Golden Retriever

Description

The Golden Retriever was made on a single Scottish estate, by one man, over about fifty years — and unusually for a nineteenth-century breed, the records survive.

Dudley Marjoribanks, the first Lord Tweedmouth, kept a Highland estate called Guisachan in Inverness-shire, and he kept a stud book from 1835 to 1890. In 1868 he mated a yellow retriever called Nous, bought from a cobbler in Brighton, to a Tweed Water Spaniel called Belle. The Tweed Water Spaniel is gone now, but it was a liver-coloured working water dog from the Scottish border country, and it is the other half of the breed’s foundation.

That litter produced four yellow puppies — Crocus, Cowslip, Primrose and Ada — and those four are where the line starts. Tweedmouth bred on from them for decades, bringing in another Tweed Water Spaniel, a red setter and further retriever stock along the way, and keeping the yellow puppies every time. The stud book stayed in the family and was not published until the 1950s, which is why the breed’s origin can be traced as precisely as it can.