The Story of the Golden RetrieverDouble click to edit me.

 Golden Retrievers

 

The puppy looked up at Dudley Majoribanks from the floor of a cobbler’s shop in southern England. The year was 1865, and the puppy had a feathery coat of gold and a wise expression. Majoribanks asked the cobbler about the dog and discovered that this one yellow pup in a litter of black Wavy Coated Retrievers had been payment for a debt. Majoribanks saw something in the dog, so he purchased him from the cobbler, named him Nous (which means “wisdom” in Greek) and took him home to Scotland.

Majoribanks, who later gained the title Lord Tweedmouth, kept large kennels of hunting dogs, but he wanted something particular from this new yellow dog. In an age when black retrievers were the favorite, he wanted to create a unique hunting dog specifically to work over the rough terrain and in the harsh climate of the Scottish Highlands. And he preferred gold.

At the time, there was no dog called a Golden Retriever, but Wavy Coated Retrievers were popular hunters all over the British Isles. In 1868 and again in 1871, Lord Tweedmouth bred Nous to a female Tweed Water Spaniel named Belle. Extinct today, the Tweed Water Spaniel was a hearty and hard-working breed with a strong instinct for water retrieving and a weatherproof coat. Four beautiful, yellow girls came out of these two mating: Crocus, Cowslip, Primrose and Ada.

Fortunately for those interested in the precise pedigrees of their Golden Retrievers, Lord Tweedmouth kept exacting records of all breedings, which included other Wavy Coated Retrievers, Tweed Water Spaniels and an Irish Setter (or “Red Setter”). No matter what combinations Lord Tweedmouth tried in order to tweak the breed, he always chose the yellow puppies (and occasionally black ones with admirable traits) to establish his new breed. Some people also believe other breeds may have contributed to the Golden we know today, including a small Newfoundland and a Bloodhound.

Lord Tweedmouth’s very last entry noted a mating between a second Nous (a descendent of the original) and a female named Queenie, resulting in two golden female puppies named Prim and Rose. If you could look back far enough into the pedigrees of most Golden Retrievers today, you should find one of these two Golden girls. And so the Golden Retriever — even though the breed still didn’t have that name — was born.