Like most successful men of his era, Marjoribanks invested in property. And that investment, along with his directorship in the East India Company, left him even wealthier. Formerly known as the Horse Shoe Brewery, the distillery had been the site of the London Beer Flood of 1814, in which a burst vat sent a quarter-million gallons of porter beer gushing the densely populated neighborhood, killing eight.īut during Marjoribanks’ tenure, the only flood he saw was of pound sterling. With it, he purchased part of the Meux Brewery. While his father’s banking partnership was earmarked for his older brother, Marjoribanks nonetheless inherited a substantial fortune. (That’s the formal name of Britain’s dog registry – simply the Kennel Club – which, with its implied sense of universal recognition, is so very British.)
He recorded all the breedings he did over a half-century in a leather-bound book that still survives today, kept securely at the Kennel Club in England. Even as a teenager, the young Marjoribanks was interested in dog breeding – then, unlike now, considered an admirable hobby for the well heeled and socially prominent. That’s the socially stratified backdrop into which Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks (often pronounced “Marchbanks”) was born in 1820, second son to a successful Scottish banker. To unite this trio, in our mind’s eye at least, let’s rewind to early 19 th-Century England, where class distinctions were razor-sharp, and the manses and manors that gave us “Downton Abbey” were in full swing. And in the story of the Golden Retriever, that theme reverberates on multiple levels – with an ambitious man born with means but no title, with a dog of a color that was considered undesirable, and with a once-sparkling mansion reduced to crumbling ruins. ***ĭog breeds are all about transformation.
Through them, we rediscover our globe’s cultural diversity and heritage.Įach week, without even leaving our couches, we travel to a different place and time to meet the people who developed the snoozing bundles of fur at our sides. If civilization is the intersection of a group of people with their environment, so too are their dogs: With coats that evolved to survive the local climate, body styles developed to navigate native terrains, and characters that fit into the social mores of the day, our purebred dogs are living, breathing moments of history, reflections of the far-flung cultures that developed and nurtured them. Other breeds were brought into being by specific cultures or classes of people. Some breeds - like the Doberman Pinscher, Teddy Roosevelt Terrier, and Cesky Terrier - owe their existence to just one visionary person. Though we often don’t think about them in this way, dogs are really about people - those long-ago (or, sometimes, not so long-ago) figures who developed particular breeds for particular tasks.
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