A keeper's best friend in the field

Whether labrador, spaniel, terrier or teckel, behind every good gamekeeper is an indefatigable companion

- Written by Eleanor Doughty

WE MIGHT think of the gamekeeper's dogs as the traditional labrador – with its slavish loyalty – and the spaniel, with slightly more vim, but over the past century and a half much change has come to the keeper's kennel.

An advertisement in The Field in 1855 was for 'gentlemen wanting first-class pointers or setters, retrievers, field spaniels, beagles, harriers, deerhounds, bloodhounds, newfoundlands, mastiffs, bull mastiffs for watch or keeper's dogs' while another advert, six years later, recommended a large bloodhound-mastiff as not only a 'good watch dog, very docile' but one that 'would make a first-rate keeper's dog.

In 1903 the Mid Sussex Times ran a report about the shifts in 'what constitutes the most suitable description of a keeper's dog. Many men affect the retriever now... Airedales are another favourite breed with keepers. They always possessed the reputation of being good guard dogs' but their services 'in the pens and coops are also in considerable request, as they seem to possess an extremely acute sense of hearing'.

Keepers throughout history have, of course, always relied on good terriers. In his 1985 memoirs veteran keeper Angus Nudds described how his best-ever dog was a 'little long-haired mongrel terrier' called Sally, who he bought for a packet of Woodbines on the Rothwell estate in Lincolnshire. As Nudds remembered: 'She killed her first rat when she was three months old and bolted her first fox when she was only seven months old.