Last night, Crufts declared Bruin the Clumber spaniel Best in Show. In honour of his success, we're revisiting a feature on Clumbers that originally appeared in a 2017 issue of Country Life.
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For the Clumber spaniel, 2017 was a year to celebrate. The fortunes of these handsome, muscular, lemon- and orange-marked white gundogs have languished since the Second World War. Annual puppy registrations hovered around the 200 mark. By comparison, The Kennel Club registers some 30,000 cocker and springer spaniel puppies every year.
Spring 2017, however, for the first time since 1911, a Clumber spaniel won an any variety field trial. When three-year-old Midori Diamond Huddlestone, known as Rigg, triumphed over 15 springers in the novice stake of the Tyne Tees and Tweed Field Trial Association, he became the first Clumber any variety field-trial winner for more than 100 years. Press coverage of Rigg’s success added to high-profile owners — including The Princess Royal, president of the Working Clumber Spaniel Society, and Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who, back then, owned a Clumber called Bramble — has contributed to renewed interest in this historic British breed.
For Clumber aficionados, Rigg’s victory came as no surprise. His owner, committee member of the Working Clumber Spaniel Society John Smith-Bodden, pointed to the breed’s ‘fantastic noses’ and their dogged thoroughness in hunting out their quarry, an assessment seconded by the Marquess of Salisbury, who, at the time of writing, was working his third successive Clumber spaniel, Lincoln. ‘They have enormous stamina and wonderful scenting qualities,’ Lord Salisbury told me. ‘They also typically show none of the over-excitement or flibbety-jibbertiness of some springers.’
Instead, these dogs are reliable and sure-footed, noted for their gentle mouths and gentle dispositions, their quietness in the field, tenacity in working through dense cover and, above all, their affectionate natures. ‘In the field, they’re totally focused on the task in hand,’ said Charlotte Chilvers, whose dogs Bumble and Hebe are working gundogs as well as pets for her two young sons, Robert and Oliver. ‘They are such kind dogs, so loving — a joy to be around. They seem to understand the dynamic of family life. Although my husband works them, they’re not one-person dogs. The children spend more time on the dogs’ beds than anywhere else in the house.’
Today’s Clumbers are descendants of the stocky, marmalade- and liver-splashed white spaniels bred and trained for the 2nd Duke of Newcastle by gamekeeper William Mansell, at Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, in the last quarter of the 18th century. A handful of these dogs is visible in The Return from Shooting, a painting of 1788 by Francis Wheatley, in which the Duke, William Mansell and Newcastle’s friend Col Litchfield are depicted in an autumn landscape with gamekeepers and springer-type spaniels.
Tradition invests these first Clumbers with a French pedigree. Their progenitors were reputedly dogs given to the Duke by the duc de Noailles, a picturesque tradition unsubstantiated by material in the papers of either the Newcastle or Noailles families.
Whatever the truth of their origins — and it may be, as has been suggested, that the distinctive heavy doughtiness of the Clumber shape arose through the inclusion of some hound blood in Mansell’s breeding programme — the breed’s early popularity is attributable to Newcastle’s sponsorship: dogs from Clumber Park made their way into the Duke of Portland’s kennels at nearby Welbeck Abbey and those of the Foljambe family at Osberton Hall near Worksop. Members of the Foljambe family afterwards bred some of the first Clumbers entered in dog shows.
In her journal for October 1840, Queen Victoria recorded a walk in the park at Windsor with Prince Albert and ‘his seven fine Clumber Spaniels’: ‘We went into the Slopes… in order that I should see how the dogs found out the game; they are such nice, dear dogs.’ The Prince bequeathed his fondness for the breed and his habit of working them as a pack to his eldest son and grandson; Edward VII and George V, both keen shots, each kept a number of Clumbers in the kennels at Sandringham.
In one contemporary account, it was the breed’s suitability for working in groups that particularly attracted George V, his favour ‘largely attributable to their special suitability for the covert shooting in which His Majesty delights and to the fact that the clumber, almost alone of shooting dogs, can be worked in packs’.
Dog painter Reuben Ward Binks placed the King’s favourite, Sandringham Susan, in the centre of his charming George V’s Clumber Spaniels at Sandringham, a portrait of six royal Clumbers painted in 1930.
Winner of the Best in Show category at the Westminster Kennel Club in the USA, Country Sunrise is congratulated by her agent Jane Meyers and the judge Roy Holloway in February 1996. The Clumber spaniel also won the best of the sporting category at the show.
Today, few owners are able to accommodate packs of working dogs on this scale. In addition, those Clumber breeders who preserved the breed from extinction in the years after the Second World War contributed to the development of an increasingly heavy, slow-moving spaniel lacking athleticism and unsuited to working coverts. Without any working purpose, the breed experienced a sharp decline in popularity from which it has yet to recover fully.
Today’s owners all agree that the Clumber deserves to be more widely kept, both as a working dog and a pet. Lord Salisbury admires the breed’s ability to wriggle through undergrowth to put up birds and their stubbornness in running down their prey: ‘They’re not the intellectual stars of the canine world, but they’re pretty grounded and they have delightful personalities. And, as I grow older, Lincoln proceeds at something nearer my own stately pace.’
Owner Claire Griffith, who works her rescue Clumber Finn on her husband’s North Wales estate, admires his fixity of purpose. ‘He works very well in dense thicket and does quite a lot of putting up,’ she said. ‘He works much more carefully than other spaniels, picking up birds that other dogs miss and working steadily and slowly.’
Claire identified Finn’s complete lack of aggression as a typical Clumber trait. His slow determination is also typical, although, for some owners, it comes close to stubbornness and John suggested that puppies can be slower to train as working dogs than other spaniel types.
John and his wife, Jane, have six Clumbers, including Rigg, whose performance in the field he described as ‘poetry in motion’. Beyond the dogs’ adroitness in putting up or retrieving partridge, pheasant and duck and their gentleness, loyalty and affection, the Smith-Boddens, like other owners, admire the Clumber’s gorgeous good looks. Claire waited many years before she was able to acquire one of her own. ‘Somewhere, there is a 19th-century painting of Clumbers in the heather,’ she remembered. ‘I’d always rather wanted one.’ The long-awaited Finn, rehomed from a keeper on Anglesey, is a ‘very beautiful white and ginger’.
It’s not entirely true that Clumbers are silent dogs. Despite their quietness when working, they have a distinctive singsong woo woo bark that Charlotte told me delights her sons and with which Clumbers typically greet their owners each morning. It seems characteristic of these gentle, patrician spaniels that even their bark should be mellifluous and winning.