Retriever mania had been brewing for years, and the only surprise was how long it took for Americans to catch on. The first Labs were logged into the AKC’s Stud Book in 1917—golden retrievers had to wait until 1925 for their moment in the sun—but their popularity seemed written by royal decree. Back in England, George V had shown his family’s inimitable examples at Crufts, as though to tease the public with something it could never have. He kept a promise made to his mother, Queen Alexandra, never to release their genes into the general population. Breeders were inconsolable, but the royal reluctance was a heads-up to potential buyers that there was something very special about these dogs.10
George VI, like his father before him, wasn’t shy about showing off his Labs and then keeping them out of circulation. Who let the dogs out? Malmesburys and Buccleuchs passed on their family recipes to members of their circle, and slowly but surely specimens began arriving in New York Harbor wrapped in every credential but a royal seal. The stellar cast of previous owners sent this dog’s reputation in advance. It was an established fact that Lord Knutsford was the first president of the Labrador Retriever Club of Great Britain (currently steered by the Duke of Wellington). A better recommendation would have been hard to find. Lorna Countess Howe, in an uncommon move away from lapdogs for a woman, was elected the club’s second commander. Lady Hill-Wood was entrusted with the third presidency, adding a ring of authenticity that only a true Buccleuch by birth could bestow. Across the pond, Labs were entrenched among the old elite, and America’s new elite was eager to dig itself in.
Wolters finally came out with it: “There would develop a certain snob appeal in importing and running Labradors.”11 Maybe the Lab’s appeal had at least as much to do with people as it did with dogs, because the list of early owners was a veritable Who’s Who of American plutocracy. Among the first to have dibs on dogs off the boat were Mrs. A. Butler Duncan, the famous Phipps family, the Guests, and the Harry Peters. J. P. Morgan showed himself true to form by nabbing an original. The Livingstons, as always, occupied center stage in dogdom. Jay F. Carlisle started one of the first important domestic kennels, and W. Averell Harriman was another big breeder. Samuel Milbank, Marshall Field (whose imported English wife was the American Lab’s first club president), August Belmont, John Olin, Dorothy Howe (a Scottish importation like the dog)—pretty much everyone who was anyone either owned, bred, or imported Labs with aristocratic-sounding names like King Buck, Duke of Kirkmahoe-Tare of Whitmore, Boli of Blake, Orchardton Doris of Wingan, Earlsmoor Moor of Arden, Caumsett Don of Kenjokaty-Kateren, Sab of Tulliallan-Peconic, and Dandy of Adderley-Chatford. Now the only problem was figuring out what to do with these legendary dogs trailed by such lengthy titles.
Included on the list of Lab-owning luminaries was real estate mogul Robert Goelet, on whose vast Orange County estate the breed’s miraculous powers of retrieval were first showcased in 1931.The name Glenmere Court drove home the comparison to Scottish nobility, in case someone had missed the many other references. Freeman Lloyd, the dog fancy’s English ambassador and official interpreter, was on hand to make sure the right message was conveyed. “On the 8,000 acre Glenmere Court Estate of Robert Goelet,” wrote Lloyd, opening his dispatch in Popular Dogs by giving the raw acreage so readers knew precisely the caliber of people concerned, “took place this country’s initial field trials for retrievers.”12 The rest read like a guest roster for a fancy cotillion with the same illustrious names that crowded the society columns. In another article done for the AKC Gazette two months later, Lloyd would use his English standing to overreach by actually calling Glenmere “the seat of Robert Goelet” (italics mine) as though the real estate mogul were landed gentry. Guests summoned to Goelet’s domain were dignitaries from near and far. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were frequently called to court, though they’d left Labs along with the crown and moved on to pugs, which traveled better. Americans were inheriting a sort of hand-me-down dog, really, needed nonetheless for this “new diversion connected with countryside sports.” Reproducing an aristocratic pastime required accuracy in every detail, and the full effect had to be dashing. Lloyd described the Glenmere event as nothing less than a “renaissance of the Labrador in the United States.”13
The first Lab performance staged in America was as stilted as any royal shooting spree in foreign lands. The new recreation was aimed at mimicking “Scottish shooting style” an ocean away from Scotland where these games had been pure theater all along. Field trials involved too many people, too many dogs, too many guns, too many birds, and too many rules. As in traditional shoots on that distant turf, ritual hunters walked richly dressed in an orderly line across a field where farm-raised pheasants were strategically planted in their path. Individual trials consisted of three shooters, each with his own personal gun attendant, and two handlers with Labs waiting patiently at heel. The troupe forged ahead until several trained “bird boys,” placed at left, right and center, chased their foregone conclusions out of the brush, where they’d placed them for easy shooting. Pheasants couldn’t fly much higher than chickens, and bagging them was no great feat. Water fowl were birds of a different feather. Ducks were also mass-produced for defining moments but had to be trained to fly from point A to point B, which just so happened to be right across the gunmen’s own established route. Men, staff, and dogs advanced repeatedly, shooters stopping and firing, then pausing to shoot again, across a scene that was supposed to be the Scottish moors but looked more like New York State. “Behind them strode the gallery,” Lloyd reported starstruck, “among whom were many women of much social distinction and affluence.”14
Where did the dogs come in? Easy as it was to lose Labs in the crowd, if “the gallery” looked closely enough they could be seen performing basically the same task on land and water. Sportsmen discharged their guns in a firing frenzy to impress the wives, and the dogs’ task was to dash ahead at the handler’s command, find as many birds as they could, and deliver them unscathed. Labs weren’t much more than glorified garbage collectors and might have been replaced by any of the retrieving dogs that still found work at pigeon-shooting events. But in the judges’ eyes, this breed was different. Upper-class bird shooting was about style, and Labs put on happy faces and showed a new kind of briskness and enthusiasm. Maybe some of their excitement rubbed off on the sportsmen, who seemed to care only about making their own roles easier. The Duke of Beaufort had said that hunting should be “the amusement and not the business of the gentlemen,” and wealthy Americans were determined to act the part. In fact, the first field trial for Labs was deliberately scheduled on a Monday so that anyone too attached to a desk could not attend! At least one mogul, unable to leave his office back in Manhattan, sent his regrets along with his Labs, after the example of foreign dignitaries who dispatched their canine ambassadors to Westminster from afar.
Those who attended had a grand time, less with the dogs than with each other, at this meet and affairs to follow. Between sumptuous luncheons, formal dinners, and drunken parties where Scotch flowed freely and Scottish dog handlers were kept awake all night by the revelry, ideas surfaced on how to make the next function less strenuous than the last. “Walk ups” were soon replaced by stationary shoots. Players stepping down from chauffeur-driven town cars needed no longer trouble themselves with walking because birds were kept in spring-loaded boxes and catapulted into the air. Without batting a wing, targets found themselves suspended at the wrong end of a rear-loaded shotgun without knowing how. Having shooters stand in position awaiting their turns also spared the gallery from exerting itself. Seated with wide bottoms hanging over folding lawn chairs and armed to the teeth with knitting needles were “them fancy ladies all dressed up in their Abercrombie and Fitch field clothes,” recalled Jack “Bad Jack” Cassidy, a fireman from Brooklyn and one of the first nonsociety types to compete in Lab trials.15 “Tower shoots” were another favorite of pampered guests at Glenmere, though these games had been declared unsporting at London’s Hurlin
gham Club. Thirty or so shooters stood around an elevated cage and fired into hundreds of birds released at the appointed time. Retrievers fetched in high numbers, proving themselves worthy of the company they kept. The gallery knitted away.
It was in these controlled environments, and under recherché circumstances, that America’s own tried-and-true working dog, the no-nonsense Chesapeake Bay retriever, was bumped by his fancier cousin as favorite hunting companion. What made the newcomer seem so special, apart from the list of previous owners? Besides the happy-go-lucky attitude, the Labrador was blessed with “common-sense and strategy,” according to Lloyd, who sang his praises to an American audience. The breed possessed “a fine intellect begotten of large and educated brains,” he hailed, unclear as usual on whether he was talking about the dog or the owner.16 Rumors of the little prince’s superior skills soon spread from coast to coast, though how this happened remains a mystery. High society’s field trial results were seldom made public—perhaps for fear that champions might look good enough to steal—so how did outsiders learn of the Lab’s stupendous powers? The simple fact of these momentous events at vast estates and private clubs was enough to stimulate “the ordinary dog owner,” as Lloyd called the duly impressed commoner by whom “the field accomplishments of any retriever may be read, marked and inwardly digested.”17
Largely due to favorable press in these early years, “Lab” is a household name today, and most Americans have never heard of their own American retriever, the “Chessie.” Proud Lab owners can be found on blogs tracing their dogs’ pedigrees back to kennels that no longer exist and previous owners who’ve been dead for generations. Little do imitators know that early importers wanted as little to do with newcomers as they did with these animals or the subalterns they’d hired to soil their hands handling them. The sporting dog situation on posh parts of Long Island, for example, was not much different from the show ring events held in nearby Mineola, or in Madison Square, where status symbols often weren’t even shown by their rightful owners. “Owners and trainers did not socialize with each other,” according to the author of Legends in Labradors, who confirms how strict the caste system was. “And in the beginning, owners rarely ran their own dogs.”18 As for dealing with the dogs for which they’d paid thousands per eugenically perfected head, apart from the occasional visit to their highly appointed kennels adjoining many-winged manors on vast estates—in the tradition of English royalty taking tours of menageries at Windsor and Sandringham—America’s sporting set couldn’t be bothered. This hands-off relationship brings to mind my years spent walking and training dogs for New York’s most opulent households. In the most affluent families, not even children are expected to walk their own pets, and the hired walker, groomer, acupuncturist, aroma therapist, and celebrity behaviorist are escorted in through the delivery entrance to instruct the servants on how to handle high-priced specimens of Canis that are familiaris to everyone but their owners.
Lab loftiness continued well into the century, though the transition from elite shooting accessory to middle-class coach potato would not be smooth. Upper-class sponsors had too much of their identities invested in these foreign affectations, and seeing them fall into the wrong hands was as difficult as any process of letting go. As with early dog shows and so many breeds that had since fallen out of fashion, the original intent was to use their social positions to draw attention to yet another expensive importation, then to tease the public with items it didn’t deserve to have. But the mob was demanding equal rights to be unequal, and gluttons for punishment seeking approval from higher-ups were given a run for their money. Presuming to enter field competitions on an equal footing, for example, was like poaching on a lord’s estate. Clamorers for acceptance were snubbed for actually raising, training, and handling their own dogs, because in the minds of seasoned sportsmen who imported handlers with their hounds, this simply wasn’t done. Showing up at Long Island field trials with homespun dogs, wearing clothes with the wrong labels, and toting guns purveyed by unknowns were surefire invitations to ridicule. Outsiders were often made to feel outclassed the moment they arrived by an old guard withholding that “wholesome feeling of being at home among friends” the Duke of Beaufort had described.19
“Mixing a Wisconsin milkman and a Wall Street banker who belonged to a fine shooting club and had his own professional trainer was bound to have its effects,” Wolters recalled of the latter-day Long Island game milieu. “Just because they both had good dogs did not mean they had equal social status.”20 Rather than welcome strangers and let them break bread at the same table as the entrenched, after-trial dinners were eventually discontinued to avoid the awkwardness. Field trial fever spread across the country like a marathon, but nowhere, according to witnesses whose feelings had been hurt and social climbs thwarted, was there more resistance to change than on uptight Long Island where, as late as the 1960s, retriever competitions were notoriously snooty affairs. “By the time my wife and I reached Butte, Montana with our dogs,” recalled one of the rubes slighted in passing, “we felt that we really belonged. After their trial we were invited to the club’s annual dinner as their guests. But we’d started our campaign trialing across the country in Long Island where we couldn’t get as much as a ‘Good morning’ while airing our dogs in the designated area.” Unpleasant memories from back East bring to mind the uneasy melting pot of dog owners competing in the film Best in Show. Private parties, tiaras, and poodle ice sculptures didn’t rule in the end, but impartial judges couldn’t stop the flow of bad blood among Lab owners, and “one had the feeling on the Island that the pedigree of the owner was more important than that of the dog.”21
CONCLUSION
FRANKENSTEIN’S LAB
or
The Price They Pay for Living in the Castle
Prominent New York socialite James L. Kernochan thought he was minding his own business early one morning in 1896 when he took the usual train from his opulent Manhattan townhouse to his vast Long Island estate. Dressed in the finest fabrics and joined by fellow members of the elite Meadowbrook Hunt Club, this gentleman of wealth, leisure, and conspicuous waste was headed back to Hempstead to be depicted by society columnists as reigning Master of the Beagles in upcoming events, news of which would return to Manhattan faster than he’d left.
A leading sportsman of the highest caliber ever to ride against an English hunting scene, Kernochan had been mentioned on many occasions, along with his wife, for pursuing the sport of kings on horseback and sharing body parts of slaughtered prey as trophies of their noble pursuit. The companion riding by his side on the train that morning was not his wife, but a fashionable French bulldog bitch that had won him second prize in the “Non-Sporting” class at Madison Square Garden the day before.
If Kernochan was just sitting there, trying to mind his own business, this was a strange way to go about it—or was showing the rest of the world what it could not afford, and didn’t deserve to own, his own business after all? The sordid events that followed might serve as a cautionary tale of calamities befalling the uppity pet owner unwise enough to advertise who he is, where he comes from, and where he’s headed.
“J. L. KERNOCHAN BEATEN,” read the headline in the Times later that day. “Attacked by Firemen Who Objected to His Prize French Bulldog.” Why would anyone take exception to a harmless, inbred monstrosity that could barely breathe or walk without medical attention? Not all passengers seemed to appreciate this perfect pooch or the message she was meant to convey in loudspeaker fashion. While Kernochan sat proudly with his breed apart from common curs of the villages they passed, gathering a few rows behind was a mob of burly working-class onlookers, “most of whom had been drinking” and whose attention had been roused. While their social superior accepted a silver cup and kudos on his exquisite taste in four-legged luxury items the day before, these ill-bred, low-paid public servants were attending the popular Washington’s Birthday parade and celebrating in taverns.
By the next m
orning when they boarded the train in the same direction for a very different destination from the fancy pet owner’s, the firemen, “some of whom were ugly,” were full of alcohol and needed only a spark to set them aflame. “Some of the firemen did not like French bulldogs,” the Times explained politely, and in a combined effort to express their personal preferences, they “began to make uncomplimentary remarks about the appearance of the animal.” Kernochan was annoyed but tried to show his good breeding by telling one ruffian to “mind his own business” as he himself was trying to do. The fireman “forced himself into Kernochan’s seat, and knocked the dog from the seat to the floor.” This poor inbred monstrosity had become “the innocent cause” of an impromptu class conflict aboard a crowded smoking car.
Within moments, some twenty reinforcements of “drunken firemen” joined the rough-cut assailant to do further violence to the offensive Frenchie and her master. Kernochan’s grooms, always within shouting distance, intervened and “a lively fight” ensued for “a run of about ten minutes” during which train doors were held firmly shut by proletarians so “the fight might be more strictly a private affair.” The controversial canine was kept shielded in a corner by the body of a groom, but Kernochan received “a terrific blow over the eye,” another on the mouth, and kicks to the back, chest, and ribs, followed by further punches to the face. Society’s gentleman and his gentleman’s gentlemen were greatly outnumbered and severely plummeted by their inferiors. The coachman was knocked to the floor and kicked mercilessly. The foreman was thrown through a window. Warrants were sworn later that day, with “public sympathy” and “much indignation” arising over “the brutal conduct of the Far Rockaway firemen” who had begged to differ with the ruling of a Westminster judge.1
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