When I was looking at the foundational pedigrees for the golden retriever, I was expecting to find lots of outcrosses with black flat-coats. And found them in several different place. It is very easy to trace goldens to black flat-coats. A relationship between those two breeds has been well-established, but I was definitely not expecting to find a curly-coated retriever behind some of the dogs in those foundational pedigrees.
The dog Rajah (b. 1903) is the sire of Inez and Ingestre Rubina. These two dogs usually passed over as foundation stock with nebulous roots. Rajah is also similarly passed over, so I was somewhat shocked when Rajah’s pedigree.
Rajah is listed as a curly-coated retriever. I was skeptical about this listing. Really wavy goldens have been known to exist, and I thought it might be a mistake. Tweed water dogs or Tweed water spaniels were occasionally mistaken for curlies, and I wondered if that might have been a more likely possibility.
My skepticism about Rajah being a curly soon vanish. Rajah’s sire is listed as “Tivertons [sic] Best Lad,” a curly-coated retriever.
I jumped at this name, because I knew from previous research of Samuel Darbey’s line of curly-coats. His Tiverton line was very influential in curly-coated retrievers. For a while, Tiverton was almost synonymous with curly-coated coats. From that post, you see depictions of Tiverton Victor and Tiverton Beauty, but I had vaguely remembered reading about Tiverton Best Lad, but I could not remember seeing a depiction of him.
A google search found “Tiverton Best Lad” in Charles Henry Lane’s All About Dogs-A Book for Doggy People (1901). The curly that is depicted under the entry for his breed has the caption: “CURLY RETRIEVER CH. “TIVERTON BEST LAD” S.DARBEY OWNER.”
Ch. Tiverton Best Lad. He was the sire of Rajah, the curly who was behind two of the dogs in the golden retriever foundational pedigrees.
The addition of curly-coated retriever into any wavy/flat-coat/ or foundation golden pedigree is a bit baffling. Curlies had been distinct from wavy/flat-coats since the 1850’s, and because curlies were not the top trial contenders, many contemporary flat-coat fanciers defamed them. George T. Teasdale-Buckell described them as useless in his The Complete English Shot (circa 1905).
However against the conventional wisdom this crossing was, I was certain that these dogs were just tiny additions to the golden gene pool, and compared to the wavy and flat-coated retriever influence, they are.
However, I checked out the some of the descendants of Inez and Ingestre Rubina. I was a bit shocked when I found out that Inez was Ch. Michael of Moreton’s great-great granddam through Paxill Brian, Triumph, and Aurora. Granted, Rajah contributed only3.125 % of Michael of Moreton’s genes, but that is far more genetic contribution than Nous or Belle gave him.
Cubbington Diver had the same amount of his genetic material from Rajah. Even though he was six generations removed from the curly, he descended from both Inez and Ingestre Rubin at the fifth generation back.
These dogs didn’t really have any curly features. They were fully golden or yellow wavy/flat-coats. However, the fact they did have a curly cross within just very few years before they were separated from the flat-coat as their own distinct breed means that we should at least consider the curly-coat’s contribution to the breed. It may have been minor, but dogs with curly-coat blood wound up doing very well in the breed and producing many offspring– both Michael of Moreton and Cubbington Diver were widely used at stud. Michael was particularly known for his prepotency and was a prolific sire in the 1920’s and early 30’s. Within the golden breed at large, then, there are little traces of their curly ancestors. Every once in a while, a golden develops a very tightly curled coat. It is not exactly like a curly’s, but it is very different from the more usual wavy-coat that is still quite common in the breed.
As Michael got a little older, some of this curly ancestry may have been revealed. In this old photograph of him, I have always noted how curly his coat was from what one normally sees in goldens today.
Ch. Michael of Moreton. Note the curl to his coat.
I had always assume that this curl had come from his Tweed water dog ancestors. However, I am now imagining that they came from his more immediate ancestors, Tiverton Best Lad and Rajah. I know that’s an unscientific way to think, but it is so beguiling. I know now that I won’t look at a golden with a particularly curly coat the same way again.
I have found it a little strange that no one jumped at this opportunity to explore the curly’s influence on the golden. Retriever historiography tends to be quite Balkanized. Each person specializes in a breed and its very close relations. It has long been established that curlies standardized early on, and they generally were not favored as outcrosses to trial and show flat-coats. The whole process of turning a wavy-coat into a flat-coat often dictated that setters were more likely chosen as outcross than curly-coated retrievers. The name kennel name Tiverton probably wouldn’t have set off too many alarm bells for most flat-coat and golden historians.
If we are willing to work together on historiography, maybe we’ll find even more relationships that we previously thought.
I am not surprised and often wondered why some goldens tended to curls…also goldens tend to be slightly longer legged than flatties…
CCR crosses that I have seen don’t seem to have very curly coats
Flat-coats/wavy originally varied from setter-type to “Newfoundland” type. Zelstone, Moonstone’s sire, looked very much like a long-haired Labrador: https://retrieverman.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/zelstone.jpg Most bench-line goldens tend towards this tendency that once existed in the breed.
I’m going to do a post in a day or so about why flat-coats got some interesting conformation. Harding Cox, the great flat-coat man, is my source.
Goldens can have a wavy or flat-coat. In the US, the tendency in show dogs is to have straighter coats, while the field lines have a mixture of wavy and flat.
BTW, if you post this on the Murray River Curly yahoo group, I need to mention that there were yellow curlies at one point. They weren’t very common, but they were around. Also, in the pedigrees, I found a dog registered as a golden named Black Croble, which obviously wasn’t golden!
It must be interesting to be able to go back to the true foundation dogs in your breed. I can go back and look at the first imports to the west in my three breeds, but their true origins are really not known even in their home countries. They just *are*.
Our equivalent to a COO dog– Tazi or desert-bred saluki– is extinct.
The St. John’s water dog was the landrace– probably a cur-type that adapted to going in frigid water–that founded them all. Labs have some relatively recent outcrosses with them, as recent as the 1940s. And in those golden/flat-coat pedigrees, where you see the word “Labrador,'” they really mean St. John’s water dog. The modern Labrador is a more recent creaion, which descends from the Buccleuch line of short-haired retriever.
There are a few more Curlies listed as being behind some of the very early Goldens. However, it is likely that their influence on coat type was minimal at best. Every reference I’ve found says that when a Curly is bred with any other retriever, that that coat type is lost. The wavy-coated Goldens are a different coat type entirely; for one thing, they have undercoat, and true Curlies do not. I have seen a very few (maybe four or five) truly curly-coated Goldens over the years; and Michael of Moreton is nowhere near being curly!
I’ve seen a Labrador/Curly X, and it had no curl at all.
However, there was a study that found that coat length and type are the result of variations on three genes. They found it works for Irish water spaniels, but there were three breeds, including the Afghan hound, in which these three genes don’t describe their coat type. I don’t think curlies were in the study, but it would be interesting to see what genetics of their coat is.
Since wavy and curly are recessive to straight in other breeds of dog, it might be something that only pops up when bred to another dog carrying the curly gene. I doubt that it would disappear entirely through a single cross. If it does, then the curly-coated gene wouldn’t disappear entirely.
Yes. I had a golden that was much, much curlier than Michael of Moreton. She even had a partial topknot like a water spaniel (something like what Cullham had but much, much more profuse)
In the Stonex research article, the picture of Michael as a young dog shows him to have a relatively straight coat. A lot of goldens get curlier as they age. I’ve seen the same thing happen in Labs.
This is all fascinating, and makes me wonder: if someone wanted to recreate the golden retriever today from non-golden retriever dogs, could it be done with the dogs we have have available to us now? Seems like it should not be that difficult. Start with a flat coat and then….?
The flat-coat is a bit different today than it was when goldens were founded. I’ve found a first had account of borzoi being added to their bloodlines, which is why they are so different now.
We also lack our landraces– the greater retriever landrace, the St. John’s water dog/retrieving Newfoundland, and the Tweed water dog.
We could recreate them using lots of different dogs, but I don’t think they would entirely be the same.
But in theory, we could.
One of my Goldens looks so much like this photo and now that she is 6 years old, her fur has begun to curl like this whereas previously it had been flat. Ch. Michael of Moreton is in her pedigree. If someone showed me this photo and said it was her, I would believe it. I was already familiar with this photo.
[…] retrievers also descend from at least one well-known curly-coated retriever. He was black and curly, but all of his golden retriever descendants look like golden […]
[…] The other is the actual refined show curly, and at least one of the breed’s very prolific sires had a well-known show curly ancestor. […]