Pointing Dogs, Volume Two: The British and Irish Breeds.

PREFACE

Remember the old saying about eating an elephant? You do it one bite at a time. But what about two elephants? My solution was to eat one, then the other, a bite at a time. When I set out to write Pointing Dogs Volume One: The Continentals, I had no idea that it would take more than a decade to complete. So, when I set out to write Volume Two, I knew it would take years to write, but I once again underestimated just how many. As with Volume One, traveling to the native lands of the breeds described in this volume took time and money.

A thirst for knowledge and a hunger for adventure motivated me to write Volume One, and those same forces were still in play as I wrote this volume. This time, though, the focus is on the one hand narrower; only five breeds are fully described here, whereas nearly 40 breeds were documented in Volume One. On the other hand, it is wider. I’ve taken a closer look at each breed’s history, shedding new light onto their origins and evolution. I also describe how the British and Irish breeds ended up conquering much of the sporting world, from the United Kingdom to the United States, from Australia to Algeria, Italy to Iceland. I’ve also included a large number of images taken by talented photographers from across the sporting world and art works by some of the most famous sporting artists of the 18th and 19th centuries.

I hope that this elephant goes on to enhance the collective knowledge of these fine dog breeds and perhaps inspire your own thirst for more knowledge.

PART I BIRD DOGS

The bird dog is a canine creation evolved solely for the benefit of the sportsman.

—A. F. Hochwalt

Left: Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Portrait of Henri Camille, Chevalier de Beringhen, 1722 Above: Photo by author

In 1901, a remarkable book was published, entitled The Pointer and His Predecessors. It was written by William Arkwright, a wealthy Englishman who spent nearly a decade studying the history and development of the Pointer. About halfway through the book, Arkwright provides a wonderfully evocative description of the bird dog’s essence:

Still, of course, the chief glory of the sport is to shoot over a brace of raking pointers, matched for speed and style, sweeping over the rough places like swallows, and passing each other as if they were fine ladies not introduced. Let one of them get a point and the other will, as if connected by invisible wire, instantly point at him (i.e., back him); and as the pointing dog advances to make sure of the birds, the backer will do the same—often with an absolute mimicry of his leader’s movements. When his master has come to the spot, how proudly will the first dog march him up to the game with outstretched neck, flame in his eye, and foam at his lips, while his companion watches from a distance with perfect self-control; and, when the birds rise, both dogs instantly drop to the ground, not to move till the game is gathered, and they are bidden to resume their search.

For Arkwright, Pointers were not just for the sport of wingshooting, but for the glory of the sport. They were well-bred and well-raised, their instincts distilled through careful breeding and honed by skillful training. They didn’t just run; they “raked” across the fields. They were fast and powerful, yet agile enough to “sweep” over the terrain as deftly as though they were birds themselves. Ideally, they ran in wellmatched pairs, canine equivalents of a matched pair of London-made shotguns. They were focused on one thing only: finding birds. Even as they ran, they maintained perfectly proper British good manners, paying no attention to one another “like ladies not introduced.” Only when one of them pointed would they become one and mirror each other in their actions.

When on point, it wasn’t a hunter or partner joining them; it was their better, their master. Yet the dog was no cowering servant. He “proudly marched” his master towards the birds. Both dogs perfectly represented the Victorian ideal of controlled passion; the dog on point has “flame in his eye and foam at his lips” while the backing dog retains “perfect self-control.”

Even after the birds are shot, the play-by-play continues to reflect the Victorian class system. The dogs knew their place and played a precise role—to seek and point game. Full stop. Retrieving was left to the lower classes, servants, or other “lesser” kinds of dogs. Yet the Pointer also understood his subservience to the master, waiting patiently for the order to resume the search.

Arkwright’s brace of Pointers represented the pinnacle of over 500 years of bird dog development. By the time his book was published, the golden age of Pointers and setters had already come to an end in Britain, even as it was just dawning in America and Europe. Today, 120 years later, the British and Irish pointing breeds have surpassed the greatness of their ancestors. They’ve conquered the hearts of millions of sportsmen and women around the world and are considered the gold standard in field trials everywhere, but we have reached an inflection point. Like the men and women who created the British and Irish pointing breeds, we face an ever-shifting cultural, technological, and ideological landscape fraught with risk and opportunities. The decisions we make and the stands we take today will determine the future of hunting, field trials, and bird dogs. While no one knows the future, it is safe to say that no matter what, the glory of the sport of wingshooting will always belong to the British and Irish pointing breeds.

Right: Thomas Gainsborough, Major John Dade of Tannington, Suffolk, ca. 1755 Above: Photo by author

Politics

In the chart below, the dates of some of the more significant political events that have had an impact on the British and Irish pointing breeds are indicated in brown.

CHRONOLOGY

Culture

Traditions, art, literature and popular culture have all played a role in the evolution of pointing dogs. In the chart below, the dates of some of the more significant social or cultural events are indicated in blue.

Influential People

The dates marked in black on the time line below indicate when influential were born or died, or began their work with bird dogs.

Turning Points

From the first appearance of setting spaniels in England to the advent of field trials and dog shows and revival programs, the major turning points in the development of the British and Irish pointing breeds are marked in red.

Pointer and Setter field trial

George Earl paints A Field Trial Meeting at Bala

American Kennel Club formed

Setting Spaniels appear in England

Short-haired pointing dogs imported into Britain from Spain and France

Fleming translates De Canibus Britannicis by John Caius

Club Formed (UK)

Laverack born

America

writes The Setter

Birth of Richard Purcell-Llewellin United Kennel Club established (US)

Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon born

Colonel Thornton crosses Foxhounds to Pointers First field trial in France

Prince Albert of Solms establishes Wolfsmühle Kennel

published William Humphrey born

Arnold Burges publishes The American Kennel and Sporting Field

driven shoots

England Quanrantine laws enacted in Britain War of Spanish Succession

Earliest accounts of wingshooting

First running of the National Bird Dog Championship

Key sociopolitical, technological and organizational developments in the history of The British and Irish Breeds.

First World War 1914-1918

Arkwright publishes The Pointer FCI established

Second World War 1939-1945

Irish

Record number of over 19,000 English Setters registered in Italy

Kennel Club recognizes the Irish Red and White Setter

John Nash starts breeding Irish Red Setters

Reverend Huston starts breeding Irish Red and White Setters

The Kennel Club places the English Setter on its list of vulnerable breeds in the UK

First edition of The Field Dog Stud Book opened with Llewellin Setters listed as a separate strain of English Setter (US)

Death of Richard Purcell-Llewellin. William Humphrey purchases his remaining setters

Russian Revolution

National Shoot to Retrieve Association formed

Robert Wehle breeds his first litter of Pointers

Giorgio Guberti breeds his first litter of Pointers

Ferrel Miller starts breeding Pointers

Manitoba Rap becomes first Pointer to win the National Championship (US)

Shadow Oaks Bo becomes the first English Setter since 1902 to win back-to-back National Championships (US)

George Ryman starts breeding English Setters

George Bird Evans starts his Old Hemlock line of English Setters International Gundog League formed

PART II SETTERS

The four divisions of the United Kingdom may be said to have each a breed of setters peculiar to itself, though of late years many of each variety have been distributed beyond the limits of their respective districts.

Left: Sydenham Edwards, Setters, ca. 1800 Above: Photo by author

Stonehenge

Today, most registries and stud books in the world recognize four breeds of setter: English, Gordon, Irish Red, and Irish Red and White. In the US, the Field Dog Stud Book recognizes the Llewellin Setter as a pure and independent strain within the English Setter breed. In the past, however, there were several more types of setters that were, at the time, considered separate breeds. Some were eventually absorbed into one or more of the four breeds recognized today, some faded away, and some never really existed at all.

As to the actual origins of the setter, they’ve been a source of debate for centuries. In 1823, T. B. Johnson wrote about the mystery of the setter’s origins in the book The Shooter’s Companion.

The setter is the handsomest and perhaps the most generous of the canine race, but by what peculiar cross he originated, is not well known; and all conjectures on this head, though very interesting to the sportsman, are too much involved in uncertainty, to be much depended on.

While people will always disagree about which breed is the “handsomest and perhaps the most generous,” everyone agrees that trying to follow all the twists and turns of the setter’s creation story is more or less impossible. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn something more about them by taking a look at some of the more interesting, and even surprising, stops along the way.

In 1872, Edward Laverack, the father of the modern English Setter, answered the question by writing “. . . the setter is nothing more than the setting spaniel improved.” But what exactly are setting spaniels, and what exactly were the “improvements” that turned them into setters?

One way to get to the bottom of it is to look at the words that Laverack used: spaniel, setting, and setter. Let’s start with “spaniel.” The most common view is that it means “from Spain.” Gaston Fébus himself wrote that “there is another type of dog that we call chiens d’oysel and espaignolz [spaniels], because this type comes from Spain, even though there are some in other countries.”

Did spaniels really come from Spain? Jean Castaing didn’t think so. He believed that they probably developed somewhere further north where a colder, wetter climate would have favored long-haired dogs. He also suggested that the word spaniel came from an old French word espanir which means to “spread out.” Another theory is that Fébus only said they came from Spain because he found them loud and obnoxious, just like his wife’s Spanish family, so calling them spaniels may have been a not-so-subtle way of dissing the in-laws. In any case, everyone agreed that spaniels were busy, medium-sized dogs that excelled at flushing game, no matter where they first came from. They were developed by hunters well before the early middle ages and eventually spread across much of Europe and, at some point, crossed the English channel.

The first use of the word spaniel in English may be from The Wife of Bath’s Tale written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 1300s. The main character is a licentious woman who “. . . hankers for every man that she may see; For like a spanyell will she leap on him.”

Edward of Norwich, the 2nd Duke of York also mentions spaniels around the same time in his book The Master of Game, a translation and adaptation of Gaston Fébus’ Le Livre de la Chasse. In Chapter 17, the Duke wrote that spaniels

. . . go before their master, running and wagging their tail, and raise or start fowl and wild beasts. But their right craft is of the partridge and of the quail. It is a good thing to a man that has a noble goshawk or a tiercel or a sparrow hawk for partridge, to have such hounds.

As to their appearance, the Duke provided another word-for-word translation of Fébus, with one glaring error. He wrote that “. . . a fair hound for the hawk should have a great head, a great body, and be of fair hue, white or tawny.”

The error is the word “tawny,” which means yellowish-brown or orange-brown. In the French original, Fébus did not use the word tawny (fauve in French); he wrote that the coat was tavelé, which means spotted or ticked, just like the coats of modern flushing spaniels and setters. Be that as it may, the most important line in the Duke’s description is the following: “. . . and also when they be taught to be couchers they be good to take partridges and quail with a net.”

That final phrase contains two things we need to keep in mind as we dig deeper into the setter’s origin story: the word “coucher,” from the Middle English word “couch,” which means to lie down, and the fact that spaniels were taught to be couchers.

The next time we come across the word “spaniel” in a major work is in 1570, in the book De Canibus Britannicis written by John Caius. It is unclear how much personal experience Caius had with dogs or even if he had any particular interest in them, but he must have known the right people in the right places because his work is remarkably accurate and provides an in-depth look at the many kinds of dogs in Britain at the time. The only problem for modern readers is that it is written almost entirely in Latin. Fortunately, six years after its release, Abraham Fleming published Of Englishe Dogges, which is not a wordfor-word translation of Caius’s book but more of an interpretation. From it we learn what spaniels looked like, and where some of them came from (spelling modernized):

Above: Detail from a scene of Saint Hubert, Notre Dame Church, La Ferté-Milon, France, ca. 1550

Right: Thomas Cook, The Setter, ca. 1780

The most part of their skins are white, and if they are marked with any spots, they are commonly red, and somewhat great therewithal, the hairs not growing in such thickness but that the mixture of them may easily be perceived. Others of them be reddish and blackish, but of that sort there be but a very few. There is also at this day among us a new kind of dog brought out of France (for we Englishmen are marvelous greedy gaping gluttons after novelties, and courteous cormorants of things that be seldom, rare, strange, and hard to get.) And they be speckled all over with white and black, which mingled colors incline to a marble blue, which befits their skins and affords a seemly show of comeliness. These are called French dogs as is above declared already

We also learn that there were two major types of spaniels—“The first findeth game on the land. . . . the other findeth game on the water”— and that the ones that worked on land were further divided into two sorts, one for hawking and one for netting. The main difference between the land spaniels was their hunting style. Spaniels used for hawking searched for and flushed game or, in Fleming’s words, “they. . . play their parts, either by swiftness of foot, or by often questing, to search out and to spring the bird for further hope of advantage.” He also says that they were “denominated [named] after the bird which by natural appointment he is allotted to take.” So, there were pheasant spaniels, partridge spaniels and spaniels for the falcon. Today, we still name one spaniel, the Cocker, after the bird it hunts: the woodcock. The other sort of land spaniel did not flush birds, but showed the hunter where the birds were hiding, or in Fleming’s words, “by some secret sign and privy token betray the place where they fall.” Unlike hawking spaniels, which had a reputation of being noisy and hard to handle, the other type of land spaniel was considered easier to train, and worked in silence, making

. . . no noise either with foot or with tongue while they follow[ed] the game. These attend diligently upon their Master and frame their conditions to such . . . motions and gestures as it shall please him to exhibit and make, either going forward, drawing backward, inclining to the right hand, or yielding toward the left.

So, based on the work of Caius, Fleming offers us an updated and expanded description of dogs the Duke of York called “couchers.” However, neither Fleming nor Caius called them couchers; instead, they called them setters. Caius used the word in a schematic he drew up to categorize the various types of dogs in Britain and Fleming wrote that “. . . this kind of dog is called Index, Setter, being indeed a name most consonant and agreeable to his quality.”

According to both Caius and Fleming a “setter,” then, was a dog that “betrays the place of the bird’s last abode.” Since setter sounds like sitter, and setting sounds like sitting, it has long been assumed that setter was a synonym for coucher and therefore meant a dog that lies down, but that is a mistake. For Caius and Fleming, the word setter had nothing to do with laying down. It was not a synonym for coucher. It was a new word that Caius decided to use for a new type of dog.

So, if it didn’t mean a dog that lies down, what exactly did setter mean? In order to find out, we have to go back to the original text of Caius’s book and then unravel Fleming’s somewhat confusing translation.

De Canibus Britannicis was written in Latin, the common language of 16th-century European scholars, but Caius also included a few English words in the text, mainly terms English people used for certain kinds of dogs. That is why words like tumbler, dancer, turn-spit, spaniel, and setter appear in the schematic Caius included in his book. Caius knew that many of his readers didn’t read or speak English, so he included

ENGLISH SETTER

English Setters are among the most popular gundogs on the planet, but their distribution is anything but even. Wildly popular in some regions, more or less unknown in others, they face extinction in their native land. Before the days of breed standards, registries, dog shows, and field trials, they didn’t even have an official name. They were simply "setters," setting spaniels, or bird dogs. For over 400 years, they had been kept and bred by men of means, each following their own vision of what a setter should be, their breeding decisions guided by the game and terrain of their particular region.

Left: Photo by Rebecca Goutorbe Above: Photo by Susan Stone

GORDON SETTER

This variety of the modern setter had its name originally from the fact of being first introduced to the public from Gordon Castle, Fochabers, Banffshire, the Highland seat of the Dukes of Richmond and Gordon.

—Rawdon B. Lee

Above: William Henry Hopkins, Gordon Setters, 1877

Left: Photo by Laurent Bernede

IRISH RED SETTER

The Irish Setter who was, incidentally, a separate breed long before the Gordons and English sorted themselves out, always seemed to be the fancy of men who did not seem to have the herewith, or the inclination, to push them, as the Pointers and English Setters had been pushed.

—John Nash

Left: Photo by Susan Stone Above: Photo by author

IRISH RED AND WHITE SETTER

There is another color of Irish Setters, blood red and white, quite as pure, indeed some people maintain, of greater antiquity and purity of blood, than the blood red. Both the blood red, and the blood red and white will throw each color, evidently denoting they are of the same strain.

—Edward Laverack

Above: Victor Marcou, Setter in a Landscape, ca. 1910

Left: Photo by Stéphane Gerreboo

PART III THE POINTER

Like the Arabian horse, he may be regarded as an exotic, which, in the hands of English sportsmen, has attained a degree of perfection which will be vainly sought in those countries of which he was originally native.

—William Shaw

Photos by author

PART IV LOST AND FORGOTTEN

Today there is one recognized breed of Pointer, sometimes referred to as the “English” Pointer, and four recognized breeds of setters: English, Gordon, Irish Red, and Irish Red and White. Yet it hasn’t always been that way, at least not under the historical definition of the term “breed.”

In today’s dog world, the word “breed” has come to mean not just a particular group of dogs selectively bred to perform specific tasks, but one that is also

recognized by an official registry. In the past, the word did not have the same meaning and so was often used interchangeably with words like strain, line, or type, so it is not uncommon in the old literature to read about Mr. so-and-so’s breed of setter or Lord Something-orother’s breed of Pointer. Today, we would use the word strain or line to describe those dogs. Nevertheless, there were certain strains of dogs that could have risen to the status of a breed in the modern sense of the word, but failed to do so for a variety of reasons.

Left: American 18th Century, Boy of the Beekman Family, ca. 1720, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch Above: Photo by author

One of the sadnesses in gundogs lies in the loss of old breeds, either through a lack of recognition or simply indifference to their fate.

—David Hancock

PART V FIELD TRIALS

Given man’s delight in inventing games, and then elevating them to such a status that national prestige depends upon them, it is likely that the competitions involving dogs go back a very long way. Given man’s competitive nature it could not have been long after one man and his dog emerged from their cave to find themselves confronted by their neighbor and his dog.

—Frank Jackson

Photos by author

The hunting partnership between man and dog developed thousands of years ago and it came from a deep bond of affection. I suspect it was the dog’s idea.

—Aaron Fraser Pass