Stephens continues to press their claims in comparing the retrieving processes of both dogs – the flatcoat’s tendency to cast widely, downwind of a target, and then work slowly towards it, dependent on air scent versus the Labrador’s ‘direct line to the mark, followed by a tight-patterned working-out of a limited area around a fall’. Stephens notes, ‘The extra distance covered by flatcoats not only takes longer but inevitably moves other game off the ground, to the detriment of the sport. When Labradors worked, more game remained …’ He triumphantly concludes: ‘Realisation of the average Labrador’s superiority was sudden, positive, and has proved permanent.’
So when did the Labrador become popular away from the field? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gundog was now known not just as the Labrador but as the Labrador Retriever, and it had become the gundog of choice for the British aristocracy.
The Victorian love of both dogs and pastimes led to the incredible popularity of field trials and dog shows. The first conformation dog show – a show to assess how well individual dogs conform to specific breed standards – was held in the town hall of Newcastle upon Tyne in June 1859. The only breeds scheduled were pointers and setters. The first organised field trial – a competitive event at which hunting dogs such as retrievers, pointers and flushing dogs compete against one another in a series of tasks – took place at Southill, in Bedfordshire, in 1865. Both sports gained a large and fashionable following.
In April 1873 the Kennel Club was founded to provide a set of rules and standards for the popular new pastimes. The very first sport recognised by the Kennel Club was the sport of Field Trials, which in this era particularly tested the skills of working gundogs and attracted large and appreciative audiences. In 1886, Charles Cruft, a general manager at a dog biscuit manufacturer, founded Crufts Dog Show. Billed as the ‘First Great Terrier Show’, it began with 57 classes and 600 entries. By 1891, the show was known as Crufts Greatest Dog Show. The venue was the Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington, and it was the first at which all breeds were invited to compete, with approximately 2,000 dogs and almost 2,500 entries.
As a young boy, I used to visit Crufts with my father, when it was still held in central London, at Earls Court, and it helped define my childhood. I loved going to Crufts – the noise, the smell, the dogs. My role in the show became tighter in 2006, though, when I was asked to present the BBC’s live coverage of the show. I presented Crufts for two years. I can’t say those years were as happy as my childhood recollections; the pressure of presenting a live prime-time TV show, and the interaction with a significantly haughty group of breeders who didn’t like my style of presenting, inevitably led to a bumpy ride.
I co-presented the show with Inca, my black Lab, at my side. The show was dropped several years later, after the BBC ran a panorama exposé that revealed the slightly murky world of the Kennel Club and their breed requirements that often lead to long-term health complications for many breeds. In fact, Inca was a case in point. Her epilepsy was more than likely to have been caused by a limited gene pool. In short – incest.
I digress.
Back at the late turn of the last century, dog ownership was booming, and with it an appetite for specialised breeds that ordinary people could ‘discover’ as the dog that best suited them. Labradors had come to Britain as sea dogs. They were spotted and cultivated as wildfowling water dogs. As gundogs to the gentry, they acquired a fashionable social status attractive to the aspirational classes. Eager to please and eminently trainable, loyal and lovable, playful and energetic, the Labrador gradually became a great all-rounder, a symbol of social status, a valued working dog to some and a treasured family pet to millions. Once the development of breech loading revolutionised the shooting scene, the breed’s gundog expertise was its passport to the millions.
I left Poole and headed to meet Lord Malmesbury’s son on their old estate. The Malmesbury Estate itself was broken up and sold several decades ago, with the great house turned into apartments and flats. Driving through the gates and along the drive, however, you still get a sense of the estate it once was.
The River Stour meanders through the land, through fields that were once flooded from the heavy rain which had made the river burst its banks. The Stour had memories for me from my school days, just a short way upriver from where I was now.
My first port of call was the small keeper’s cottage. Over tea and scones, the keeper explained to me how important Labradors still are for the shoots. We piled into a battered pickup and drove through the old estate to the remains of the kennels. They had long since fallen into disrepair, with just a couple of walls remaining, largely overgrown. Looking at what remained of them, it seemed incredible that the dogs that had once been kept in these kennels were more than likely to have been the progeny for the millions and millions of Labradors across the world.
It was about the same time that the Earl of Malmesbury was beginning his breeding programme in his kennel on the south coast of England that the fifth Duke of Buccleuch (1806–1884) and his brother, Lord John Scott, imported dogs for use as gundogs on the Queensberry estates, in the Scottish borders, from a Newfoundland fishing fleet which sailed into the River Clyde. They had also realised what an extraordinary dog the Labrador was and so established a kennel in around 1835. One of the Duke’s dogs, Brandy, earned his name on his journey across the Atlantic. Having been sent overboard in a heavy sea to fetch the cap of one of the crew, the young dog spent two hours in the water before he could be picked up again, by which point he was so exhausted that the sailors had to revive him with brandy.
The brothers loved their dogs so much that when they went on a yachting holiday to Naples in 1839, they took their favourite Labradors – Moss and Drake – with them: something that was unheard of back then.
According to records, in 1871, the Earl of Malmesbury’s neighbour, Major Radclyffe – who had patrolled Poole Harbour with the Earl admiring the fishermen’s sea dogs – imported a dog direct from Newfoundland. He was called Turk and would go on to sire the line that included Ben of Hyde, the first yellow Lab to be registered.
By the early 1880s the original Buccleuch strain had died out, just five or six decades on from the original purchases from the fishermen on the Clyde. This could well have signalled the end of the Scottish lineage of the Labrador Retriever, were it not for our friend the sixth Earl of Malmesbury who ‘gave them a pair, descended from our own imported dogs’.
It is probably fair to say that a chance meeting between the third Earl of Malmesbury (at the age of 75) with the sixth Duke of Buccleuch (1831–1914) and the twelfth Duke of Home (1834–1918) saved the Labrador from extinction. The two Scots were visiting a sick aunt on the south coast of England and while there accepted an invitation to participate in a waterfowl shoot at Hurn. Precisely where I was heading now.
The Hurn Estate is another old estate that was broken up long ago, but what remains is managed by the current Earl’s son, James Fitzharris. In an old pickup truck we drove through what was left of the estate that had once been the family seat to James’s ancestors. Hurn Court is now apartments, and there was an air of sadness as we drove along the road that had once been the drive to the grand house.
It was hard to imagine what this place must have been like when it was still the thriving seat of the Malmesburys, in the family’s heyday, when aristocracy had money and power.
‘That’s all that remains of the kennels,’ pointed James from one of the misted windows of the pickup. There were some simple