles Chetwynd-Talbot. In the days before the charity auction, interested parties could size up the historic pig – still alive – in the stables of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester. When the hammer finally fell on 11 December 1917, Tirpitz is said to have raised 400 guineas, around £20,000 in today's money.

Tirpitz in more recent times. Photograph: Gordon McLeod/Imperial War Museum

The celebrity pig's fate over the next few years remains a bit of a mystery. She may have been auctioned a couple more times before her life came to an end in 1919. Most of her, one imagines, was eaten. But the 6th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Bentink (her owner at the time) had her head stuffed, mounted and donated to the nascent Imperial War Museum in London. When the museum opened its doors to the public on 9 June 1920, King George V was there and the first bank holiday in August saw an incredible 94,179 visitors flooding to the new attraction. Many of them will have marvelled at Tirpitz's head.

The Duke of Portland, it seems, also came up with the wheeze of turning a couple of Tirpitz's trotters into the handles of a carvery set. The knife and fork are made from the finest Sheffield steel sunk into a brass plate attached to the pig's cloven hooves. The plate on the two-pronged fork reads simply "Tirpitz". On the knife there is more detail: "Foot of 'Tirpitz' the famous pig rescued from the German light cruiser 'Dresden' sunk in the South Pacific by the British man-of-war 'Glasgow'."

In contrast to Tirpitz's head, it seems her trotters remained in active service. They probably saw action once more on board the next HMS Glasgow, commissioned in 1937 in the run-up to the second world war. If this is the case, it is possible that some naval rating used the Tirpitz trotters to carve up a roast for the King of Norway, the crown prince and much of the Norwegian cabinet (all of whom the Glasgow carried to safety in 1940).

When the Navy scrapped this incarnation of the Glasgow in 1958, the carvery set finally stopped carving. Tirpitz's surviving remains – her head and two of her trotters – were reunited once more in the collections of the Imperial War Museum.

Tirpitz's head is currently undergoing conservation work in preparation for its latest outing: a place of honour in the brand new first world war galleries that will open in 2014.

If there is a zoological specimen with a great story that you would like to see profiled, send a message to Henry Nicholls @WayOfThePanda.