Natural History

The first two retriever breeds: the old wavy-coat and the curly.

I know I have written a similar post on the various histories of the golden and flat-coated retrievers, but I think that this history is worth repeating.

The story of retrievers begins with the end of the last vestiges of manorial system in Britain and the Industrial Revolution. Both of these events happened in the late nineteenth century. Theorists have long argued about the causal relationship between the two, but both events complemented each other. Large numbers of people in England were driven out of the countryside during several centuries called “the Enclosure.” These people largely provided the first labor market for the first factories and provided the muscle behind the British navy and private and crown armies.

The technology that had developed as result of the new industrialized production and the opening of new markets as a result of imperialism created great wealth. A whole new class of rich and upper middle class was created. These new rich were deeply influenced with the Romantic movement, which argued that man was happiest in the country “doing country sport.” There were large agricultural lands in Britain that were now overproducing food as result of the agricultural revolution that occurred at roughly the same time. There were far fewer people living in the countryside, because of the centuries of the Enclosure. Thus, there was enough land for these sporting individuals to set up their own shooting preserves, complete with gamekeepers to control game stocks.

Gundogs in Britain evoloved rather peculiarly. In most of Europe, a dog could point, flush, and retrieve, and it would be considered a good dog. In Britain of that day, however, spaniels were used to flush game, and setters and pointers were used as index dogs.  This created a division of labor among gundogs.

The idea of a dog for picking up game is not new. The British had always had their rough water dogs and water spaniels for that purpose. However, these dogs were not exactly what the sporting gentleman had in mind. He needed a much faster dog for picking up, and by the early nineteenth century, various dogs began to be used for this work.

The Rev. Thomas Pearce or “Idstone” in his seminal work The Dog (1872) believed that the retrievers evolved from some sort of setter. However, William Nelson Hutchinson’s Dog Breaking  (1869) finds that all sorts of breeds were used as retrievers.  Idstone does mention that collies and “Newfoundlands” were used in their founding. He also points out that water spaniels played a role in creating the curly-coated retriever. However, Hutchinson is very specific in which breeds made up the main retriever lines of that period.

Hutchinson believes the dogs are derived from the following breeds: the dog on top is a water spaniel/”Newfoundland” cross, the dog on the lower left is a cross between a water spaniel and a setter, and the dogs on the lower left are “Newfoundland”/setter cross. The reason why I put “Newfoundland” in quotations is that this word could mean any sort of water dog from Newfoundland, including the big one. (See this pic of a Landseer Newf retrieving.)

Out of this retriever soup came the foundation of all the modern retrievers developed in Britain. In 1854, the curly-coated retriever was standardized as  distinct form. The original curly was a diverse breed, as one could expect from its ancestry in various forms of water spaniel. The early photos of curly show as smaller dog with longer hair than the modern breed. By the late nineteenth century, this breed was bred to be a much larger dog with a very tightly curled coat. One one working strain of curly, the Norfolk, continued on for several years as a distinct breed, but the big curly began to shift from a working dog to fancy show dog. It is the first retriever breed to be standardized by the fancy. It was also the first one to be ruined by it.

By the late nineteenth century, this breed was on its way out as a working dog. It was unknown in retriever trials in early twentieth century, although its cousin, the Norfolk, was still around. It was rapidly being replaced by the other early retriever breed, the old wavy-coated retriever.

Wavy-coats became popular through the exploits of two dogs in early retriever trials, “Old Bounce” and “Young Bounce.” These dogs were very common in Britain, probably because of the use of Welsh black setter in the outcross and the fact that Newfoundland fisherman and hunters often gave away long-haired puppies to British merchants. William Epps Cormack, who once walked across Newfoundland in 1822 wrote that “[t]he smooth or short haired dog is preferred because in frosty weather the long haired kind become encumbered with ice on coming out of the water.”  So the long-haired St. John’s water dogs were probably easily procured from Newfoundland, but the smooth-haired ones were very hard to come by. They were simply too economically useful.

Long-haired St. John's water dog.

This breed was prefectly designed for English driven shoots for pheasants and hares. By end of the ninteenth century, this breed replaced the curly as the main working retriever.

I should note here that there were wavies of colors other than black, probably as the result of crossbreeding with setters. Landseer painted a reddish gold retriever named “Breeze”, and Sir Francis Grant’s “Shooting Party-Ranton Abbey” depicts a yellow wavy-coat with some rather unsual ears. Both of these depictions are from the 1840’s. Yellows and reds were always part of the old wavy-coated breed, in part because of the red setters and yellow water spaniels that were crossed into the breed.

These two breeds did have slightly different bloodlines. The curly had a sharper temperament than the old wavy. In the big trials that developed, aggression with other dogs could not be tolerated, so the original curly really had lots of trouble fitting into the new scene.

However, the splitting of the British retrievers into new breeds had only just begun. The Labrador and golden retrievers appear to be absent from this analysis. And what about the Chesapeake Bay retrievers, the Murray River curlies, and Nova Scotia duck tollers? These three breeds are not British, of course, and they developed on a very different trajectory.

I shall continue this analysis in another post to come.