An Exploration of the Sculptures of Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Brown Dog, Battersea, South London, England

Hilda Kean

ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the sculptural depiction of two nonhuman animals, Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh, Scotland and the Brown Dog in Battersea, South London, England. It explores the ways in which both these cultural depictions transgress the norm of nineteenth century dog sculpture. It also raises questions about the nature of these constructions and the way in which the memorials became incorporated within particular human political spaces. The article concludes by analyzing the modern “replacement” of the destroyed early twentieth century statue of the Brown Dog and suggests that the original meaning of the statue has been significantly altered.

In his analysis of the erection of public monuments in nineteenth century Europe, Serguisz Michalski has suggested that there was an increasing urge “to commemorate important personage or patriotic events and memories acquired a new... dimension, moving beyond the limitations of individually conceived acts of homage.” Such commemorations were not confined to images of people; increasingly, nonhuman animals were depicted in paintings, sculptures, and monuments. As the curators of a recent exhibition devoted to dog sculpture during the nineteenth century have suggested, “pets were seen as being worthy of celebration with the visual language of permanence.” Certainly from the early eighteenth century, many portraits of the nobility start to include depictions of animals as “identifiable pets.” The fashion developed in later years to include sculptures of favorite pet animals. Queen Victoria employed William Boehm to carve an image of her aging collie in expectation of his forthcoming death.
This practice of commemorating favored animals in sculptural form was usually confined to named dogs kept by aristocrats or celebrities. Well known examples include the mausoleum to poet Lord Byron’s dog Boatswain at Newstead Abbey or the sculpture of novelist Walter Scott and his Highland greyhound Maida depicted by William Scoular in 1838, which has recently been described as, “modern culture’s first canine celebrity.”

Dogs depicted in sculpture usually would be thoroughbreds whose “breeding” would also confer status on their human keepers. The popularity of particular breeds and the interest in visual depiction was greatly influenced by Queen Victoria and her penchant for different types of dogs. These included Skye terriers, previously seen as lowly and working dogs. Three such Skye terriers, Cairnach, Dandie Dinmot and Islay were depicted in a number of paintings of the royal family and their loyal pets. One example includes a painting by Edwin Landseer of the Skye terrier Islay improbably guarding the sleeping baby Princess Alice in her cradle. A further example of Islay engaging with a human can be seen outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, Australia. This bronze sculpture by Justin Robson was apparently modeled from a sketch drawn by Queen Victoria in 1842. While begging for coins to help dead and blind children of New South Wales, the sculpted dog is also turned toward Queen Victoria whose statue is adjacent.

I mention the depiction of the Skye terriers in particular because they were the same breed of dog as Greyfriars Bobby, one of the dogs I explore in this article. What is distinctive about the sculptures of Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh, Scotland, and of the Brown Dog in Battersea, in south London, is not their depiction as such but the rationale for their existence and, in particular, where they were erected -- in public spaces. Moreover, in contrast to the practice of Landseer, commissioned to paint the corpse of dogs brought to his studio by a caregiver (owner) as a form of private mourning, the purpose of these sculptures is to make a public commemoration of a dead dog. Both sculptures were erected in cities, the conventional cultural landscape of humans. Far from these sculpted nonhuman animals being set apart in a geographically distinct place for animals, such as a dog cemetery, they were located, as I shall argue later, in places defined by a particular type of human politics.

Narratives of Greyfriars Bobby and the Brown Dog

Both dogs were famous before they were commemorated. Many versions of the story of Greyfriars Bobby exist, but the gist is as follows. Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye terrier, was kept by John Gray -- in some versions a working farmer; in others, a policeman -- whom Bobby accompanied on his business. They both ate meals regularly at Traill’s dining rooms opposite Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh. On Gray’s death in 1858, Bobby continued to frequent the dining rooms and took food he was given to his master’s grave every day in the Greyfriars churchyard, where he then made his home. The owner of the dining rooms was prosecuted as the putative owner of Greyfriars Bobby for not taxing him. In his defense, the man argued that he would have taxed Bobby but Bobby was still loyal beyond death to his owner and that this loyalty should be acknowledged. This argument won the day: Bobby was given a collar by the Lord Provost of the city, who paid the annual dog tax. Bobby lived for another 14 years. A little kennel was erected for him by his former carer’s grave. On his death in 1872, Bobby was buried in a non consecrated part of the churchyard, and a year later a statue was erected outside the churchyard and opposite Traill’s dining rooms (Figure 1).

Figure 1 about here

The brown dog -- like Greyfriars Bobby -- was also famous before a statue was erected to him, although his story is much less well known. The monument did not give him fame but portrayed him in a different way as a nonhuman animal worthy of being remembered (Figure 2). He was a dog seen in a laboratory whose plight had been exposed by two anti-vivisectionist campaigners, Louise Lind af Hageby and Liesa Schartau, who in 1903 had registered as students to attend lectures at University College London (UCL) to expose vivisection, arguing:

The importance of personal experience of the methods of vivisection for those who throw themselves heart and soul into the the battle against it cannot be exaggerated. We hope that more and more ardent friends of this cause will enter the laboratories...and tell the world what they have seen.

Figure 2 about here—Please add – “By permission of the British Library”

UCL was chosen specifically as the leading institution in Britain for both physiology and experiments on animals. In 1836, the college had pioneered the new physiological sciences with the first professorship of its kind in anatomy and physiology to which it appointed William Sharpey, who subsequently advised the government on the workings of the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. The experiment was witnessed after the legislation of 1876, which had controversially regulated experiments on animals, and before the Royal Commission on Vivisection of 1906, for which activists had campaigned both to review the way the legislation had worked and to demand total abolition.

In the early years of the twentieth century, vivisection was being perpetrated at the college, particularly by Victor Horsley, William Bayliss, and Professor Starling. The dogs used in experiments were not bred specifically for the purpose but were stray dogs and thus included animals who previously had been kept as companion animals (pets). It was the undermining of this perceived human-animal relationship of loyalty and trust, a contemporary, culturally accepted characteristic of dogs that particularly incensed anti-vivisectionists.

Certainly, there are examples in anti-vivisection literature of dogs being captured precisely because they followed scientists’ agents who offered friendship, causing the dogs then to be captured. In the anti vivisection press, one also finds the visual image of a small pet Skye terrier looking up at an absent owner in much the same guise as Islay in the statue in Sydney, so well known was the image of Queen Victoria’s dog with her associated qualities of loyalty. Frances Power Cobbe, the leading anti-vivisectionist campaigner of the nineteenth century spoke of her own work against the 1876 Act, which regulated animal experiments and exempted vivisectors from prosecution for cruelty. She declared she would not begrudge her hard work of the previous two years against vivisection if, “...a certain hideous series of experiments at Edinburgh have been stopped and a dozen of Greyfriars Bobby’s comrades have been mercifully spared to die in peace”.

The dogs killed in experiments were not necessarily mongrels; those who died at UCL, as cited in the experiment notes of Victor Horsley, included a collie terrier, healthy male fox terrier, brown fox terrier, bull terrier, retriever, bull dog, and a very cross spaniel bitch who had been nursing puppies. They were subjected to experiments on nerves that entailed having their testicles or paws crushed. Such experiments were permitted under the 1876 Act, and vivisectors could not be prosecuted under legislation for cruelty to animals, although there were not supposed to be repeated experiments on the same animal and adequate anesthetics and appropriate killing afterwards were stipulated.

On February 2, 1903, Hageby and Schartau had witnessed Professor William Bayliss conducting an experiment on a “brown dog of the terrier type.” They alleged and published in their book The Shambles of Science (which referred in its title to the place of operation of slaughtermen) that the brown dog already had a wound from a previous experiment. They argued that the brown dog had not been properly anesthetized while his neck was cut open to expose the saliva glands to show that the pressure at which saliva was secreted was greater than blood pressure. Finally, they alleged, the dog was killed by a knife through its heart by an unlicensed research student. They also stated in a section headed “Fun” that students had laughed and joked during the experiment. To deliberately invite publicity, part of the text was read out by Stephen Coleridge, the secretary of the National Anti Vivisection Society, at a public meeting accusing Bayliss of breaking the law. Libel action followed, and the campaigners lost, although all costs were covered by donations collected through publicity in the “Daily News.” Different amended editions of The Shambles of Science were later issued (and also subsequent libel action was brought by Hageby against the scientists). The publicity caused by different libel actions ensured that the plight of the brown dog was well known in both animal welfare and scientific milieux for a number of years.

Narratives of the Public Sculptures of the Dogs

The bronze statue of Greyfriars Bobby, designed by the Scottish sculptor William Brodie and paid for by Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, was erected in November 1873, just outside the Greyfriars churchyard and opposite Triall’s dining rooms, a year after the dog’s death and some 15 years after the demise of John Gray. On the marble base was the dedication to “the affectionate fidelity of Greyfriars Bobby,” the dog by then having taken on the epithet of the place in which he lived after John Gray’s demise.
The statue of the brown dog was erected in the small Latchmere recreation ground in Battersea in September 1906, some 34 years after the statue of Greyfriars Bobby was put up in Edinburgh. Those behind the campaign to commemorate the brown dog included Louisa Woodward of the Church Anti Vivisection Society and Captain William Simpson, secretary of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association (MDFCTA), acting in a personal capacity. This statue was, like that of Bobby, a statue of a real dog. Unusually for dog sculpture, however, this was a dog without a name because the rationale for the monument did not emanate from a personal relationship between a “pet” dog and his carer. The monument consisted of a 7'6" marble fountain with an 18" high green bronze dog on top that had been sculpted by Joseph Whitehead, whose company mainly made artifact for churches such as pulpits or fountains for the MDFCTA. The statue stood on a plinth that echoed in design the Greyfriars Bobby monument; but the nature of the inscription was very different in tone. Far from suggesting that humans were worthy of the loyalty of dogs, it condemned human behavior toward this -- and other -- dogs. The inscription on the brown dog memorial declared:

In memory of the brown terrier dog done to death in the laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured vivisection extending over more than 2 months and having been handed over from one vivisector to another till death came to his release. Also in memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?

The Liberal MP George Greenwood wrote, noting the controversy this declaration had aroused, that in contrast, “in the northern capital there stands another monument to a dog bearing an inscription at which no man can cavil.”

Although a victim of vivisection, the brown dog was not begging for mercy; rather, he was depicted in a similar stance to the lone Greyfriars Bobby. The brown dog was a proud dog: He was neither cowering nor whimpering but almost defiantly confronting his human vivisectors. But the brown dog did not depict the conventional narrative of dog sculpture, a beloved pet of the nobility or wealthy. The brown dog statue was not even celebrating the life of a dog after the death of his owner (as was the case with Bobby) but the very circumstances of his violent and unnecessary death. In this respect, the rationale for the commemoration bore similarity with monuments recalling individual humans martyred in a worthy cause.

Contested Ideas of Loyalty

Ostensibly, Greyfriars Bobby typified the “human” quality demanded of a companion dog in relation to his keeper: loyalty. Moreover, the little Scottish dog became the focus of “heart warming and enlightening anecdotes,” which became common in nineteenth century dog literature. Samuel Smiles, for example, wrote in biblical language of the Scottish dog: “His was a love utterly unselfish, faithful and self-sacrificing....What a lesson of gratitude and love for human beings” The narrative of the life of Greyfriars Bobby epitomized loyalty beyond death -- in religious vein -- signified both by his refusal to acknowledge a new keeper and a reluctance (for whatever reason) to leave his dead owner’s grave. In his sculptural depiction, Greyfriars Bobby stands alone: The particular human to whom he might turn in begging mode (as characterized by images of Islay) no longer exists. He sits with his feet firmly on the ground.

The brown dog sculpture, however, exemplified a different relationship between dog and human. The statue’s function was both to commemorate the untimely death of the brown dog (thereby gaining publicity for the anti vivisectionist cause) and to chastize scientists for their own absence of “human” qualities, including a lack of compassion toward an apparently trusting dog. The brown dog did not possess a given name since he was no longer a “pet,” although, in an earlier part of his life, he may have been part of a household, an emblem of domestic ideology.

Like Bobby, the brown dog also was depicted alone and without an owner; He became the first vivisected nonhuman animal to be commemorated in sculptural form in Britain. This was neither a commemoration nor an easy celebration of notions of loyalty, which had been the rationale for the statue to Greyfriars Bobby. Rather, it was an indictment of the way humans had misused nonhuman animals, particularly those defined as possessing qualities of loyalty: dogs. The sculptural creation of Greyfriars Bobby as a symbol of loyalty occurred only after the death of his keeper, John Gray. Conventionally, this would be a time when the surviving dog, if not killed or become feral, would form a new keeper-companion domestic relationship with a different person. Both Bobby’s atypical behavior and the nature of his subsequent commemoration marked a change from conventional practices. This was not a private monument erected for personal reasons by a grieving human. The nature of the commemoration ensured that Bobby moved into both popular memory and public history.

The Siting of the Statues: Place and Space

Both statues were located in places defined by particular human political geographies. As Doreen Massey has argued, local spaces are set within, and actively link into, the wider networks of social relationships that make up the neighborhood, the borough, the city. It is a “complexity of social interactions and meanings which we constantly build, tear down, and negotiate.”

Both Greyfriars Bobby and the Brown Dog became incorporated into wider political narratives. Greyfriars Bobby had become part of the story of Protestant Scotland through the location of his actions, for he allegedly regularly ate his dinner and/or mourned on his dead keeper’s grave in Greyfriars churchyard, defined by Walter Scott as “the Westminster of Scotland.”

Greyfriars had been the site of the signing of the Protestant National Covenant in 1638. Here the Covenanters pledged the oath of loyalty to their religious cause, “thus testifying to their unbreakable faith in Him, the Almighty Master of all.” Here too the Covenanters were imprisoned after their defeat at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679. This place was already a site of Protestant commemoration, of loyalty and steadfastness against the odds before Bobby visited it. In so doing, his story became incorporated into this bigger national -- and religious -- narrative.

Battersea too was a location of particular ideas and ideals. One might consider this area of south London to be defined by an animal geography, for here in 1860 was established the Battersea Dogs Home, providing shelter for lost dogs and cats. In less benign fashion, less than half a mile away was the Brown Animal Sanatory Institute, established in 1871 by Sir John Burdon Sanderson to continue his experiments on animals.

Battersea in the first years of the twentieth century was also a place in which particular human politics thrived. The local council was run by socialists, and the local London County Council member (and MP) at the turn of the century had been the former socialist, John Burns. Other local campaigners included the socialist and feminist Charlotte Despard, future president of the militant suffrage Women’s Freedom League and of the Vegetarian Society, who spoke at the brown dog statue’s unveiling ceremony. Apart from the nearby dogs’ home -- then as now totally opposed to vivisection -- there was also the anti vivisection hospital, which included on its governing body Louise Lind af Hageby, the infiltrator of the UCL laboratories.

The statue of the brown dog was erected in the small Latchmere recreation ground. This was at the center of a new council housing development, the first to be built in Battersea and one of the earliest municipal estates in Britain. The streets of the estate had rousing socialist names (which haven’t changed) including Reform and Freedom Street and are also named after leading nineteenth century socialists, including George Odger, the first president in 1864 of the International Working Men’s Association. Like Greyfriars Bobby, the brown dog also was incorporated into the political narrative of the locality. But a space, characterized by both socialist and feminist politics and opposition to vivisection, was contested and highly controversial. The statue was physically attacked in November 1907 and March 1908 -- by medical students from UCL. The students also demonstrated with small effigies of the dog, which they held aloft on skewers. Because of these attacks, the local council was obliged to guard the statue at an annual cost of £700 a year. When a new, Conservative, local council was elected in November 1909 it determined within a month to remove the statue, not just because of the expense but because of the political sentiments it represented.

In response, there were petitions, local protest meetings, and attempts at legal injunctions to stop the removal of the statue. A brown dog memorial defense committee of 500 people was established. Speakers at a meeting of 1500 people in February 1910 included the defeated socialist councilor John Archer (who was to become the first black mayor in Britain in November 1913), Louise Lind af Hageby, Charlotte Despard, Harold Baillie Weaver, (a Theosophist organizer, supporter of women’s suffrage and chair of the National Canine Defense League in 1910), and Liberal MP George Greenwood. There also were demonstrations in central London against the statue’s removal. These events included banners depicting the statue, people in masks of dogs in support, and speeches in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park.

Even the monument itself (as opposed to the narrative it was representing) became invested with much power. According to Louise Lind af Hageby, its physical presence had terrified the opposition. Vivisectors hated it, she argued, as through the story of one dog people were learning what happened to thousands of dogs and vivisected animals in laboratories of the world and what was being done under the 1876 Act. The statue of the dog had taken on the cause of the dog. As one campaigner asked:
Why are the vivisectors so anxious that the dog should cease to speak, for remember that the dog does not only speak to Battersea and London. Its fame has gone all over the civilised world”

George Kekewich, former Liberal MP and secretary to the Board of Education, declared:

“...the brown dog...is more than an ornament, it is a credit to this borough of Battersea.” The former mayor argued that the statue needed to be read against other monuments arguing that this “public monument... was an emblem of truth, which is more than you can say for a lot of statues which are about, but we do not say that they ought to be removed.” Charlotte Despard developed this theme saying, “it is ‘lest we forget’ that these memorials are put up.”

We see there the symbol, the evidence of what they are, and then we feel that this is a memorial to a martyr , a martyr to that which is falsely called science.... when we see memorials to martyrs in a higher state of being we say “there shall be martyrs no more”. We must not let these things happen again and we make up our minds that each one of us in our own way will do what we can to stop it.

Discussion about the importance of the statue was thus contextualized not just by the debate about vivisection but by controversy over commemorative statues of humans. In particular, comparisons were drawn with the heated debate surrounding the statue of Oliver Cromwell, which had been unveiled outside Parliament in November 1899. Indeed, Dr. Snow, a supporter of the Battersea statue, argued that the brown dog should be removed to the palace of Westminster and erected next to Cromwell’s statue as both of them “represented very great principles in the history of humanity -- and both needed police protection.”
Despite protests and marches, the brown dog statue was removed by the council from Latchmere recreation ground in the stealth of the night of March 10-11, 1910. And, as the bizarre illustration from the “Daily Graphic” suggests, it was viewed as a potentially controversial space needing to be policed -- even when the statue itself had gone. A blacksmith then officially smashed and destroyed the statue to ensure that no future socialist council could reinstate it. Suffice to say, no such controversy beset Greyfriars Bobby who still stands on his plinth, as popular as ever. He continues to be a focus of children’s tales, a subject of a Hollywood film, chatty websites, and official tourism. There is even the Bothy newsletter established to keep his memory alive. The idea of loyalty as a laudable quality continues in his various depictions. As the Petsmart web page asks, “Is Greyfriars Bobby the most loyal dog ever?” -- suggesting, of course, that humans are creatures deserving of loyalty.

There was never any suggestion that the brown dog memorial be linked to the work of Louise Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau in exposing his plight -- and no subsequent memorial to the women was erected, although Hageby continued to be a leading light in the anti-vivisection movement until her death in the early 1960s. Although the brown dog statue was the focus of anti vivisection campaigns, it was not erected to glorify the work of human campaigners. John Gray, Greyfriars Bobby’s keeper subsequently received a tombstone on his humble grave paid for by “American lovers of Bobby.” The wording on the stone inverts the norm for the relationship between dogs and their keepers for the human Gray is described in the context of his dog as, “master of Greyfriars Bobby.”

The continuing physical statue of Greyfriars Bobby has helped ensure the dog’s survival within popular memory. However, the enforced removal and destruction of the old brown dog ensured a much more precarious form of knowledge. Publications outlining the circumstances around the events have only started to be written in recent years. Outside the ranks of opponents of vivisection, the brown dog enjoys neither the affectionate memory nor widespread recognition of Greyfriars Bobby.

Revisiting and Subverting the Brown Dog Sculpture

But knowledge that the brown dog (and his public sculpture) had existed and that campaigners had entered laboratories to expose experiments in not dissimilar ways to modern activists had encouraged the two largest anti vivisectionist organizations in Britain -- the National Anti Vivisection Society and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection -- to raise funds for a replacement statue in the last days of the left-wing Greater London Council in the 1980s.

In due course, on December 12, 1985, a “replacement” statue of the brown dog was unveiled in the presence of Peter Pitt, chair of the GLC Arts and Recreation Committee in Battersea Park, which was run by the London wide Labor authority (Figure 3). By this date, however, the local politics in Battersea were rather different from those of the first years of the century. The anti vivisection hospital had long closed down along with local municipal socialism. The Latchmere recreation ground and the surrounding borough were under the political control of the Conservative party; because of contemporary political contestations, the replacement statue -- recalling past controversies -- now needed to be erected in another place, the GLC-run Battersea park.

Figure 3 about here

The sentiments of those agitating against vivisection recalled their campaigning forebears through the words on the plinth of the “new” memorial that were identical to those previously inscribed on the 1906 statue. As Jose Parry a representative of the anti -vivisectionist organizations said at the 1985 unveiling, “...vivisection is as much a problem today as it was in 1906.” In his recent exploration of the nature of visual images, Peter Mason has argued that images have an ability to move freely from one context to another making it,
...impossible for us to view the image as an ideological product. Of course, when it enters a specific cultural or historical context, an image can be given an ideological role to play, but when it moves on, it is capable of shaking off this ideological accretion and of fulfilling other, sometimes contradictory, roles.

Thus while the sentiments of the campaigners and the words on the plinth may remain constant, the way in which we might read the words are altered both because of the changed historical context and because of the changes in the depiction of the brown dog himself.

The new statue on top of the stone plinth was neither a remake of the proudly defiant brown dog nor was it a modern and contemporary depiction of a commonly vivisected dog, a beagle. It was, according to the sculptor Nicola Hicks, modeled on her own dog, Brock . Her mature works, she maintains, examine the relationship between human beings and animals, who have “precious qualities in common, the qualities we are deeply in touch with subconsciously and may be totally out of touch within our conscious state.” This is no longer an independent dog. He is not standing proud and defiant but in a pose engaging with an absent human, ear cocked, looking quizzical. The dog has changed from a public image of defiance to a pet, relating to one individual human companion. In turn, this brown dog has become an easier, less uncomfortable, subject for the contemporary viewer.

The new statue has become a celebration of a former statue, neither a commemoration of an actually existing vivisected dog nor of a political moment. Rather than evoking politics that even today are controversial, this is a safe image and one which is now contextualized by a different sort of historicized space. Within the park, now run by the local, still Conservative, council the brown dog is now to be found on a path by the “old English garden.” As David Lowenthal reminds us, what heritage does not highlight, it often hides: In its new form and location, the statue has been separated from its anti vivisection message . This is not a modern popular image of vivisected nonhuman animals -- a dog rescued from a lab by an animal rights activist wearing a balaclava nor an image of a rabbit suffering injections of shampoo in its eyes. Rather it is a nice, “heritage” piece, and the image does not make us feel uncomfortable.

The nineteenth century statue of Greyfriars Bobb, which suggested that humans are creatures deserving of loyalty, survives alongside a plethora of other visual images. As Jonathan Burt has recently reminded us,
The mark of a more civilised society... is the way in which a society displays its humanity. The appearance and treatment of the animal body becomes a barometer for the moral health of the nation.
The statue that challenged assumptions about society’s humanity, that commemorated the dogs “done to death” in laboratories, and that presented us with uncomfortable stories of cruelty, did not survive.

Figure Legends

Figure 1. Islay outside the Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, New South Wales.
Figure 2. Daily Graphic, Friday, March 11th, 1910. By permission of the British Library.
Figure 3. New Old Brown Dog in the Old English Garden, Battersea Park, London.

Notes

 

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