A Brief History of the Modern Lurcher & Longdog Types.

published in four parts in Earth Dog Running Dog
from Oct 2004 - Jan 2005

Part Two

During the 20years between the early 50's and the early 70's the emphasis especially amongst the travellers had switched, of necessity, from true lurcher work (cooking-pot filling) to sighthound blends of sporting and betting match dogs. Initially the deerhound/greyhound cross, misnamed "staghound" was all the fashion. I remember about this time explaining to some of them about this Arab breed of dog called salukie which a few gentry carefully jealously harboured in an elitist way in this country. I suggested that if sighthound sporting dogs, to hare course in large open spaces, were what they were after they had much to offer since they were desert dogs used to running over stony ground using stamina rather than pace. At the time very few knew what I was talking about and I had to show them pictures in books. Nowadays, to listen to some of more juvenile of the coursing brigade you would think they invented the salukie, not the Arabs!

Now going back to Lord Orford's time, the gentry had been using the descendants from the Celtic Greyhound for match coursing much as the coursing boys of today do with their longdog crosses. Indeed in the early years of the Waterloo Cup even the slip was only about 80yards run up with a dyke to jump on the way. So it was the coursing they marked not merely the sprint to the hare. Official coursing today has followed the Irish Park coursing model and would more accurately be described as 300yard racing to the hare.

Today's greyhounds are about 90 to 100 lbs massive straight line sprinters that blow up and "jack" it in after a couple of turns. Where as when they marked several minutes actual coursing Master M'Grath stood 26.5ins to the shoulder yet only weighed about 58lbs - which is nearer the proportions of a salukie than today's greyhound. Indeed, Comassie the best greyhound bitch of her day stood 24.5ins and weighed 42lbs. Now that is a very interesting statistic, because Paul Sager's Joshua Annie, probably the best salukie ever to run in England just happened to stand 24.5ins and weighed 42lbs. So for match coursing you can't beat those proportions in my eyes.

This supports my contention that today's match boys have re-created the old type English coursing greyhound of pre-Orford's time, by modifying today's type with liberal use of salukie to achieve it. And they've made an excellent job of it in a relatively short time. But these dogs are not lurchers (in the pot-filling stealth poaching sense) they are sporting sighthounds or longdogs as Col. Walsh had the sense to call them in order to distinguish the difference. They've even started down the road of talking in terms of giving fair law (long slips) to give the hare a sporting chance again. They value the heroic course over the quick kill and competition rules are being drawn up to rule against a dog hunting up and taking the hare out of it's seat (as a lurcher should) without wasting energy touring a few counties for the spectacle of making a display for entertainments sake.

Except for our strain the old-fashioned stealth poaching, pot-filling lurcher type and blood had got so thin on the ground as to be almost extinct through neglect or diluted out of existence before the 1970's. Then all of a sudden an interest sprung up amongst the very country set, whom for generations had despised them as gypsy and poachers dogs. They adopted them as a romantic badge of ruralism, a status symbol along with Jack Russell's, green wellies, Barbour coats, and Rangerovers. They started holding rural shows for them, but the problem was there were to few of the real thing to go round.

I remember the second Lambourn show; we didn't hear about the first, there was only about 80 dogs some pure sighthounds, some accident greyhound cross anything. We, my brother and I, were late; we'd been coursing on the chalk downs on the way so we missed the showing, but as we walked onto the show ground it was like we were the pied piper arrived. A crowed was following us saying,"You should have been here earlier, look they're real lurchers, that's what they should look like." My brother was leading Sheila 1st. 23ins. Wheaten/blue-brindle rough coated bitch (Dam of Bluey and Tina, who later featured in Col.Walsh's Lurchers and Longdogs) whilst I was leading Jasper my 24.5ins. fawn broken coated dog. Ours were the only dogs with hams like riding breaches and rolls of muscle down their backs you could roll a marble along between. Within a couple of years thousands of superficially similar looking beasts sprung from the loins of pedigree breeds such as deerhounds, bedlingtons, and beardie collies-who's working qualities had already been destroyed by the K.C. show brigade.

About this time there was a race going on to write the first book totally devoted to Lurchers. The race was between a retired Colonel, who may have coursed in various foreign lands but clearly had no background in poaching, and an eccentric Welsh schoolteacher who could not afford a prosecution for poaching either. Yet both felt qualified to appoint themselves as experts, one relying on library research (historically poachers were illiterate) the other on hearsay from a few who really did some (but in so doing caused them no end of grief- confirming my belief that poaching is best done under the cloak of night and not boasted about the next morning). These two self-appointed experts perpetuated no end of miss-information that still obscures real knowledge about lurchers to this day. I only hope my scribblings may inspire a few to seek out more reliable information.

An amusing little anecdote here is that in February 2000, Plummer rang me and started quizzing me about the old-fashioned bloodlines and knowledge. I (despite having a good idea) asked him what he wanted the information for. He replied he was doing research, as he would like to write about them. To which I replied, "But, David, you've already written numerous books about lurchers, wouldn't it have been a good idea to have done the research first".