The staunch and sturdy Austrian export that's even better than schnitzel

In 1935, Country Life reported that just two years earlier, an article by Lady Kitty Ritson had appeared in a London newspaper titled ‘What Is a Schnauzer?’ The staunch, sturdy little dogs had arrived in Britain only a decade earlier, and in a short space of time had ‘gained in popularity, that such a question is now scarcely ever heard at a show, and even in the country, as a yokel points to one of these dogs, you may overhear the remark: “Them’s Snorzers, them is.”’

The Duchess of Montrose was one of the first to bring Schnauzers to Britain, keeping them at her extensive kennel at Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran. A standard bitch called Busserl von der Grünenbaum, imported as a puppy from Vienna in 1924, would deliver her first litter on British soil in January 1926. Arthur Croxton Smith would later credit the Duchess with ‘being the pioneer of a breed that is likely to become popular’. In 1926, she wrote to the magazine about the ‘rare breed’ to inquire if anyone else knew of this dog ‘in England, as [she had not] seen more than [her] own and one belonging to a celebrated soldier, who had his dog all through the war’.

When the breed arrived in England, Country Life reported that it seemed as if they would ‘boom’ in much the same way as Alsatians had done a few years earlier, but the approach of the Second World War prevented the breed’s advancement. Like Poodles, Schnauzers come in three sizes: the standard (or medium-sized) variety; the Miniature or Zwergschnauzer (introduced to the United Kingdom by Mr W. H. Hancock in 1930); and the Giant, Munich, or Riesenschnauzer, a variety that would not appear on British shores until the 1960s.

A common misconception is that Schnauzers are associated with the terrier family; they are, in fact, herding dogs. Von Stephanitz, in The German Shepherd Dog, declares that Schnauzers belong to the rough-haired intermediate form of driving dogs, and expressed emphatically that they have nothing to do with the short and stocky Pinschers or snappers. Schnauzer enthusiast Captain Williams revealed to Country Life in 1937 that he believed the breed originated from cattle drovers from the Württemberg pastures, who had driven cattle up into Germany. Those who had achieved good sales at the carousel sought other means of transport home and left some of their dogs behind. These were crossed with the wolf-grey Spitz, and later with the French Poodle. In the case of the Giant Schnauzer, it would be crossed with the black Great Dane, ‘to make his hair shorter and his body larger and black’.

The Schnauzer was once known in its native Germany as the rauche or wire-haired Pinscher, while ‘Schnauzer’ was more or less a nickname, meaning snout, and refers to the dog’s outstanding feature — the strong whiskered muzzle. The hirsute furnishings of the face are certainly the breed’s distinguishing feature, ‘plentifully equipped with hair about the head, which is strong and long. They have a moustache and chin whiskers, and their eyebrows are beetling’, Country Life expressed in 1937.

Although the breed’s original vocation was that of a general-purpose farm dog and an excellent vermin exterminator, the Schnauzer’s ‘amazing faculty for discriminating between friend and foe have made him the most popular of all dogs in Germany and Austria for the protection of warehouses’. The Giant Schnauzer has been used as a police and army dog and the little Miniature, ‘with a growl which might well belong to a dog three times his size, still guards the bakers’ carts as their masters deliver the bread from door to door’, Country Life revealed in 1935.

Champions of the breed would also note that they ‘adore children as much as they hate rats, and their temperament does not lead them into mischief in the country’ and, as the faithful little dog with a Teutonic yap ages, ‘his beard may go white, his youthful sense of fun never diminishes, and if he has a fault, it is that, when at last you put him to rest, you can only heal the hurt by buying another Schnauzer’.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.