The story of the Golden Retriever has its origins in the Scottish Highlands in the 1800s – although believe it or not, that wasn’t always the accepted wisdom. For a long while (up until the mid-20th century) it was actually thought that the Golden Retriever was descended from Russian circus dogs. However, this theory was disproved in the 1950s when a trove of documents was released by a descendant of Lord Tweedmouth (also known as Sir Dudley Marjoribanks). Lord Tweedmouth was the pioneer of the Golden Retriever breed.
This selection of hand-written studbooks, covering five decades between 1840 and 1890, showed Tweedmouth kept detailed records of his breeding efforts. The terrain across the Scottish Highlands required a dog who was capable of retrieving wildfowl from either land or water. Tweedmouth mixed a Tweed Water Spaniel (now an extinct breed), Belle, with Nous, a yellow Retriever who had been acquired from a cobbler in the southern English city of Brighton. The resulting litter of four puppies then became part of a breeding program which included the Irish Setter and the Bloodhound.
Tweedmouth’s aim was to produce a dog which was calm, stable, gentle and trainable, yet also possessed the hunting characteristics required to succeed in retrieving downed game in almost any situation. With further refinement after Tweedmouth’s passing in 1894, the Golden Retriever as we know it today started to become increasingly prominent.