Culham Brass (b. 1904) is an example of what early golden retriever breeders thought was functional conformation.
I was digging through some GRCA literature online, when I came across this document, which includes some analysis and commentary from early golden retriever people in the US, Canada, and Britain.
It seems that a poison seed always existed in the early days of the golden retriever as a standardized breed.
I don’t know how to describe this poison seed exactly, but the best I can come up with is the “Irish setter inferiority complex.” The early people in the breed hated that their dogs were mistaken for Irish setters, so they decided to breed away from the setter’s conformation.
***
Now, one must not forget that wavy/flat-coated retrievers came in two basic types: the setter-type and the Newfoundland-type. A very good illustration is these two can be found in the illustration of two wavy-coats named Paris and Melody in Stonehenge’s Dogs of Great Britain, America, and Other Countries.
Then, as wavy-coats evolved into the top working retriever of their day, the Newfoundland-type was deemed inferior in the breed. Writing about the merits of the working flat-coat in The Complete English Shot (1907), George Teasdale-Buckell contended that the flat-coat is “open to regeneration when he is bred more wiry and less lumbering.” In other words, one should breed away from the Newfoundland-type.
Teasdale Buckell continues his critique of heavily-built, lumbering retrievers. He writs that the “the old dogs were lumbering, and so no doubt the Newfoundland type of wavy-coated dogs were” (187) and again criticizes his own selection of the Newfoundland-type wavy-coat stud named Zelstone, claiming that he was the worst cross he ever made (188).
***
Now, this information on flat-coated retrievers is very nice, but what does it have to do with golden retrievers.
Well, golden retrievers actually started out as a strain of wavy-coated retriever and then became flat-coated retrievers. Their original breeder, Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, bred these dogs with the best black wavy-coated retrievers he could find, including some of the top wavy/flat-coated dogs in the strain. He never intended to split this breed off because it was a different color.
Good working conformation for a flat-coated retriever is based upon a very simply axiom “Power without lumber and raciness without weediness.” It’s actually a very good axiom for breeding any strain of retriever.
However, if you are breeding golden retrievers with this conformation and they happen to be towards the darker end of the spectrum, they will look a lot like Irish setters.
This makes a lot of sense when you realize that the main outcross for flat-coated/wavy-coated retrievers was the setter. In fact, Idstone thought that the wavy-coated retriever was a specialized strain of black retrieving setter!
In the nineteenth century, a very common setter was the red setter. In the US, we call this breed an Irish setter, but red setters also occurred in the gordon setter breed (and still do).
Because wavy/flat-coated retrievers were almost always black dogs at this time, it was very common for a black retriever to carry the gene for red, as was the case with Moonstone.
After the Tweedmouth strain had been founded, it was augmented through outcrossing to black wavy/flat-coats that had setter ancestry. And as the setter type became preferred in flat-coat, it also affected the golden retriever (How could such a preference not?)
That’s why the Noranby goldens in the 1930’s looked like this:
Yes, these dogs do look like Irish setters.
To which I say, “So what?”
Flat-coats have obvious setter ancestry. It is celebrated in that breed.
It is condemned in the golden, even though this is what the efficient functional conformation is for a retriever that has some coat.
If you scan to page 3 of that GRCA document, a person named E.F. Rivinus contrives a whole rationale for breeding away from this functional type. Basically, he wants to breed to look so distinct from the setter that everyone will recognize that it is not one.
I find it interesting that Winifred Charlesworth, the founder of the golden retriever as a separate breed, wanted to breed for a different head in her dogs. She produced the Noranby dogs in the above photograph, and their heads are not radically different from a flat-coat. Of course, she was one of those people pushing the Russian origins poppycock, but you can obviously tell that her dogs are derived from flat-coats and red setters.
I can’t imagine a sillier rationale for coming up with a conformation standard.
In fact, it is a reversal of what British golden breeders were trying to breed for as the golden became distinct from the flat-coat. Because the golden had been an estate shooting dog, it had been one of the last strains of wavy-coat to develop the lighter strain. The Reverend Needham- Davies wrote the section on the golden in A.C. Smith’s Gun Dogs-Their Training, Working and Management. In that section, Needham-Davies contended that the golden was more like an old fashioned retriever, which he incorrectly suggested was the Newfoundland (it was actually the old-fashioned Newfoundland-type wavy-coat). He writes that the golden was being developed that could move with more speed, and it would eventually be able to compete with the best flat-coats and Labradors.
Of course, that was in the working gun dog sphere. In the show ring, breeding away from the lighter-built dog and the darker colored dog was the goal, while in the working gun dog sphere, breeding for lighter-built dogs was the main objective.
And even early on, you the beginnings of the split that has since happened in this breed.
One set wanted a dog that could move efficiently and with speed, while the other wanted a dog that didn’t look like an Irish setter.
***
I’ve searched long and hard for the reason why the show-strain goldens developed as they did.
I can’t believe it was for such a silly reason as the lighter-built and darker dogs looked like Irish setters.
I’m sure stranger rationales exist for the conformation standards of many breeds, but I have not heard them yet.
What I am about to explain here might be offensive to curly-coated retriever owners. It is not intended to be.
I am merely quoting what Harding Cox, a retrieverman of the late nineteenth centuries and early twentieth centuries, thought of the breed. The breed has definitely changed since then, because it is no longer a “fancy” breed. It is now bred for sound working conformation and ability by its dedicated breeders.
Cox wrote the section on retrievers in W.D. Drury’s British Dogs: Their Points, Selection and Show Preparation (1903), and to be fair, Cox was a flat-coated retriever enthusiast.
He begins his section on retrievers with this somewhat Spencerian prediction:
That the Curly-coated Retriever is doomed to practical extinction is a notable and an undeniable fact, which must be put down to the inevitable law of the survival of the fittest…For every Curly-coated dog (speaking of the recognised show type) used in the field, or exhibited on the bench, there are now a score, at least, of Flat-coats. (333).
Whoa.
Cox explains that reason why the curly lost favor in the British gun dog circles did not have much to do with their lack of tractability or their supposed reputation for hardmouth.
Cox contends that the real reason why the curly was not favored at time is that it was thought of as a show dog, not a working dog:
There seems to be a prevailing impression that the average disposition of the Curly-coated Retriever…is not as sweet and benevolent as that of the more popular dog [the flat-coat], and that he is less tractable. The writer’s only experience of these animals is in the show-ring, and he confesses that he has always found the exhibits mild and friendly enough. Probably the real reason of their unpopularity lies in the fact that they are more or less a “fancy” breed (345).
In this analysis, the real reason why the curly lost favor in Britain is because it was a dog bred solely for the show ring.
After all, this breed does have an unusual feature that is difficult to breed. Their coats do not withstand any crossbreeding. If you breed a curly to Labrador, you will have a dog with short hair and some wave to it. At this time, though, crossbreeding different strains of retriever was a common practice, and thus, the curly missed out on some of the experimental breeding that goldens, Labradors, and flat-coats experienced.
If you’re breeding for that feature, you’re not breeding for working ability. You’re breeding for the coat and for the rosettes that this coat will win you.
And that’s a recipe for disaster for a working dog.
If all the competitor breeds are being cross-bred and selectively bred for work, and you are breeding for a peculiar physical feature, your dog will not be able to keep up with them.
And the curly nearly went into extinction as Harding Cox suggested.
Of course, the flat-coat didn’t remain top dog in the trial circuit. After the First World War, the Labrador, which had been developed from breeding recently imported St. John’s water dogs with flat-coats, Chesapeakes, and all sorts of other dogs (including pointers and foxhounds), began to come into its own. The flat-coat developed a bad reputation for being hard to handle and for having possible borzoi ancestry (sight hounds are known for being terrible retrievers.) The yellow version of flat-coat became a separate breed, and it became the secondary retriever to the Labrador.
Nearly becoming extinct actually proved to be a blessing for the curly, for now the only people who were breeding them were truly interested in producing the best possible dog. The modern curly is now a dog with good working conformation and retrieving instinct, but most people don’t know about it. If the average person sees one, I guarantee you that the first question will be “Is that a Labradoodle?”
Losing popularity isn’t such a bad thing.
***
Today, the top working retriever is the Labrador. Most waterfowl hunters in North America go for Labradors.
In fact, the Labrador is now even more popular than its flat-coat predecessor. It is now the most common dog breed in the world.
The golden is the secondary dog. It is the curly of today.
However, this breed still remains common enough, although its popularity in Europe has started to drop off. In the US and Canada, it is still a very popular breed.
Most golden retrievers are rather like the curlies of the nineteenth century. They have been bred for their novel appearance alone. Working ability has been secondary.
And many working retriever people pass the golden over.
It is just a matter of time until the golden begins to really lose its status in our society.
When I first heard of them, they were touted as being very easily trained and very good natured.
A few years ago, they were touted as being very good natured and much calmer than Labradors. (This isn’t necessarily a good thing, because extremely calm dogs are on their way to losing their working ability.)
Now, their temperaments have become far less reliable than they once were.
As things have progressed, the golden is not thought of as a working retriever. It’s thought of as a fancy breed for yuppies to own.
All of these factors set the golden up for meeting a very similar fate that befell the curly in the early twentieth century.
Is this a bad thing?
Well, as I said before, losing a lot of popularity was a blessing for the curly. It allowed only the most dedicated people to breed them.
And with all the problems that the golden is facing, the only way to solve them is for the breed to lose some it of its popularity. Too many stupid people are breeding them.
If the demand for cute little golden retriever puppies would just drop, dedicated golden retriever people would be able to breed good dogs once again.
***
It amazes me how many comments I get whenever I offer even a tepid criticism of a breed. I usually don’t attack individual dogs, but I do attack breeding practices. However, these criticisms are viewed as affronts against an individual dog, which may be sound, smart, and healthy.
I have nothing against the curly-coated retriever.
In fact, if you read this post and didn’t know any better, I bet you’d think I hate golden retrievers.
The truth is that I can offer a criticism of a breeding practice or trend within a gene pool and still respect the individual dog.
Every dog breed and every bloodline within a breed or strain has its virtues and vices. We need to be honest about them.
It’s only then that we can have real discussions about improving our dogs through selective breeding.
But because this candor eludes too many people who consider themselves dog people, we can’t have that conversation.
But for the sake of the dogs, we need to have that conversation.
It’s time to detach our egos from our dogs.
Guisachan in the 1890's.
Virtually all breed books discuss the prominent individuals within a given breed’s history in a positive light. Negative facts are usually left aside, for the focus is more on how the breed developed, not a discussion of the social, economic, and political history that made the breed possible. Granted, people do not buy dog books to understand these issues. Most people just want to read about the creation story of their dog, and the breed fanciers like to bask in the glory of the past.
However, it important to at least consider some of the negative parts of a breed’s history. As someone who prefers history to hagiography, I think it is a good idea to understand that the golden retriever would not have been possible had their not been some human suffering.
What do I mean by “human suffering”?
First of all, we have to start with who the founders of the golden retriever were.
The golden retriever’s founders were part of the economic and political elite of British society. The reason why we know so much about the dogs is that only people with considerable means would ever bother to keep such meticulous records of the dogs in their lines, and only people with that sort of wealth would even dream of keeping a dog with such a limited utility.
A dog that picks up shot game is certainly useful, but the average person could not bother with keeping or breeding such dogs. Working people needed dogs that could earn their keep. Dogs were bred according to their utility, not their pedigree, and after many generations breeding for utility only, tracing these bloodlines becomes next to impossible.
However, if one has money, time, and employees to maintain kennels, one can keep close records on the dogs. That is why we have such a complete record of the dogs at Guisachan.
Dudley Marjoribanks was not a poor man. Dudley had made a considerable fortune as chairman of the Meux Brewery Company, and he had inherited a lot of money from his father’s estate. He had a posh mansion in London’s Park Lane called Brook House. He also had holdings in the Scottish (now registration) county of Berwickshire, which was where he was born.
A Border Scot who had done well in this world, Marjoribanks began to look for new real estate. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Scottish Highlands had experienced a total image makeover. In the eighteenth century, it was seen as a backward place, full of Gaelic-speaking insurgents called Jacobites who were too busy raising hell and livestock to be recognized among the civilized.
The work of Sir Walter Scott had totally changed that popular perception. In his writings, Scotland became a romantic place, where the last vestiges of wild Britain existed alongside a turbulent history.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert also helped changed this perception. They began visiting Balmoral in 1848, and eventually purchased the estate in 1852. This purchase set off a land boom in Scotland. All sorts of wealthy aristocrats began buying up land in Scotland.
In 1853, Dudley Marjoribanks was elected as the Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, and it is very likely that he was caught up in the Scottish euphoria the had swept through these elite circles. His lands in Berwickshire did not count for much. He needed an estate deep within Caledonia, and you can’t get much more Caldeonian than a shooting estate in the Highlands.
Marjoribanks purchased Guisachan (“Place of the Firs”) in 1854. It was the perfect place to go grouse shooting and deer-stalking. It was also not a bad place to bring his fellow politicians for deal-making and negotiations.
Now, our popular perception of the Highlands is of a sparsely populated place with spectacular landscapes. The land is inhabited by a few shepherds and some rare wild creatures, like the Scottish wildcat.
The truth of the matter is that Highlands were not always so empty. There was once a rather large population that lived there. In Scotland, the lands were enclosed rather similarly to the way they were enclosed in England and Wales. However, these enclosures happened a little later, and they were based upon a different set of economic pressures. The tenant farmers of Scotland had lived on these estates for centuries as part of the ancient clan system of Scotland. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, these farmers were driven off these lands to make way for sheep grazing. Many Scottish farmers were without land to work, and they were forced into a level of economic insecurity that forced them to fight for a chance to labor as virtual slave on estate or join the army (see the song “Twa Recruiting Sergeants.“)
The process of driving these large numbers of small farmers off the land to make way for sheep and cattle grazing and later for setting up posh estates for the wealthy was known as the Highland Clearances, and that is a good description for what happened. The Highlands were literally cleared of people, many of whom emigrated to other parts of Britain, as well as North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the British Empire.
In the 1850’s, there were still some estates that had tenant farmers working on their lands. When Guisachan was purchased, there were tenant farmers living there. These farmers were forced to leave.
Alexander Mackenzie (not the Canadian prime minister or the explorer) wrote the history of these clearances and worked hard to bring about reform to give these people rights. Mackenzie wrote about the Guisachan Clearances:
The modern clearances which took place within the last quarter of a century in Guisachan, Strathglass, by Sir Dudley Marjoribanks, have been described in all their phases before a Committee of the House of Commons in 1872. The Inspector of Poor for the parish of Kiltarlity wrote a letter which was brought before the Committee, with a statement from another source that, “in 1855, there were 16 farmers on the estate; the number of cows they had was 62, and horses, 24; the principal farmer had 2000 sheep, the next 1000, and the rest between them 1200, giving a total of 4200. Now (1873) there is but one farmer, and he leaves at Whitsunday; all these farmers lost the holdings on which they ever lived in competency; indeed, it is well known that some of them were able to lay by some money. They have been sent to the four quarters of the globe, or to vegetate in Sir Dudley’s dandy cottages at Tomich, made more for show than convenience, where they have to depend on his employment or charity. To prove that all this is true, take at random, the smith, the shoemaker, or the tailor, and say whether the poverty and starvation were then or now? For instance, under the old regime, the smith farmed a piece of land which supplied the wants of his family with meal and potatoes; he had two cows, a horse, and a score or two of sheep on the hill; he paid £7 of yearly rent; he now has nothing but the bare walls of his cottage and smithy, for which he pays £10. Of course he had his trade than as he has now. Will he live more comfortably now than he did then? “It was stated, at the same time, that, when Sir Dudley Marjoribanks bought the property, there was a population of 235 souls upon it, and Sir Dudley, in his examination, though he threw some doubt upon that statement, was quite unable to refute it. The proprietor, on being asked, said that he did not evict any of the people. But Mr. Macombie having said, “Then the tenants went away of their own free will,” Sir Dudley replied, “I must not say so quite. I told them that when they had found other places to go to, I wished to have their farms.”
They were, in point of fact, evicted as much as any others of the ancient tenantry in the Highlands, though it is but fair to say that the same harsh cruelty was not applied in their case as in many of the others recorded in these pages. Those who had been allowed to remain in the new cottages, are without cow or sheep, or an inch of land, while those alive of those sent off are spread over the wide world, like those sent, as already described, from other places. (291-93).
So to make way for his shooting estate, 235 people had to leave. We do not know their names, and we certainly do not know the names of their dogs or even what kind of dogs they owned. However, they were probably collie-types and terriers. They had an actual economic utility, but once their owners were deemed unnecessary for profit, progress, or prosperity of the elite, both the working dog and working man were sent packing.
To make way for Marjoribanks’s shooting estate and eventual development of his strain of yellow wavy-coat, people had to suffer. People lost their livelihoods and the ancient way of life.
This is the dark side of the Guisachan story that has always gone unmentioned in golden retriever histories. I apologize for not mentioning it earlier in this blog. The truth of the matter is that such facts do not often appear within the context of the story of the golden retriever.
However, the story does not end there. Dudley Marjoribanks’s daughter, Ishbel, married John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, 1st Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, who served as Governor-General of Canada from 1893 to 1898. They were early Social Liberals who worked very hard to improve the conditions of working people in Canada, many of whom were either immigrants or descendants of immigrants who had left Scotland as a result of the clearances.
One wonders if Ishbel (Lady Aberdeen) felt a certain amount of guilt over her family’s clearance of Guisachan. Maybe she was trying to make amends for that injustice.
***
Lord and Lady Aberdeen purchase the Coldstream Ranch in the Okanagan Valley, which they renamed Guisachan. On that estate, they kept some yellow wavy-coats that were of her father’s strain. These were the first goldens to be imported to North America.
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.
***
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.
***
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.
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.
