News hounds Bristol’s celebrity cani
It gives you paws for thought to learn that the country’s pooch population has gone through the woof, so Eugene Byrne hounded out some tails of dogs and their owners, some of them barking.
ONE of the consequences of the pandemic and its associated lockdowns is that lots of people bought or adopted a dog.
Recent figures from, among others, the Pet Food Manufacturers Association, suggest there are now about 12.5 million dogs in the UK, up by more than three million on 2019. That’s an awful lot of pandemic pooches.
One third of all UK homes have a dog. There’s a dog for every five humans in Britain, and while there tend to be fewer in big cities than in smaller towns or the countryside, the increase is noticeable even in Bristol.
BTW, according to a survey from a local veterinary practice last year, the most popular dog names in Bristol are Bella, Poppy and Teddy in that order. Old-fashioned names like Spot and Rover are out of fashion, perhaps because owners nowadays seek to “humanise” the names of their pets.
In honour of all this caninemania, we decided to raid the archives for some dog stories (shaggy or otherwise) from Bristol’s distant and not-so-distant past.
Working dogs in the docks
James Millerd’s famous 1673 map of Bristol shows lots of details, including what appear to be animals in the docks around Welsh Back. It’s often said that they’re seals, but they have visible ears, something seals don’t have. Besides, it’s hard to imagine seals hanging around in what would have been a very filthy river that was tidal.
So it’s now thought that they are dogs, possibly Talbot Hounds (now extinct) which were rather like bloodhounds and used for hunting. Whatever they were, there is a view that they were used as tugs, towing boats, lighters and even whole ships around the harbour. They might even also have been for rescuing people who fell in the water.
At this time, dogs also pulled goods around the city. Samuel Pepys noted on his visit that Bristol had “No carts, it standing generally on vaults, only dog carts.”
Turnspit dogs
Among the exhibits at Blaise Castle House Museum (currently closed for winter) is a wooden wheel, like a big hamster wheel. These were set on the walls near the fireplace in the kitchens of large houses or inns and dogs bred specially for the purpose (with short legs and long bodies) would walk or run in them. A mechanism connected to the wheel would turn the spit on which meat was roasting at the fire down below.
We used to think that this clever labour-saving device was unique to Bristol, but this isn’t so. Evidence of them crops up all over the country. Apparently Queen Victoria kept retired turnspit dogs as pets.
Other people also used them as foot-warmers. According to one often repeated tale, a clergyman was giving a sermon at a church in Bath and was talking about the prophet’s vision in the Old Testament book, Ezekiel 1: “It was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel …”
At the mention of the word “wheel”, which the dogs had been trained to recognise as the order to get to work, they all slid out from under their owners’ feet and made for the door.
”Sagacious dog”
“A curious instance of the intelligence of a dog occurred Bristol on Saturday. A nursemaid in the employ of a gentleman living at Kingsdown was wheeling a baby in a perambulator [i.e. pram] down Spring Hill. She was accompanied by a valuable dog, half Newfoundland and half retriever, the property of her master.
The girl was suddenly seized with a fit, and loosened her hold of the perambulator, which rolled away at an accelerated speed and to the imminent danger of its little occupant.
The faithful dog, with wonderful instinct, realised the child’s danger, and, dashing after the vehicle, seized part … in his mouth and brought the runaway to a stop. In another minute the perambulator would have been dashed over the two flights of steps.
As it was, the dog’s seizure was so forcible that the perambulator was overturned, but, fortunately, baby sustained no injury …
We need hardly say that the sagacious dog was overwhelmed with the caresses of the grateful parents when they learnt how bravely he had saved their child.”
Western Daily Press, April 4 1870
Jim, the (unofficial) police dog hero
BT has been unable to determine
when Bristol Constabulary started employing police dogs, but it certainly seems to have been much later than most other forces. (If anyone knows, please write in!)
The Chief Constable was talking about it in 1914, when he gave his view that they might be useful around the docks because there were so many “loafers” sleeping on the docksides and any one of them might accidentally set fire to flammable goods by thoughtlessly throwing a match away when lighting their pipes.
The first real canine hero of the force was Jim, who was not an official police dog but a rather scruffy Airedale. He originally belonged to a Clifton nursing home but made himself comfortable at the police station on Brandon Hill.
The officers took a shine to him and he regularly accompanied constables on the beat. His finest moment came when, in the Spring of 1930, he walked into the station and started tugging at the trouser leg of an officer very persistently. The officer followed and was surprised that Jim was leading him up the hill rather than downwards.
Jim led the officer to an injured colleague, who had slipped over in the dark and hit his head, and who was now lying semi-conscious.
For this Jim was rewarded with a special collar presented by the Lady Mayoress at a ceremony in the Lord Mayor’s parlour.
It was also noted that Jim would only walk out with regular constables. He didn’t like sergeants or inspectors, though nobody knew how he could tell the difference.
Canine fundraisers
Aardman’s Gromit is a familiar sight around Bristol Children’s Hospital as the figurehead of The Grand Appeal, the Hospital’s charity. But Gromit was not the Children’s Hospital’s first fundraising dog.
In the 1880s, when the hospital was at the top of St Michael’s Hill, a terrier called Punch helped collect donations from the local community.
He was owned by George Williams, landlord of the Standard of England pub on Castle Street, who even trained Punch to pick up coins in his mouth and drop them in the collection box. This plucky pooch was known as “the children’s friend”, and raised £43 in his lifetime – think of this as around £20,000 or more today.
In the 1930s the Hospital found another four-legged friend in Rex, a Great Dane owned by Miss Cook,
the Principal of Hampton House School in Cotham (no longer in existence). Rex wore a collection box strapped to his back with a special harness and was led around by the school’s pupils. By the time he retired he had collected £166, something like £30,000 in modern terms.
Who’s the most famous?
Gromit, albeit a fictional hound made of plasticine, may be Bristol’s most famous dog but, until he
came along, that distinction unquestionably belonged to Nipper.
Nipper was born in Bristol in 1884 and belonged to Mark Barraud, a stage set designer at the Prince’s Theatre on Park Row.
Nipper was part bull terrier, part fox terrier, and Barraud called him Nipper because he liked to bite people’s ankles. Barraud died in 1897 and Nipper was taken in by Mark Barraud’s brother Francis, an artist. Francis noticed how Nipper
would often sit by the horn of his phonograph, apparently wondering where the sound came from. Although Nipper died in 1895, Barraud painted the scene three years later.
Barraud named the painting “His Master’s Voice” and tried unsuccessfully to have it exhibited at the Royal Academy. He tried to sell it to magazines and phonograph companies with no success until an American firm called the Gramophone Company paid him £50 for it (altered so that the dog was listening to one of their products) and £50 for the copyright.
The Gramophone Company started using it in their adverts and the rest is history. Francis Barraud painted several replicas of the original, and when he died in 1924, HMV, as they were now called, hired other artists to do the same.
Down the years HMV produced several Nipper products, including metal statuettes, and it was from the mould from one of these that a statue was specially cast in 2001 to be sited on Bristol University’s Merchant Venturers building, opposite the location of the Princes Theatre, where his master used to work.
When HMV went into administration in 2013, someone laid some flowers by the statue with a card on which was written: “Thinking of you, Nipper, the HMV dog. You brought music into our lives. Love always.”
Doting owner
On the Westbury route the other day the bell rang and the bus pulled up in the usual way. No one got off and the conductress, looking up the stairs into the mirror, saw a woman standing in the top deck gangway with a dog in her arms.
The conductress ran up the stairs and said: “Do you want to get off?”
The woman replied: “Oh! No – I rang the bell because I wanted to show my little doggie where he was born.”
Western Daily Press, January 4 ,1947
Hearty Labrador
The first dog in history to be fitted with a heart pacemaker was Major Catastrophe, a three-year-old Labrador. It was implanted at Bristol University’s Veterinary School in 1980 and proved successful. So much so that following a check-up a year later the vets decided to slow his heartbeat down from 90 to 80 per minute as he was so energetic.
Major Catastrophe got his name from his owners, the Harcombe family of Wellington in Somerset, because of his antics as a puppy. In keeping with the spirit of the times, they were now also referring to him as The Bionic Dog.
Border collies
In the mid 1990s, Jimmy Rye, an army veteran in his 60s, lived an independent and sort of self-sufficient existence, with two caravans and six cars in Churchill.
At that time, Churchill was on the border of Somerset and the nowdefunct county of Avon. The neighbours complained on account of his 11 dogs, but whenever one council tried to evict him, he simply moved a few yards across the border into the other council area. Apparently it took a lot of paperwork for both local authorities to combine forces.
The Unusual suspects
A woman was bitten by a sheepdog after delivering a package to a Somerset farmhouse in 1992. She complained to police but the problem was that there were four similarlooking Border Collies on the farm. So they held an identity parade. The woman failed to identify the offender, so the culprit was saved from being put to sleep. This is thought to be the only identity parade involving Border Collies in UK history.
A wee problem
In 2009 a Redland family sought a rather unusual course of action when Simon, their black Labrador, went missing – they laid trails of their own wee around the neighbourhood.
Simon’s owners, the Baltesz family, tried all the usual methods posters, trawling the local streets, and calling vets and rescue centres.
When this failed, they started putting down highly diluted urine in the hope that Simon might latch onto their scent and return home. Experts said it would be surprising if it worked and that dogs usually knew their way home anyway.
A leader column in the Post however, pointed out that the publicity around the family’s unusual methods might draw greater attention to the missing dog and so help find him.
The authorities were not impressed. A Bristol City Council spokeswoman said: “We would not consider this to be a good idea from an environmental health point of view.”
We don’t know if Simon was ever found.
Dog owners “not as smart as cat owners” – shock report
According to a study by Bristol University’s Department of Clinical Veterinary Science published in 2010, cat owners are cleverer than dog owners.
Actually, that’s not quite what the boffins said, though it’s how everyone read it.
What they said was that (in a survey of over 2,500 households) 47.2% of homes with a cat had at least one person educated to degree level, compared to only 38.4% of homes with dogs.
This does not mean that owning a dog necessarily makes you less intelligent.
The study’s authors said it might just be that the long working hours associated with better qualified jobs meant that owning a dog was just impractical for many.
Perhaps with the pandemic and increasing numbers of people working from home, the numbers of college-educated dog owners has now risen.