them as the St John’s breed of Newfoundland. In the first published account of a Labrador, his diary describes the dog as ‘by far the best for any kind of shooting. He is generally black and no bigger than a Pointer, very fine in legs, with short, smooth hair and does not carry his tail so much curled as the other [meaning the Newfoundland, which had a rough coat and a tail that curved over its back]; is extremely quick and active in running, swimming and fighting … The St John’s breed of these dogs is chiefly used on their native coast by fishermen. Their sense of smelling is scarcely to be credited. Their discrimination of scent … appears almost impossible … For finding wounded game of every description, there is not his equal in the canine race; and he is sine qua non in the general pursuit of waterfowl.’
Eight years later, in 1822, the Scottish-Canadian explorer William Epps Cormack, who was born in St John’s, crossed Newfoundland by foot. He was the first European to journey across the interior of the island and it was during this expedition that he noted small water dogs, writing in his journal: ‘[they are] admirably trained as retrievers in fowling, and are otherwise useful. The smooth or short-haired dog is preferred because in frosty weather the long haired kind becomes encumbered with ice on coming out of the water.’
The earliest known depiction of the St John’s water dog – owned by a Mr Alsop – was on the canvas of the famous animal painter Edwin Landseer in 1822. Initially entitled Watchful Sentinel and known now as Cora. A Labrador Dog, the commissioned portrait of a much-loved pet shows a black dog with white paws and chest lying inside a stable yard or carriage house, with horses and grooms working in the background and, interestingly, no water in sight. (The earliest portrait of a yellow dog is believed to be in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham – a portrait in oils of Mrs Josephine Bowes painted in the late 1840s with a yellow dog called Bernardine at her side.) This seems to be the moment these early ‘Labradors’ made the transition from sea to land. These dogs, seen and admired for their eye-catching skills in West Country ports and harbours, were being purchased for use on land.
For a land famous for two world-class dogs, there was a distinct lack of canine activity as I wandered the tiny fishing ports. I spotted a single working Collie. In the absence of either of the region’s namesakes, I arranged to meet two of the region’s living mascots. Gus the Labrador and Felix the Newfie are both employed by the State to greet people arriving in the remote territory, predominantly by cruise ship.
We arranged to meet in a tiny harbour that is now home to an artisan collective where artists produce paintings and knitwear. It was a picture-postcard, perfect location. Bright yellow fishing houses with faded red piers were reflected perfectly in the calm waters. Here, away from the rough Atlantic surf, I could image Labradors plying these waters collecting fallen fish and fishing tackle.
As instincts required, Gus belly dived into the clear waters. It was like an echo of an earlier time as I imagined his early cousins swimming in these very waters for the fisherfolk.
The extraordinary twist in this furry tail is that Gus’s provenance owed more to England than it did to those early pioneers. Indeed, his distant relatives had come up from Portugal to this remote land, only to traverse the Atlantic Ocean once again, back to Europe.
For the fortune-hunting fishermen, dog trading had become a lucrative subsidiary. The sale of fish was the main business, but canny sailors also sold the ice used to preserve their catch and, increasingly, established a dog import trade. The dogs’ water skills were much talked about. They feature in old stories as near-mythical water dogs, as fetchers of sailors’ hats in icy waters and blustery gales, big-hearted, eminently trainable and intelligent. They could swim with ropes in their mouths and sometimes – so the stories went – paddled out to the aid of ships in distress. They retrieved whatever their master bade them. The proud seamen put on a remarkable show of human–dog teamwork for the quayside crowds.
Wilson Stephens wrote in The Field, ‘No wonder that the deck dogs on the ships off-loading in Poole Harbour caught the eye of passers-by. Perhaps the crew men entertained the locals by throwing overboard things which the dogs would retrieve, demonstrating their expertise at diving in and swimming back with a load. Perhaps bets were struck. No wonder, either, that the impression they made caught the eye of the local gentry – strolling, as all men do, on the quaysides …’
One spectator was the second Earl of Malmesbury, an MP and sportsman, born in 1778. He kept detailed records of the game he shot and of local and national weather. A large part of his estate at Hurn, in Dorset, included the floodplain between the River Stour and River Avon, north-east of Bournemouth. Hurn is listed in the Domesday Book as ‘Herne’; the name comes from the old English ‘hyrne’, meaning a disused part of a field or the land created by an oxbow lake. The Earl was fascinated by these amazing water retrievers. Until drainage operations in the mid-twentieth century, the River Stour had been habitually liable to winter overflow, spilling over its banks so that water spread over the countryside, creating large watery meadows a metre or more deep. The land was crisscrossed with carrier channels to control the annual floodwater; for half the year it was, as one observer put it, ‘a minor Venice’. The quantity of water was such that a raised causeway had been built around a 16-hectare floodable meadow so that the ladies of the house could continue to enjoy their carriage drives before stopping for afternoon tea.
I know the River Stour well. I spent much of my childhood navigating, rowing, paddling and swimming in its meandering waters. My school was built on its floodplains. A distinctive memory was of flooded sports fields; the river often burst its banks, creating a watery world. How many times I found myself wading through this very water.
So could this have been the very same river that helped give rise to the most popular dog on Earth? Was the answer there all along?
The early nineteenth century was the golden age of wildfowling, and the sporting pride and glory of the Malmesbury Estate was the duck. With such expanses of swampy waterlands there were always plenty of ducks – but many a shot duck would fall where only a swimming dog could retrieve them. The Earl of Malmesbury and a neighbour, Major C. J. Radclyffe, who lived close to the watery hinterland around Poole Harbour, saw these Labrador dogs as the answer to their sporting problem. There is mention of ‘the Earl of Malmesbury at Heron Court’ using his St John’s dog for shooting sports as early as 1809.
And here lie the crucial links between Poole in Dorset and Newfoundland …
The Newfoundland fishing fleet docked regularly at Poole Harbour, with its catch of cod and other fish kept on ice in the hold. After the fish had been sold, the ice was sought by local squires for their ice houses (typically a brick-lined hole in the ground, covered with a domed roof, and used to store ice in the years before the invention of the refrigerator). The Hurn Estate had two such ice houses that needed regular re-stocking with blocks of ice. According to the late sixth Earl of Malmesbury, ‘It was usual for each ship to carry at least one dog on board. My great-great-grandfather on occasions rode over to Poole Harbour, and saw these dogs playing in the sea and retrieving the fish that had not “kept”, so had been thrown out. He thought to himself that these water dogs, who retrieved so naturally in the water, were exactly what he required for his wildfowling. In 1823 he acquired two couples and built kennels on high ground for them, near a bend of the River Stour, known as Blackwater, which was only a quarter of a mile above the official tide end of the river, and bred from these dogs.’
The genesis of the breed began as a private whim. The dogs so impressed the Earl with their skill and ability that he devoted his entire kennel to developing, stabilising and pioneering the breed in Great Britain. He was the most influential person in keeping the Labrador breed alive and kept his kennel well stocked until his death in 1841.
Poole? It seemed such an incongruous place for this pivotal moment in the adaptation and creation of the Labrador. Poole, the home of millionaires, Harry Redknapp and the RNLI. Poole, where not only had I spent
