Adored by Princess Margaret and Alfred Hitchcock — the rare Welsh terrier breed saved from extinction by Country Life
The Sealyham dog was once the talk of the town and a silver screen star, says Caroline Kennedy.
The Sealyham terrier has the sort of face that suggests it has seen a great deal of life and approved of only some of it. Small, white and faintly dishevelled, with dark intelligent eyes peering out beneath extravagant eyebrows, it resembles nothing so much as a retired colonel who has wandered out of a country house in search of a whisky and an argument.
Few dogs combine such comic dignity with such complete certainty in their own judgement, which may explain why Sealyham people become so devoted to them.
Excellent companions, the Sealyham, unlike other terriers, can suit small homes and flats.
The breed began life, improbably enough, as a serious working dog. In the 1850s, Captain John Edwardes of Sealyham House in Pembrokeshire, required a small terrier game enough to go to earth after badger, otter and fox, while keeping pace with his pack of otterhounds. He insisted the dog be white, so that, underground or in the thick of a hunt, it could never be mistaken for its quarry. Edwardes kept no records, so the exact recipe is lost, but the now-extinct English white terrier, the Welsh corgi, the Dandie Dinmont and a little bull terrier are all thought to have had a hand in it. The result had to be fearless enough to face a badger underground, yet civilised enough to behave respectably indoors afterwards — a curious marriage of ferocity and good manners that has charmed owners ever since.
After the First World War, the Sealyham became the dog to be seen with. It swept the show ring, taking Best in Show at Westminster four times between the wars; Alfred Hitchcock adored them and famously appeared alongside two of his own, Geoffrey and Stanley, in the opening moments of The Birds. Princess Margaret reportedly insisted hers, Johnnie and Pippin, be brought to her room with her breakfast tray each morning; Cary Grant was so fond of the breed that he gave one his original name, Archie Leach. Agatha Christie kept them too, which seems entirely fitting because I imagine they would have made excellent witnesses.
When fully grown, Sealyhams stand about 30–31cm (10.5in) tall at the shoulder and weigh roughly 8–10kg (18 to 22lb). They are heavy boned for their size.
The Sealyham is lazy compared to its terrier compatriates and very happy to while away several hours on the sofa. They like their own people best and are in no hurry to be charmed by anyone else.
The Kennel Club registered more than 1,000 Sealyhams in 1938; by 2008, the figure had collapsed to 43 puppies, placing the breed among the most endangered native dogs in Britain. Even now only about 100 or so are registered in a typical year. Country Life itself sounded the alarm, devoting a 2011 cover to the cause: ‘SOS: Save Our Sealyhams’.
Salvation, such as it is, has come from a devoted few who speak of them with unguarded affection. The interior designer Bee Osborne, who keeps the breed, calls them simply the perfect small dog: loyal, but not needy, sturdy and brave, friendly and kind-spirited. The only real drawback, she admits, is practical rather than temperamental — for a dog this low to the ground and this emphatically white requires bathing rather more often than one might like. Her devotion runs further than most: she has named a whole range of paints after her Sealyhams.
And there are flickers of a revival. A younger generation is beginning to rediscover the breed. In an age of dogs bred to be relentlessly agreeable, there is something appealing about one that reserves the right not to be. Watching a Sealyham trot across a lawn, whiskered face set in faint but unwavering self-belief, one feels it belongs to a Britain quietly disappearing. The Sealyham, characteristically, seems unconcerned. It has always expected the world to come back round to its way of thinking — eventually.
