Notes & Queries, 26th November, 2013: Why do dogs come in so many sizes?

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If we dispel from our minds any notions of a Garden of Eden, where God created the animals, who were in turn named by Adam, then we must consign our ancestors to the wilderness. There was never a paradise, nor was there any biblical fall from grace. There was only a bloody uphill struggle; a race to the top of the food chain.

Out of necessity, early man would have categorised some animals as potential sources of food and others as dangerous predators; less frequently, he would regard some as allies. In that clouded era of human history, dogs were a presence lurking furtively in the corner of the eye. They were paw prints, pressed into the wet mud at dawn, marking out the perimeters of the earliest human settlements. At night they were silhouettes skulking around on the margins of temporary encampments. Gradually, over the seasons; down through the years, and the decades, and the centuries; across the overlap of the generations, they inched closer to the warmth and the light, awaiting an invitation, or at the very least a bone thrown in their general direction.

The flames from the first fires projected the shadows of the first dogs onto the walls of the caves, where they were superimposed over paintings of hunting parties frozen in time at the moment of the kill. Our distant ancestors looked upon the shadow versions of these animals and they saw possibilities; traits lying dormant in a species that could be drawn out and set towards a purpose. And so the shadows became dogs, who in turn cast shadows of their own, and so on. That is why, today, there are many different breeds in all shapes and sizes.

Because history is a cycle of endless repetition, there have been periods when, either necessity or a craving for novelty, has brought forth an explosion of new canine varieties. The most recent occurred just beyond the frame of living memory, in an English manor house called Woodlawn. It was an unusual building, constructed in the Dutch style with a gambrel roof. The village that had grown up around the house and which, for a handful of centuries existed solely to served its needs, was named Lower Woodlawn, the ‘lower’ part of the name being applicable both in terms of its location and its status. The manor was demolished in the aftermath of the last great war and the neighbouring properties absorbed into the great sprawl of South London.

On the morning of April 27th, 1902, the owner of Woodlawn, a man called Ray Wallace, laid his father to rest in the churchyard at St Mark's. Hours later, he bade farewell to last of the guests who had attended the wake, accepting from them their final condolences as he closed the door on the day. He ushered his wife Margaret upstairs to bed with the promise that he would be along to join her shortly.

When the ground floor of the house was empty of all souls apart from his own, he sat in the darkness, enveloped by a silence that was weighted by the ticking of a grandfather clock, remembering the stories that his father told him as a child. He recalled how this man, who had always seemed old to him, would illustrate these tales by contorting his hands into different shapes in front of the bedside lamp, projecting images of animals onto the wall of the room.

The animal that he loved above all the others was the dog; not any dog, mind, but the one his father had created. The boy's love for it was so great that eventually his parent, seeing the need in the child, allowed it to break free from the constraints of the stories and become an imaginary companion, who was at his son's side in sickness and in sorrow. When his father left the room, the shadow dog would follow along beside him, first elongating, then slowly fading as it trailed across the wall, momentarily taking on the shape of the door lintel, before it was swallowed up in the darkness of the landing.

In 1903, Ray wrote a children's book which he based upon his father's stories. It was titled: A Dog For Every Job. On every page an imaginary canine breed performed a highly specific task for its human master: The French Tovel, for instance, barked at the bedside of the Vigneron in the dead of night, alerting the man that the grapes had ripened and should be harvested from the vines before the sunrise spoiled the crop and soured the wine. Margaret Wallace illustrated the stories with silhouette images of the dogs and their human owners.

The book did well at home and abroad, where it established a foothold in American schools and in the colonies. The Wallaces began receiving letters from all over the world, asking where a particular breed of dog from the book could be purchased. In her replies, Margaret Wallace would gently break the news that none of the dogs were real, while suggesting an alternative pedigree that might pass as a substitute.

In 1906, the pair began cross-breeding dogs. By 1913 they had created real-life likenesses for 39 of the 43 silhouette dogs in the book. Margaret Wallace wrote in her memoirs: “They poured from the gates of Woodlawn. We had no children to carry on our name and so it was these dogs who were our lasting gift to the world.”

On the day Ray Wallace died, he was sitting on a high-backed chair, which had been carried out from the dining room of his home, through a pair of French doors, and set down on a small patio that was fringed with red bricks. It was the hour before dusk and he faced to the east watching the encroaching darkness. The two surviving dogs on the property, having been roused from their afternoon slumber by a gentle breeze that had ventured into the house, bolted from the doorway and up the gentle incline of the long garden. When they reached the drystone wall at the far end they vaulted it and carried on across the unkempt meadow that lay beyond. The old man in the chair watched as the tangled duo crested the small hill and became a pair of black shapes on the horizon.