Kate eventually intervened, worrying that the canine song might lead to cardiac arrest on the rats’ part. And so we ate dinner to the smell of wet dog. It was the beginning of a long friendship, though, so it wasn’t all bad.
Another time I remember visiting the late Duchess of Norfolk at her home, Bakers, in Berkshire. I was dating her granddaughter, Kinvara, and we had both been invited for Sunday lunch. As always, I arrived with Inca. It was a glorious summer day and once again Inca made a bee line for the water. In this instance, it wasn’t a fish pond but an immaculately clean swimming pool. Before I could stop her, Inca was sailing through the air into the azure waters.
We weren’t invited back.
Over the years I lost count of the number of times I hauled Inca from rivers, canals and even cattle troughs. And all this from a dog that didn’t like to get her paws wet. It was all or nothing with Inca.
It is perhaps unsurprising, given its coastal place of origin, that the Labrador began its life as a Water Dog. ‘It was as a water-dog that the Labrador came into Britain. Regarded as a water-dog only, except by the few who treasured them, and ignored by most, Labradors spent the next 50 years in the well-cushioned obscurity which is the privilege of specialists,’ wrote Stephens.
It was in Dorset that the Labrador was first treasured and ignored in Britain. I have always loved Dorset. I even lived there for four years, in the army town of Blandford, which I remember used to be called ‘An Interesting Georgian Town’. Perhaps it was because I spent some of my formative years there that I can feel my whole body relax when I arrive in the county. It has that unique ability to combine happy memories with a largely unchanged landscape.
Often described as Thomas Hardy country, Dorset is defined by its rolling green farmland and its famous Jurassic coast. I have since returned many times both for work and pleasure. Indeed, I have spent the past few years based at Poole Harbour, making a series about one of the world’s largest natural harbours.
Poole really is a place of contradictions, where hard-working fishermen moor their ships alongside Sunseeker super-yachts. There can be few places in the United Kingdom where there is such a jarring clash of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.
Sandbanks peninsula is often described as the most expensive real estate in Great Britain, and even one of the most expensive in the world. Here, million-pound glass and steel structures look out onto the working waters where fishermen still ply their trades. That it was here that the Labrador was first discovered seems incredible.
The harbour wall has changed very little in the last century. Close your eyes and you can still imagine the hubbub of trawlers emptying their holds of cod after their long voyage across the Atlantic. This would once have been a bustling place. It must have been quite a spectacle.
Today, the small fishermen’s harbour is largely ignored. A handful of small boats still work the harbour and the ocean beyond, but Poole is as much a location for pleasure craft as it is for working boats.
Next to the old harbour pilot office, overlooking the estuary and the Sunseeker factory beyond, is Poole Harbour’s museum. The museum is full of old artefacts covering the harbour’s rich history, where old, faded black-and-white photographs offer a small porthole into the bygone era. I asked the curator if he had ever heard about the harbour’s connection with the Labrador. Nobody in the museum knew anything. There were no records. No photographs. No documents or accounts. The only inference was the large section dedicated to Newfoundland and the Dorset families who emigrated in search of wealth.
I sifted through hundreds of old photographs hoping to find the famous performing ‘black dogs’ that had captivated Lord Malmesbury, but there was nothing.
It seems that Poole has long forgotten its part in the story of the evolution of the world’s most popular breed. So while the connection between Poole and Newfoundland is strong, Poole’s role in the import of the Labrador as we know it today remains a bit of a mystery. Back in London, at the British Library, I read the first page of the leather-bound Stud Book of the Duke of Buccleuch’s Labrador. The book names Ned (1882), sired by Lord Malmesbury’s Sweep (1877) and dam Lord Malmesbury’s Juno (1878), and describes him as ‘of a different category to any of the other dogs’ at the Duke’s kennels. According to the book, Ned was followed by Avon (1885), hailed as even better than Ned – sired by Lord Malmesbury’s Tramp, with Juno again the dam dog. The carefully kept stud book represented the start of an official record of the Labrador, but in retrospect, it is a rare and valuable document which highlights some of the events in the development of the breed. Another entry describes the time Buccleuch Avon is said to have sired ‘liver-coloured’ pups: in 1892, the record states that two ‘liver colour’ Labradors were born at the Buccleuch kennel. Labrador enthusiasts then began to demonstrate a desire to preserve and safeguard the ‘new breed’. Records also show that in 1899 the first registered yellow Labrador was born at the kennel of Major Radclyffe and named Ben of Hyde. Was this the first time the breed deviated from the traditional black?
The colour of the breed has long divided Labrador lovers. Many still believe that black is the true original colour and that yellow and brown are mere anomalies that caught on. Certainly as a dog to blend into the landscape during a shoot, black is undoubtedly the best colour, although yellows can blend in well in some wildfowling situations.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century Labradors were carefully bred but still remained ‘rarities if not eccentricities’ in the sporting and domestic scene. Traded exclusively among the landed gentry, they proved themselves the most versatile of working dogs: hardy, reliable, efficient, gentle, clean and undemanding. The same traits that define them today.
The Field once wrote, ‘One of the countryside’s riddles is how and why a race of dogs, so dominant for only 10 years short of a century, could also have been so dormant for so long, a clear case of unrecognised talent.’
There is a truism here. In 1886 – 75 years after their arrival on these shores – J.H. Walsh, in his Dogs of the British Islands: Being a Series of Articles on the Points of their Various Breeds and the Treatment of the Diseases to which they are Subject, described the Labrador or Lesser Newfoundland Dog as a mere accessory to a certain lifestyle: ‘As his use in this country is almost entirely confined to retrieving game, he cannot be included among the non-sporting dogs.’
How did the Labrador go from being a specialist wildfowl retriever prized by a small elite circle in Britain to being the world’s most popular domestic dog? The answer begins with another milestone in history: the wide-scale development of the breech-loading gun in the late nineteenth century. Up until then, shooting was by muzzle-loaded guns, i.e. a firearm into which the ‘shot’ and the propellant explosive powder are loaded from the muzzle of the gun (the forward, open end of the gun’s barrel). To go shooting usually meant several guns (people with guns) walking through a woodland, copse, moor, waterland or field, shooting the birds their dogs put up. This style of ‘walked up’ shooting (sometimes called ‘shooting over dogs’) remained customary until the introduction of the much more efficient double-barrelled, quick-loading shotgun.
Thanks to the revolutionary refinement in precision engineering and machining in the nineteenth century, breech loading – whereby a cartridge or shell is loaded into a chamber integral to the rear portion of a barrel – became the norm. It meant a significant reduction in reloading time and gave rise to the popularity of driven game shooting, where beaters are employed to walk through woods and over moors or fields (dependent on the quarry and the season) and drive game over a line of standing guns spaced about 50 metres apart. In driven shooting, the head count of shot game is much higher than in walked-up shooting, requiring pickers-up with dogs to make sure all shot or wounded game is collected. The advent of driven game shooting was the cue for the Labradors to come into their own. Only dogs could keep up with the guns.
But it didn’t happen quickly. Wilson Stephens described the evolution in The Field: ‘Although those to whom it had become second nature no doubt learned to reload them safely in half the time that we would