A cross between a golden retriever and a bloodhound looks a lot like a ridgeback. There are no dogs like this one featured anywhere in historical golden retriever photos.
Source for image.
I see it often repeated on websites that golden retrievers have bloodhound ancestry. I don’t know why it gets repeated that much, but if you breed a golden retriever to a bloodhound, you get smooth-coated puppies. There are no smooth-coated golden retrievers or any mention of smooth-coated bloodhound retrievers anywhere in the breed history.
The GRCA has published an article in which it quotes Arthur Croxton Smith, a British gun dog enthusiast from last century, who actually talked to the originators of the strain. It was actually he, not Elma Stonex, who revealed that the Russian circus dog story was bogus.
But no one listened to him.
And apparently no one is listening now. This is what Croxton Smith found out about the exact ancestry of the retrievers from the Third Lord Tweedmouth:
“Col. Ie Poer Trench ( St. Hubert’s Kennel) told me a romantic story which I was responsible for reporting extensively in various articles, to the effect that Sir Dudley Marjoribanks founded his kennel on a troupe of performing dogs that he bought from a circus proprietor in Brighton soon after the Crimean War. My old friend told me this story with such conviction that I had no reason to doubt it, but when I saw descendants of Mr. Harcourt’s strain (Culham} I came to the conclusion that they were not greatly different from the FlatCoats that I used to know when a boy, and I thought the best way of getting an accurate version of the origin of the Guisachan dogs was to go to the late Lord Tweedmouth who was the grandson of the first peer [Dudley Churchill Marjoribanks, 3rd Baron Tweedmouth].
“He told me that one Sunday when his grandfather and father were at Brighton in the late ’60’s, they met a good looking yellow retriever and approached the man who had it. This man, who was a cobbler, said that he had received the dog in lieu of a bad debt from a keeper in the neighbourhood and that it was the only yellow puppy out of a black Wavy-Coated (the Flat Coats were then called Wavy) Retriever litter. Sir Dudley bought the dog and later obtained a bitch of a similar colour in the Border country. Several others were obtained, and to prevent the danger of excessive inbreeding, an occasional outcross was made with black Flat-Coated bitches. The third Lord Tweedmouth assured me that there was never a trace of Bloodhound in them — they were absolutely purebred Retriever.
“This version had corroboration in a letter published in the ‘Field’ in 1941, when M. S. H. Whitbread stated that the second Lord Tweedmouth told him how, as a small boy at school near Brighton, his father, Sir Dudley Marjoribanks, took him for a walk on the downs where they met a man with a very handsome young yellow retriever. He was a shoemaker and had received the puppy from Obed Miles, the keeper at Stanmer, in payment for a bill. Sir Dudley bought the dog, which was the originator of the Tweedmouth breed.
“Reading these two accounts together, combined with my previous doubts, I feel we must accept them as being correct.”
The bloodhound story is the last vestige of the Russian circus dog story that gets repeated in respectable circles.
People did breed hounds to retrievers, but there isn’t very good evidence that modern golden retrievers are bloodhounds.
Now, there is an account that at Guisachan the retrievers were bred to a bloodhound to make a better deer-tracking bloodhound, but there is no account of those dogs being bred back into the retrievers.
Croxton-Smith knew that the golden retrievers were nothing more than yellow or reddish variants of the old way-coated retriever, and for that reason, he was skeptical of the Russian origins story.
We now have dropped the Russian dogs from the picture, but the bloodhound still remains.
See related posts:
6th Lord Ilchester mentioned that a bloodhound yellow retriever cross was done at least once (NOT by Lord Tweedmouth), but that the dog kept from the resulting litter, while useful in its work, was so “savage” (his word) that the cross was not perpetuated.
Modern Bloodhounds are far from “savage”, but back then many varied sorts of hounds used for tracking were called “bloodhound”.
There was a savage bloodhound that was kept in the South and in the Caribbean to hunt runaway slaves and put down slave revolts. It was called the Cuban bloodhound. But it was a mastiff, something like a Presa Canario.
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