At the beginning of the 1930s, the Depression held the country in its pitiless grasp. Fully one-fourth of the American workforce was unemployed. Proud but desperate men stood for hours in bread lines and outside of soup kitchens, some of them so ashamed to be there that if they noticed a photographer they tried to hide their faces.
For certain other Americans, though, life went on more or less as usual. To the extent that the Depression affected them, it was at worst an inconvenience. Their money was old; their fortunes were bulletproof. They were born to wealth and married into more of it. They were the cream of Eastern society: captains of industry, Wall Street financiers, business tycoons, heirs and heiresses. They had names like Harriman and Field, Guggenheim and DuPont, Morgan and Belmont. Their privileged lives were objects of fascination. Their playgrounds were Newport and the Côte d’Azur; their sporting pastimes were the stuff of newsreels. They played polo, they rode to hounds, they sailed magnificent yachts.
And, in what proved to be the greatest possible stroke of luck for American waterfowlers and upland bird hunters, they imported the keen but unflappable gundogs they’d been deeply impressed with while shooting driven birds in England and Scotland. Unknown in the United States until the latter 1910s, these impressive dogs were called Labrador retrievers.
Seeking to replicate the British “driven shoot” on their own estates, mostly on Long Island and in the Hudson River Valley, these uber-affluent sportsmen brought experienced gamekeepers across the pond to manicure the habitat, lay out the drives, oversee the pheasant-rearing operations, manage the kennels, and—it goes without saying—train and handle the dogs. Most of these keepers hailed from Scotland, although a few came from other parts of the British Isles.
Averell Harriman hired the Scotsman Tom Briggs to be the gamekeeper at Arden, his baronial estate north of New York City, in 1913, four years before the American Kennel Club (AKC) officially recognized the Labrador retriever as a breed. Harriman would go on to serve as the ambassador to both the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, the secretary of commerce, and the governor of New York, but in 1913 he was a newly minted Yale graduate who just so happened to be the heir to the Union Pacific railroad fortune. Which is to say, he was in a position to dream big dreams—and to make them come true.
The 1920s were when Harriman and his cohort began importing Labs in earnest, leveraging their connections to obtain dogs from the finest kennels in the UK—Whitmore, Banchory, Hiwood, Munden. Still, just as the Lab had remained a well-kept secret in Great Britain until the early 20th century, the growing numbers of Labs in American kennels remained mostly out of the public eye. (These days we would say “under the radar.”)
This began to change in 1931, thanks to a pair of interconnected events. First, the Labrador Retriever Club (LRC) was established, with Audrey Coates Field, the British-born wife of Marshall Field III, installed as president. Then, in the fall of that year, the LRC sponsored the first-ever AKC-licensed retriever field trial in America. While the Fields are generally credited with coming up with the idea, it seems likely that the cadre of gamekeepers in the employ of the Fields and their Lab-owning friends, who fondly remembered the trials they’d competed in back home, gave them a gentle push in that direction.
Held in upstate New York at the 8,000-acre Glenmere Court estate of Robert Goelet, that first field trial reflected the role that the breed had traditionally played in the UK—namely, that of an upland retriever, not a water dog. Accordingly, the two tests in the featured Open All-Age stake were contested on land. One was a classic “walk-up,” in which the dogs were expected to walk obediently at heel until they were sent to retrieve a pheasant whose fall they’d presumably marked. The other was a “pass shoot”; the dogs were expected to sit quietly until, again, they were given the nod to retrieve. Steadiness, obedience, marking ability, and overall hunting ability, especially as it pertained to tracking down cripples and rooting out birds that had fallen in heavy cover, were the qualities sought by the judges. There was no “handling” per se, as the blind retrieve had yet to be incorporated into training and competition.
Explaining the basic workings of this new game in the American Kennel Club Gazette, Freeman Lloyd, a noted sporting dog authority of the day, wrote, “The retriever is asked to do nothing at a field trial that he is not expected to accomplish at the behest of the man who shoots game in the ordinary course of his every-day sport. And so it is that the field dog must be a model of forbearance and discipline. Whatever occurs, the dog must not leave his master’s side, until commanded to do so.”
It’s at this point that the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the rugged, powerful dog that was without peer in the eyes of serious waterfowlers, helped to unlock the Lab’s long-hidden—or maybe long-lost—gift for water work. In the fall of 1932, the American Chesapeake Club held a field trial, open to all retrieving breeds, that included a water series. Not having been trained to retrieve from water, the Labs in the entry looked hesitant, confused, and totally out of their element. The Chessies, in contrast, performed brilliantly.
Richard Wolters, in his book Duck Dogs, described this shellacking as “a disaster for the Labrador.” But this disaster had a silver lining: It told the Lab camp that if they expected to be competitive in field trials going forward, they needed to buckle down and get serious about training for the water. What they didn’t know, but we do, is that when you scratch a Labrador retriever, you find a St. John’s dog, a breed renowned for its prowess in the water. In other words, the Labs already had all the right genetic stuff; they just needed the opportunity to take it down from the shelf, dust it off, and put it to work.
The next time Labs and Chessies competed head-to-head in an Open All-Age stake that included a water test, Labs swept the placements—and the Labrador retriever reclaimed the full measure of his glorious heritage. In Wolters’s words, “That message quickly reached the average hunter. Here was a first-rate upland dog with a great hunting nose who could also beat the Chesapeake in water work. He was easy to train and had the disposition of a baby-sitter. Almost overnight, the great worker, the Chessie, the hardheaded, one-man dog whose disposition at times was questionable, was replaced in the duck blind by the Labrador. The Labrador’s future was secure.”
AKC registrations back this up. In 1935 (the first year for which statistics are available), the Chesapeake ranked 40th out of 95 breeds registered that year, while the Lab ranked 42nd. In 1936, the Lab was 41st, while the Chessie was 42nd. Never again would the Chessie’s numbers equal or surpass the Lab’s, and the gap only widened as the Lab’s popularity continued to grow.
In 1932, Jay Carlisle, a prominent New York financier, began importing Labs for his Wingan Kennels on Long Island. A year later, he hired a Scottish gamekeeper named David Elliot—the man who, in Wolters’s words, “did more to change and advance field trials in this country than any other person.”
Elliot, you see, brought with him the basic system of handling retrievers via whistle and hand commands that we continue to use today. Inspired by watching herdsmen handle their sheepdogs at long distance in his native Scotland, Elliot adapted the system for retrievers—and, for the first time, made “blind” retrieves possible. In point of fact, an American trainer named Harry Conklin, who worked primarily with Chesapeakes, came up with a system of whistle and hand signals independently of Elliot, but for whatever reason Elliot has received most of the credit for it.
At first Elliot and Conklin used these commands simply to guide their dogs to birds that the dogs hadn’t marked well (anathema in a field trial situation today, but perfectly acceptable—and much admired—at the time). Within a few years, though, blind retrieves had become part and parcel of every All-Age stake, and every trainer who wanted to be competitive had to learn the nuts and bolts of teaching his dogs how to accomplish them.
Within a few years, also, retriever field trial clubs had sprung up in places like St. Louis (where the club chartered a riverboat to serve as a floating hotel), Omaha, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison, bringing new “blood” into the game and exposing sportsmen (and women) of every stripe to the amazing feats these dogs were capable of. It was at these Midwestern events that golden retrievers, far more popular there than on the East Coast, first made their presence felt on the field trial scene. The inaugural National Retriever Championship, held in 1941, was won by the golden retriever King Midas of Woodend.
Ultimately, the rising importance of the blind retrieve—and in particular its growing difficulty and complexity, which required increasingly forceful training—became the wedge that separated the Lab from the other retrieving breeds as the dominant player in field trial competition. This, too, contributed mightily to the Lab’s popularity, not only among field trialers but among the hunting rank and file. What duck or pheasant hunter in the mid-20th century, reading about the exploits of the great field champions and gazing with longing at photographs of these spectacular retrievers, wouldn’t want such a dog for himself?
The Labrador retriever publicity machine started cranking up in 1938, when W. Averell Harriman’s Blind of Arden, the first Lab to earn an AKC field championship, graced the cover of Life magazine. (Blind’s littermate, Decoy of Arden, was the second Labrador field champion.) Dispirited by the tragic death of his longtime keeper, Tom Briggs, in an automobile accident, Harriman quit the game abruptly in 1940, but the Arden name continued to burn brightly. The St. Louis sportsman Paul Bakewell III (who’d gotten his start with goldens) obtained several of Harriman’s finest dogs, including Tar of Arden, who proceeded to win the 1941 Field & Stream Trophy, awarded annually to the top field trial retriever of the year.
By far the greatest of the Bakewell-Arden dogs, though, was Shed of Arden. His name was supposed to be Shad, after the silvery anadromous sportfish of the East Coast, but it was mis-typed “Shed” on his AKC registration certificate and Shed it stayed. A canine Adonis who resembled 85 pounds of chiseled ebony, Shed was in the eyes of many the beau ideal of the Labrador retriever. One of the first dual champions (meaning he held a bench championship and a field championship) in the history of the breed, he won the National Retriever Championship in 1942, 1943, and 1946.
A reporter from Time magazine was on hand at the 1946 National, held in mid-December at Crab Orchard Lake in southern Illinois. The final series, a double blind across a bay, was where Shed separated himself from his competition. While the other top contenders faltered, “Old Shed,” as the reporter referred to him, aced it, plunging into the chilly water without hesitation and responding instantly to Bakewell’s commands. Someone in the gallery was heard to say, “Handling that dog is like driving a car.”
In December 1949, Life devoted a multi-page photo essay to Bakewell’s Deer Creek Kennels, hailing it as “the cradle of the world’s finest retrievers.” The text continued, “The handsome dogs shown on these pages represent some of the most highly skilled labor in the animal world. They are black Labradors from the Deer Creek Kennels in St. Louis, where the best retrievers in America are trained.”
The Labrador publicity machine churned on.
At about the same time that the Life article appeared, Bakewell won the National Retriever Championship once again with Marvadel Black Gum. But Bakewell, like Harriman before him, soon lost interest in the retriever game following an unexpected death. In Bakewell’s case, though, the victim was not a person but a dog, a special favorite of his called Little Pierre of Deer Creek. The circumstances of his demise were mysterious, but it was strongly suspected, if never proven, that Little Pierre had been poisoned by a field trial rival who was jealous of Bakewell’s success.
In the nearly 80 years that have passed since then, no owner-handler has dominated retriever field trials the way Paul Bakewell III did in the 1940s. As sires and dams, his dogs, in particular Shed of Arden, profoundly influenced the development of the Labrador retriever in America. But Bakewell made another tremendously important, if often overlooked, contribution: He gave a country-smart kid from Arkansas named T.W. “Cotton” Pershall his start in the dog training business.
Pershall got his foot in the door as a groom in Bakewell’s stables, but Bakewell, quick to recognize the young man’s intuitive way with dogs, soon promoted him to head trainer at Deer Creek Kennels. When Bakewell withdrew from the scene, Pershall relocated across the Missouri River to John Olin’s Nilo Kennels in Illinois.
Does the name King Buck ring any bells? If not, let me put it this way: If any retriever who ever lived truly qualifies for immortality, it’s King Buck, trained by the legendary Cotton Pershall. Buck not only won back-to-back National Retriever Championships under Pershall’s whistle in 1952 and ’53 but was the subject of Maynard Reece’s iconic 1959 federal duck stamp. (See “Cotton and the King,” Ducks Unlimited magazine, May/June 2020.) After Buck’s 1953 National victory, the Field & Stream Trophy was summarily “retired” and awarded to Olin on a permanent basis.
Still, glittering field trial records tell only part of the breed’s story. While King Buck and later superstars like Super Chief, River Oaks Corky, Wanapum Dart’s Dandy, and Candlewoods Tanks A Lot were garnering headlines and pushing the boundaries of retriever performance, tens of thousands of Labrador gundogs, their names unknown to history, were burning memories into the hearts of their owners in the marshes and fields of the continent. When Jeff Griffen published his magisterial The Hunting Dogs of America in 1964, he could declare without fear of contradiction that “The Labrador is King of the Retrievers.”
While Griffen’s treatment of the various breeds is on the whole remarkably even-handed, he’s utterly unrestrained in his praise for the Lab: “He is as tough and hardy as the Chesapeake, better on upland game and generally equal to the Golden in this, the latter’s forte. He’s better than the Golden in the water, has the ideal coat—heavy enough for protection in any kind of weather, not long enough to require any upkeep, not oily enough to be smelly. He’s gentle and affectionate to a fault, but when a gun, duck or retrieving dummy appears, he comes roaring to life. His over-all ability in water and land retrieving and flushing upland game raises him head-and-shoulders above the rest of the retrieving breeds.”
As early as the 1960s, though, people of long experience with Labs began to detect a worrisome trend. The legendary professional trainer Charles Morgan, whose career stretched from the beginning of American field trials in the 1930s to the dawn of the modern e-collar era, was clearly thinking of the Lab when he said, “There is no question that the kind of training we are doing today has been detrimental to the natural hunting ability of our dogs.” The aforementioned David Elliot, who was known as “the father of the blind retrieve,” expressed much the same sentiment.
In other words, field trials, by emphasizing and rewarding trained, anti-instinctual behaviors that require a tremendous amount of pressure to instill, had over successive generations created a Lab that many hunters found too high-powered for their needs. And many professional field trial trainers, if their feet are held to the fire, will admit that they’ve put Field Champion titles on barely controllable dogs that would have been royal pains in the butt in a duck blind (although this isn’t as common today as it was 20 or 30 years ago).
The dissatisfaction felt by some American sportsmen over the field trial–type Lab as a hunting companion led them to return to the source: Great Britain. There, they found Labs that were generally calmer and more tractable than their American cousins. These dogs responded well to positive, low-pressure training techniques too, and possessed all the natural qualities—intelligence, eagerness-to-please, marking ability, tenacity, birdiness—for which the breed has been prized since “the Labrador dog” was first described in 1814.
The first trickle of British Labs arrived on American shores in the 1970s, when Robert Milner started importing dogs to his Wildrose Kennels in Grand Junction, Tennessee. Over the years a handful of other Anglophiles followed suit. But it wasn’t until 1999, when Mike Stewart bought the Wildrose name and remaining stock and moved them to his place in Oxford, Mississippi, that “the second British invasion” of Labs began to generate real momentum.
Today, with satellite kennels in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas, Wildrose is a mini dynasty. And the British Lab, clearly, is here to stay. Is it “better” than the American Lab? Of course not. But it better suits the needs, purposes, and sensibilities of a certain group of sportsmen, just as the American Lab is a better fit for a certain different group of sportsmen.
Any way you cut it, the Lab remains the dog for all seasons, the dog for all reasons . . . and the King of the Retrievers. Long may he reign!
