The four bitch puppies that were born from crossing Nous to Belle formed the foundational for the strain of yellow retrievers at Guisachan. The line was maintained through some outcrossing to the top black wavy-coated retriever lines of the day, at least one red setter (of some breed), and another Tweed water dog.

If one takes a look at the pedigree of the Guisachan dogs, the names of famous dogs early days of the standardized flat or wavy-coated breed are rather obvious. Zelstone, Tracer, and Jenny/Wisdom, stand out  as founders of the line. That tells us that the Dudley Marjoribanks, though a Liberal, was close enough to Sewallis Shirley, an MP from a prominent Conservative family and founding president of the Kennel Club, to breed from their dogs. The two men probably saw each other in Parliament, and although they probably were not in agreement in politics, they were both ardent retriever people.

I find this part of their history rather fascinating.  The foundational lines of both the golden and flat-coat involve many of the same dogs. It also shows us that the strain developed at Guisachan was not intended to be a separate breed. It was intended to be a yellow variety of wavy-coat.

Now, in the early days of the fancy, wavy-coats had to be black. It was nearly impossible to win at show with a liver dog, and it would be nearly impossible to win with a yellow or red one. However, this yellow or red strain existed very early on in the history of the standardized wavy-coat.

Even though the strain that developed at Guisachan had some of the best wavy-coated dogs behind it, it was virtually unknown.  Even when Dudley Marjoribanks, MP, was elevated to the peerage of 1st Baron Tweedmouth in 1880, no category was developed for yellow wavy-coats in Kennel Club shows.

One of the reasons for the breed’s obscurity during this time is that the dogs were kept solely for working purposes and were kept by only a few individuals. The same can be said about the Malmesbury/Buccleuch line of smooth-haired retrievers, which began developing in the 1880’s.

In the 1880’s, who would have thought that the most numerous retrievers in the twenty-first century would be derived from those two obscure strains!

Like all wavy-coats of that day, the Tweedmouth strain varied from Newfoundland-type to setter-type.  The dog named Jenny/Wisdom would be the first dog to have something like a modern flat-coat’s head, and in the show-line of flat-coat, it became very important to breed away from the Newfoundland head and body type.

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It should be noted here that the Tweedmouth strain was not particularly inbred. The fact that setters and Tweed water spaniels were used as outcrosses suggests that he was much more interested in producing a performance line of dogs.

The same cannot be said about Shirley’s line of wavy-coats. Ch. Moonstone, Tracer’s brother, was bred to his mother, and a red or golden puppy named Foxcote resulted from the Oedipal relations. There were  also several cases of full brother-sister matings.

I find it very interesting that flat-coats and goldens are well-known for their high incidence of cancer. I wonder if this rather high amount of inbreeding early on in their standardization might be a cause of it. After all, inbreeding tends to weaken the immune system, and the immune system is an important in fighting cancer.

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The Tweedmouth strain did not develop separately from the other strains of wavy-coat. It developed in concert with them.

Had these dogs been black, they would have been absorbed into the modern flat-coated retriever. Indeed, as we shall see, the golden retriever that developed in the early twentieth century was developing along the lines of dogs we would recognize as flat-coats. The heavier-built dogs in both golden and black wavy-coats were bred away from.

If you want to know about the history of pack hounds, as well as their breeding, training, and what happens to them when they are retired, check out the blog Full Cry.

I come from Appalachian fox chasing stock. My maternal grandfather still keeps a small pack of Walker foxhounds, and my paternal grandfather kept a pack of Walkers and Triggs.

Fox chasing is a bit different from fox hunting, though. In the Appalachians, hounds are run at night, and no horse or red jacket is to be seen.  A bonfire is built, and the chasers listen to the foxhounds as they run the foxes.

No one would kill a red fox. Their pelts aren’t worth it these days.

And the red fox is not as common in this part of the world as the gray. The gray is not a popular animal for fox-chasers, simply because the gray will climb a tree to avoid the dogs, which ends the chase rather quickly.

That is why the dogs are trained to go for red foxes only.

I’m by no means an expert on pack hounds, so if you want to know more about them, check out Full Cry.

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.