Do your ears hang low?

Incorrigible and exasperating, vocal yet always entertaining and seemingly almost human, the basset hound is a force of nature, says devotee Flora Watkins

-  Flora Watkins

WHEN cartoonist Alex Graham was asked to create a strip about a thinking dog for the Daily Mail in 1963, the obvious choice was a basset hound. They are a ‘unique dog’, he said, after Fred Basset and his wry observations had ambled into the nation’s consciousness, with a ‘rather expressive face’.

Their Queen Anne legs, mournful eyes and ears that sweep the ground make the basset a gift to cartoonists and advertising executives alike. They are absurdly endearing; as I write, our two resident Hush Puppies, Wellington and Churchill, lie slumped across my feet, emitting the sort of rumbling, 80decibel snore that would earn my husband a sharp dig in the ribs at 2am. Yet they merely elicit an indulgent smile.

Fellow basset slave Orlando Fraser is ‘completely blind’ to his dog Basil’s faults, according to his wife, Clementine. ‘All the stealing, messing and thievery goes past him and is forgiven,’ she says. Mrs Fraser bought Basil for her husband last Christmas, after years of hearing about childhood memories of his mother Lady Antonia’s basset hound. Curiously, she adds: ‘Orlando came back from London the other day and said: “I went through the albums with Mummy over dinner and the awful thing was, Bertie the Basset died three years before I was born!”’ This is a testament, Mrs Fraser feels, to the strength of personality contained within that comical body.