THE WIRE- HAIRED FOX-TERRIER: friend of the country-born

Would it be heresy to suggest that this workmanlike little dog is really rather ugly? The fashion for trimming his beard square, above his absolutely straight forelegs, results in making him look as though he were carved out of wood. The one in the photograph has evidently not been intended for the show-bench and has escaped the trimmer’s attentions; he was probably just someone’s jolly companion, who barked at strangers, bit the postman, and kept the rats down.

Both kinds of fox-terrier, the smooth and the wirehaired, descend from the Old British black-and-tan, now extinct except in its miniature form, jet-black and shiny, with rust-red markings, and weighing anything from 3-8lb. They are thus unquestionably English dogs, though their name of terrier comes from the French, terre – earth, indicating that they readily go to earth, i.e. down holes or drains, in pursuit of their prey. The first fox-terriers were nearly all smooth-coated and were probably shorter in the leg than the modern dog; in the reign of James I, some of them were crooked-legged as well, a thing which would never be tolerated today.

Until the second half of the 19th century, the wiry coat occurred more or less as a freak, though some time in the 1870s, an Oxford undergraduate named John Russell, meditatively strolling across Magdalen meadow, met a milkman accompanied by a small wire-haired bitch. She took his fancy and he bought her, to become the matriarch of the now well-known Russell terriers.

It was not until about 20 years later that the few wire-haired dogs which occasionally appeared ceased to be described as ‘objectionable’, and started to make headway and even to command high prices, until today they have outstripped their smooth-coated kindred in numbers and popularity.

Fox-terriers will always be liked. They are cheerful, companionable and sporting. Essentially normal, hearty dogs, with no Freudian neurotic nonsense about them, they seem to have been created as the born friend of the country-born Englishman or Englishwoman. They go well with tweed suits and brogue shoes. Yes, they are very English: what Kipling might have called a Man’s Pal.