Stamina is a Given trait

Restoring the working springer’s reputation for staying power is a labour of love for a couple in Ireland, as David Tomlinson discovers

- David Tomlinson

IF YOU’RE AN enthusiast for the old-fashioned working English springer, the sort that can not only work non-stop all day but also please the eye, the story of Peter May and his Givendale spaniels makes encouraging reading.I first wrote about Givendale in this column six years ago, telling how Yorkshire-born Peter had moved with his wife, Bernadette, to County Leitrim in the west of Ireland, where they had started a kennel of traditional working springers.

Peter had struggled to find his foundation stock, telling me how he had travelled the length and breadth of Ireland looking for the sort of spaniel he wanted. He didn’t find anything he liked, despite viewing scores of trialling springers.

Finding a genuine working springer with no trialling blood proved extremely difficult. The old-style medium-sized spaniels that he had bred and worked in his gamekeeping days in England were rarities. Instead, he decided to search for litters of pups whose parents were top-class woodcock dogs. This was much more successful and he bought three young spaniels, two bitches and a dog. They had no modern field trial breeding and there was no line breeding in their pedigrees.

These three dogs were his foundation stock. He bred from both bitches, using the dog, Jack, as the sire. He was delighted with his first litter, advertising them as “medium-sized, fast-action, stylish and powerful springers with immense stamina and immeasurable hunting drive and natural ability with no modern field trial breeding at all”.