By 1868, Nous had been an established working retriever at Guisachan for three years, and his owner, the 1st Baron Tweedmouth (Dudley Marjoribanks), decided that he wanted to use Nous to found his own breed.
Dudley Marjoribanks had grown up in Berwickshire, the former county in which Berwick-upon-Tweed had been its shire town. He also represented Berwick-upon-Tweed as an MP, and thus, he was familiar with that region’s peculiarities.
He knew of the local water dog, which was a cross between the indigenous water spaniel of the region and “the Newfoundland.”
Richard Lawrence wrote about them in The Complete Farrier and British Sportsman in 1816:
Along rocky shores and dreadful declivities beyond the junction of the Tweed with the sea of Berwick, water dogs have derived an addition of strength, from the introduction of a cross with the Newfoundland dog, which has rendered them completely adequate to the arduous difficulties and diurnal perils in which they are systematically engaged (405).
These dogs were a landrace type, which means they varied greatly in appearance. In Hugh Dalziel’s British Dogs, J.S. Skidmore’s description of the Tweed water spaniel goes as follows:
They were very light liver colour, so close in curl as to give me the idea that they had originally been a cross from a smooth-haired dog; they were long in tail, ears heavy in flesh and hard like a hound’s, but only slightly feathered – fore legs feathered behind, hind legs smooth, head conical, lips more pendulous than M’Carthy’s strain. The one I owned, which was considered to be one of the best of them, I bred from twice, and in each litter several of the puppies were liver and tan, being tanned from the knees downward and under the tail. I came to the conclusion that she, at any rate, had been crossed with the bloodhound.
It is possible that his dog had been crossed with bloodhound or maybe Gordon setter, but at least one account of the dogs suggests that at least some of these dogs were more of the retriever-type Stanley O’Neill was a well-known flat-coat expert who he had encountered Tweed water dogs as a boy in the 1890’s. His description is of a more retriever like than that of J.S. Skidmore:
Further up the coast, probably Alnmouth [in Northumberland, south of Berwick-upon-Tweed], I saw men netting for salmon. With them was a dog with a wavy or curly coat. It was a tawny colour but, wet and spumy, it was difficult to see the exact colour, or how much was due to bleach and salt. Whilst my elders discussed the fishing I asked these Northumberland salmon net men whether their dog was a [St. John's?] Water-Dog or a Curly, airing my knowledge. They told me he was a Tweed Water Spaniel. This was a new one on me. I had a nasty suspicion my leg was being pulled. This dog looked like a brown Water Dog to me, certainly retrieverish, and not at all spanielly. I asked if he came from a trawler, and was told it came from Berwick.
From that description, the dogs looked like a tawny curly-coated retriever. This suggests that at least some of the dogs were not true livers but were brown-skinned yellow to reds. The “light-liver” color in the Skidmore description sounds more like a deadgrass Chessie than a true liver-colored dog. (Deadgrass Chessies are light yellow dogs with brown skin.)
Now, from my reading of all of these texts, a Tweed water dog or Tweed water spaniel was actually a derivative of the St. John’s water dog. That is why it looked so much like a retriever. The fact that the dogs had such short hair suggests that they were derived from that “Newfoundland,” rather than the big one. It is likely that the native water spaniel in Northumberland and the Borders was red or yellow in color, rather than truly liver.
Also, in the O’Neill description, the dogs were being used to net salmon. That particular job is the exact task that the St. John’s water dogs performed in Newfoundland.
The dogs were celebrated waterfowl dogs, retrieving shot birds from the chilly and rough waters of the North Sea coast. Because this was a regional breed, it was not well-known in rest of Britain. Dudley Marjoribanks most likely knew about them and their reputation as superior retrievers.
However, in those days, the preferred color for a retriever was black. Other colors simply were not bred from. Perhaps Marjoribanks’s experience with Nous and his knowledge of the Tweed water dog gave him enough confidence to challenge the accepted wisdom of the day.
We do not know what Belle, the Tweed water dog chosen as Nous’s mate, looked like. We can only infer from the depictions of their offspring.
Nous appears to be rather dark-colored dog that was somewhat heavy in bone. If you saw him today, you would recognize him as a golden retriever.
Ada, Crocus, Primrose, and Cowslip, the four bitch puppies that resulted from that breeding, also looked a lot like goldens. Two depictions of those puppies exist– one of Ada and one of either Cowslip or Primrose. Ada is a rather short-haired dog. The dog said to be Cowslip or Primrose has rather wavy long hair.
Both of these dogs are lighter in color than their sire, and both are more lightly build than their sire. This suggests that Belle was a more lightly built dog than Nous and was of a pale gold color. The paler shades in the golden retriever most likely come from the Tweed water dog, for the red t0 yellow wavy-coated retrievers and red Irish and Gordon setters that were crossed into the strain are not that pale in color.
Belle was most likely a brown-skinned yellow, while Nous was a black-skinned yellow of the darker shade.
So now we have an idea about what the two foundational breeds that helped create the golden retriever looked like. You can see some of the Tweed water dog’s characteristics in some golden retrievers, especially in the performance-bred lines. This breed disappeared by the turn of the century, mostly by being absorbed into the retrievers. Regional dogs also had a hard time competing against the “improved” breeds of retriever that were coming to the fore as the nineteenth century progressed.
I don’t know if any of you remember the old Animal Planet series Animal X, but I remember watching it religiously.
The Black Cat of Killakee was one of my favorite stories.
Interestingly, Storyteller Media, the production company for Animal X, has a youtube channel.
And you can watch some of the old episodes, and the newer ones that came out a few years ago.
Speaking of the new ones, you need to see this clip.
Sometimes my spam filter “eats” comments, so I make it a habit to check my spam filter every couple of days to see if anything has been sent to comment purgatory.
I think pekes are totally screwed. You cannot talk sense to 90 percent of their breeders. Trust me. You can show them old photos until the cows come home, but they still think the dogs that came from China looked like this dog.
This is one breed were most of its fanciers operate in a kind of vacuum-type paradigm in which evidence and logic are sacrificed for approval.
If you want to see what I mean. Look at the comments on this video.
Not only do I hate song, you can’t tell me that this dog is a “beautiful mover.”
The reaction of the basset club chairperson is absolutely hilarious!
“We have improved them.”
Really?
Nous, b. 1864. Sired the famous litter with Belle in 1868.
Although yellow and red retrievers had always been born as sports in wavy-coated retriever litters for many years prior to 1864, Nous is considered the founder of the golden retriever. His progeny would make up the Tweedmouth strain, which are generally believed to be the ancestral line that gave us the three foundation line of wavy/flat-coats that became the golden retriever in 1912.
Nous had been born to the 3rd Earl of Chichester’s line of wavy-coats. If you want to know what sort of dogs were behind him, it is pretty obvious that some form of red setter had been crossed into that line. He probably had St. John’s water dog very close in his ancestry, for he has conformation that more resembles that dog than the breed that would eventually evolve from him.
Nous’s owner owed a debt to a cobbler, and when this unusually colored puppy was born, he offered the retriever to the cobbler in lieu of payment on that debt.
Typically, non-black retrievers at this time were culled from the breeding programs. The Reverend Thomas Pearce (“Idstone”) wrote “I have no fancy for other than black Retrievers, nor do I think that they will ever be in general favour.”
Apparently, Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, didn’t read Idstone’s book, because he came across young Nous at Brighton in 1865. He was very impressed by the animal, and he wondered why a cobbler would have such an animal. After all, a working retriever was meant for the shooting estate, not the home of a craftsman.
He offered to buy Nous, and the cobbler consented.
Nous then appeared at the kennels at Guisachan.
In 1868, he was bred to Belle, a Tweed water spaniel. I prefer to call this breed a Tweed water dog, because it appears to be a cross between a St. John’s water dog and the regional water spaniel of the Northumberland and Borders coast.
Nous is a rather dark dog, and he shows some features of his St. John’s water dog ancestry. His coat is thick and very wavy, which is exactly what the wavy-coated retriever would have looked like in the 1860’s. This breed hadn’t yet been standardized, and it varied from setter type to Newfoundland type. (See Paris and Melody) Some also had collie features, and many others had water spaniel characteristics. Each sportsman bred his own line of retriever He was free to breed any color he liked, mix in any outside blood that he wanted, and evaluate his stock with any standard he chose.
Breeding this color may have been a bit of a rebellion, but in those days, people were always doing these things.
Nous was the wrong color to one person, but he was the right color for another. And because of he was this color, he got to be bred.
Now, I don’t think Nous cared whether he was golden or black, but we humans do get worked up about color. In those days,coming in a weird color could get you drowned in a bucket or selected to found a new strain. Nous’s fate was that he eventually was chosen to do the latter. It could have easily gone the other way.
Check out the photos of these two moose (Alces alces or elk) in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not far from the Wisconsin border.
What do steenbok have to do with Christmas?
I don’t know, but have a look this from Tetrapod Zoology.
Now, I can see where someone could get confused. How many people have seen the stop motion special Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer?
Here’s a clip in case you haven’t seen it:
The species that this cartoon was based upon was not the reindeer/caribou of northern Eurasia and North America. Because this special was made in the US, the species it was based upon was the white-tailed deer. In fact, if you watch the whole thing, the does don’t have antlers. In real caribou/reindeer, the does do have antlers, an adaptation that helps them compete for scarce food resource during the worst part of the winter.
This makes some sense, though, if the average person in the US saw what reindeer/caribou actually look like, I seriously doubt that the film would have had any credibility. I mean they just aren’t that cute:
Now, the young male reindeer in this special have little antlers, which look a lot like the steenbok’s horns. Unlike the reindeer/caribou, steenbok have actual horns, and only the males have them.
The word steenbok in Dutch refers to the Alpine Ibex, which is known as “Steinbock” in German. When the Dutch and German-speaking settlers came to Southern Africa, they called the little antelope they saw “steenbok,” and the name has lived on in the Afrikaans language and in English. (Similarly, the large antelope these settlers found was called an “Eland,” which is Dutch for elk/moose.” In North America, we called the close relative of the red deer an elk. Yes, I know we got also got that one wrong, but at least what we call an elk is a deer!)
Steenbok live in Southern and Eastern Africa. It is not exactly a species of the barren grounds of the High Arctic.
But maybe I have it wrong.
Maybe Santa Claus’s flying reindeer are actually flying steenbok, and they use their large ears as wings and soar just like the flying nun.
I’ve got a few things planned for this blog in the next few weeks.
I’m going to recount the history of the origins of the golden retriever again. I will probably do it in daily installments.
The reason why I am doing the rewrite is because I don’t think the early ones were as good as they need to be.
Plus, I don’t think my newer readers have read them before.
I’m going to start with a general history of the retriever dog. This origins story will be followed by a general history of the wavy-coated retriever, which then will be followed by the development of golden and flat-coated retrievers. It is impossible to write a good analysis of the history of one retriever breed without considering how it fits into the whole.
I hope you don’t mind that these posts will appear to be repetitions of earlier posts, but it is the only way I can really do these posts any justice.
It will probably take me until the end of the month until I get finished.
As for my non-retriever-owning readers, I promise to have no more than one post on this topic per day.
When my counter resets at 7 P.M. Eastern tomorrow, this retooled series will start.
However, if you don’t want me to do this again, I will simply leave this story alone. (Well, I mean I’ll just occasionally mention it.)
Check out this breeder’s website. (Not the same breeder as the puppies above).
The history is pretty good, although it is more likely that the more plausible theory is that these dogs originated from Central Asian (Turkish, Turkic, or Magyar) ancestors.
These dogs are both water dogs and herders, which is why I think they are the missing link between the water dogs and puli. The puli-type is most likely the ancestor of all of these dogs.
It is possible that these dogs wound up in the hands of the North Africans. These dogs were probably introduced by through trade. Remember, most of North Africa was Christian and connected to European civilization. It makes sense that some of these dogs would have wound up in Iberia, as they spread out of Asia into the Mediterranean.
I do doubt these dogs have an origin in North Africa after that part of the world became part of the Islamic world. No active herding breed exists in Muslim countries, although one can find livestock guardians in those cultures. I doubt that these dogs were introduced to Iberia by the Moors. Herding dogs are simply not part of Islamic civilization.
I also doubt that this breed is the “most ancient” of water dogs. In reality, that dog is long extinct. In Europe, it has radiated out into so many different breeds, including the water spaniels and retrievers of Britain, the St. John’s water dog of Newfoundland, the truffle-hunting Lagottos Romagnolos of Italy, and the ubiquitous poodle of Germany, France, and Russia.
The fact that Spanish water dogs are herders should tell you a lot about the origins of these dogs and their relations. The old name “Perro Turco” for this breed suggests two origins. Either these dogs came from Central Asia through Turkey, or they are the descendants of the Magyar’s puli-type dogs. The latter sounds possible because many Western Europeans referred to the Magyar people (who we call Hungarians) as Turks. (The name of the man who discovered grapes in Vinland was named Tyrkir. He is sometimes listed as a German slave, but he is also often suggested to be Hungarian. After all, the Norse were probably also calling Magyars Turks.)
See also The History of Water Dogs post.
