These Quiet Friends

With two delightful books as Christmas gifts, David Tomlinson muses on that unbreakable bond between gundog and master

I’M HARDLY THE MAN who has everything — there’s no Ferrari in the garage nor Purdey in the gun cabinet — but I know that it is difficult to buy me Christmas presents. This year I received two that have given me a great deal of pleasure. They were both books on dogs.

The oldest of the two, called simply Memories, was published by William Heinemann in 1914. Its author John Galsworthy tells the story of his black spaniel, Chris. Maud Earl, the leading dog artist of her day, illustrates it: she had an unrivalled ability to capture a dog’s personality in her brushwork.

John Galsworthy was an English playwright and novelist, best known for The Forsyte Saga, a trilogy about the Forsyte family that was made into a hugely successful television series that was broadcast on Sunday evenings in 1967. Though Galsworthy trained as a barrister, he didn’t much like law. He did, however, campaign through his writing on a number of issues, ranging from women’s rights to animal welfare.