Stonehenge & The Kennel Club

By Amy Fernandez

Over 150 years later, the name Stonehenge still inspires respect in the dog world. Dr. John Henry Walsh continues to be regarded as the first, as well as one of the greatest authorities to emerge from a crowed field of 19th century dog experts. He made prodigious contributions, but he wasn’t perfect.

It’s fair to say that he was born in the right time and place, Hackney England, 1810. He graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1844 and embarked on a successful career. In his spare time, he edited medical journals. But his sideline soon became his mainline thanks to fate.

Like other gentlemen of the era, he loved outdoor sports, and excelled at riding, foxhunting, greyhound coursing, fencing, archery, and shooting. His achievements were even more impressive because he pursued most of them one-handed. Soon after setting up his surgical practice, he managed to blow of most of his left hand ramming powder and ball down the barrel of his muzzleloader.

He relocated to London in 1853 and began pursuing a second career writing about these sports, beginning with a series of articles on training and coursing Greyhounds for the popular periodical Bell’s Life. Within a year, these articles were reprised in a book The Greyhound. This was his first publication as Stonehenge and it was a wild success, quickly running through three editions.

The popularity of his dog writing confirmed that he was tapping into a trending cultural phenomenon. Three years later his follow up, British Rural Sports, ran through 16 editions. Soon thereafter, a London publisher hired him to update William Youtt’s 1845 work, The Dog. His mania for organization bloomed. He not only revised it, he completely overhauled Youtt’s classifications.

In 1856 he began contributing coursing reports to Thackery’s Coursing Annual and soon took over the failing publication. Eventually renaming it Stonehenge’s Coursing Guide and Calendar, he turned it into another success, which he published twice a year until 1883.

He also began writing for the Field. The editor soon put him on staff full-time. His writing on a broad wide range of veterinary and kennel topics attracted legions of new readers. Possibly his luckiest break came soon after he took over as editor in 1858.

The Canine World reprised the fateful chain of events in 1890. “Mr. Brailsford of Knowsley Kennels was advocating shows for many years before anyone admitted the possibility of holding them. In 1858 he induced Stonehenge to take up the idea and advocate it from the Field offices. A number of opinions were then collected… Although plenty of people were willing to help, no one cared to take responsibility for making a start… the plan began to take practical shape under the fostering care of Stonehenge”

The following year Walsh officiated as one of the three judges for this momentous event, now acknowledged as the first official dog show. Within months, the National Dog Club was founded in Birmingham. Their first show in November 1859 was followed by an even larger one in spring 1860. Birmingham’s success soon inspired similar efforts in Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, and London.

The Field became a primary resource for this rapidly evolving sport. Whether he realized it or not, Walsh’s commentary began to formalize a freeform cultural movement. And that’s precisely what it was at that stage of the game. Unexplainably, the general consensus was that shows would gradually become smaller, not larger, as their popularity grew. Structure was definitely lacking, and this spiraling vortex of energy threatened to collapse into chaos.

To Walsh, infrastructure was the only way to maintain direction and document the accomplishments that began accumulating at an alarming pace. As Canine World reported, he proposed forming a society in London. In 1873 he became one of the Kennel Club’s 16 founding members and gleefully applied his organizational talents to the situation.

He understood that the subjective nature of so many aspects of this game required definitive guidelines to keep progress on track. He tried to formalize every aspect of the process of canine evaluation – something we are still struggling to perfect.

In 1867 he started exploring the concept of an evaluation system based on itemized, prioritized breed descriptions in Dogs of the British Isles. However, it took root very slowly, partly because breeds appeared and evolved so quickly. It was impossible to be an expert on all of them. In retrospect, much of Walsh’s breed specific information was flat out wrong. Unfortunately, his reputation preceded him and anything from his pen was treated as gospel truth. This was a dangerous assumption in an era when very few breeds had formal standards – because, right or wrong, Stonehenge’s descriptions became the fallback source and the basis for many early standards

This definitely caused problems, especially when he ventured outside his area of expertise. His information on some Toys and rare breeds was pure fiction. For instance, Asian imports like the Lhasa and Shih Tzu were new to British shows. Stonehenge got them off to a rough start by originating the lingering myth that they derived from a mix of Poodles, small Spaniels, and Maltese.

But he wasn’t always wrong. Along with his other organizational dreams, he was an early proponent of regulations and protocols for shows. He loved logical methods, but also had the sense to know when they didn’t work, as Canine World noted, “there are those who formerly supported shows under KC rules and who find themselves unable to approve Kennel Club methods.”

Walsh was one of them. Rather than helping fanciers get into step with these newly minted rules, the Kennel Club utilized draconian enforcement policies, imposing fines, revoking wins, and canceling titles. And that’s where everything ran off the rails.

Needless to say, the bulk of these penalties came down on Birmingham’s National Dog Club. From their perspective, the Kennel Club was the new kid on the block. It’s an understatement to say they resented the heavy-handed, dictatorial threats coming out of London. As Canine World sarcastically noted, “It is the fashion with those who write about dog shows to attribute their growth and respectability chiefly, if not solely, to the controlling influences of the Kennel Club… Some of the best shows were held long before the Kennel Club was ever thought of, had nothing to do with their growth or success.” That included the National Dog Club, which had staged over 30 shows by then.

The deteriorating situation led to in Kennel Club’s ill-advised decision to pull approval for Britain’s largest and oldest show giving organization.

Walsh responded by resigning, providing a much needed wake-up call for Kennel Club members.

Britain’s dog world survived that rough patch. The Kennel Club moderated its attitude, admitting they couldn’t afford to lose critical supporters. Soon after, Walsh was their go-to person when they embarked on their next momentous project to document 14 years of activity for the first studbook.

The dog world still had a long way to go when Walsh died in 1888, but much of its subsequent progress was easier thanks to his groundwork.

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Posted by admin on Apr 2 2014. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.