The Bedlington terrier: a good family pet

Its renowned speed, stamina and strength make it the perfect working dog, but characterful Bedlingtons are also ideally suited to the role of family pet, writes Marcus Armytage

It is, perhaps, the most disappointing two hours of my life. I am sitting in a cafe in Bedlington, the old Northumberland mining town after which the eponymous Bedlington terrier and scourge of the rat community is named. While the full English is excellent, I am actually waiting for what could easily be mistaken for a lamb on a lead to walk in. (What makes the best gundog? How to choose the ideal shooting companion.)

Or walk past. Even one Bedlington terrier disappearing round a distant corner would be enough. But no, not today. For the ardent Bedlington terrier groupie this is like Michaela Strachan going to Puffin Island and finding out it is the one day the puffins are all at sea.

The place to which I have made this particular pilgrimage and that even boasts a many times life-size cut-out of the terrier’s unique shape as a welcome sign is, I am told, usually crawling with Beddies. But today they are all at home with the curtains closed. The town, I am assured, remains a stronghold of this originally northern breed of working terrier. Apart from Bedlington on this particular morning, Bedlingtons pop up everywhere. I’ve seen them in Lyme Regis, on Exmoor, at Hungerford, Bridgend, Paddington and Darlington. When I visited Moscow in 1990 and looked out of the hotel window on my first morning, I had to do a double take; the first dog I saw being exercised across the Hippodrome was a blue Bedlington. No irony there apparently; the Bedlington’s most recent Crufts success was a Russian dog that won Best of Breed in 2016.

One makes a cameo appearance in the film Atonement and another completely steals the show in the 2022 Finnish war movie Sisu as the loyal accomplice to the lead character in wiping out some hapless Nazis. It is a movie – strapline ‘glorious carnage’ – with an impressive body count and makes a couple of Bedlingtons roughing up a few rats pushed out from under an old pigsty look tame.

The next family dog we get will be a Bedlington but trying to get that past my wife is a work in progress, in much the same way that colonising Mars is a work in progress. Although I have serious withdrawal symptoms from them, she caught the tail end of Gypsy, my first and so far only Bedlington. She remembers the long hours waiting for her, a burr magnet with selective hearing, to finally wind up her morning’s hunting and return to the fold. Every time the children or I see one, however, we stop and talk to the owner and tell each other it is a sign (of what, we are still not sure).

Bedlington terriers at The Kennel Club

Bedlingtons are holding their own in terms of numbers. About 400 puppies are registered with the Kennel Club each year and it is a reasonable guestimate that an equal number of non-registered pups are born. People who have them tend to stick with the breed for life. The person who invented the omnipresent cockapoo or labradoodle (take your pick but can male poodles ever have had it so good?) was only two and a half centuries late if they were looking for a fun, characterful, hypoallergenic dog that did not leave hairs all over the carpet, the furniture or your suit. Were they simply not aware of the Bedlington terrier?

Like many breeds of dog, how it actually came into being is slightly lost in the mists of time. The Dandie Dinmont, which many reckon is a short-legged version of the Bedlington, is always believed to be somewhere in the background but DNA testing suggests the otterhound, of all breeds, is far more prevalent. You can get shades of blue, sandy and liver, with or without tan. The breed standard – an irrelevance in pursuit of a rabbit – states ‘darker pigment to be encouraged. Blues and blue and tans must have black noses; liver and sandies must have brown noses’. According to Bedlington sage Jacqui Hurley, president of the Bedlington Terrier Association, the coat is “twisted” rather than curly with, in the blue, black guard hairs among the grey.

It is one of Britain’s oldest breeds. To put that in some sort of context in dog-breeding terms, it was a founder member of the Kennel Club in 1873 and the Bedlington Terrier Association celebrates its centenary this year. But it goes back way further than that and it is believed to have originated in 18th century in the Rothbury Forest area of Northumberland (it was once known as the Rothbury terrier) as an all-purpose hunting dog with speed and endurance, and particularly good at despatching pest species.

A visiting Hungarian nobleman described seeing the local dogs that had ‘hair like that of a lamb’, which were effective on hare and rabbit. But the father of the breed is generally believed to be Joseph Ainsley, who lived in Bedlington. He gave the breed its name when his puppy Piper, the best of his breed at that time, was born in 1825.

Ten years later, Mrs Ainsley supposedly left her child under a hedge with Piper in charge. (Reassuring to learn I wasn’t the first person to leave a dog in charge of the kids.) A ‘ferocious sow’ was wandering around and tried to get at the child but Piper kept her at bay until human assistance arrived. Urban myth or not, it sums up some of the qualities of the Bedlington: patience of a saint, ferocity of a tiger when need be.

A revolutionary streak

Ainsley was breeding them for their strength, courage, strong bite and ability to work on command (a quality much diluted by the time it got to Gypsy I might add). In 1868 The Field reported on the increased popularity of the Bedlington, the article encouraging good specimens to be shown, and the first recorded dog show with a class specifically for the breed was in 1869.

As a lurcher man, most of whose lurchers had a degree of Bedlington in them, I bought a pup in 1989 to see what it brought to the lurcher mix. She came with a long and distinguished show name but to us she was simply Gypsy, and she won people over instantly by greeting everyone with the most engaging gummy smile. So successful was this tactic in winning affection, my other dogs soon started copying her.

To say that she was independent was to underplay the free-thinking aspect of her character: she was more a revolutionary than a team player. When the other lurchers and terriers were working a hedge she was resolutely in a hedge but never the same one, working away in her own one-man show.

Gypsy was relatively slow: a rabbit invariably always beat her home. Most of the breed are faster than she was. A firstcross whippet-Bedlington, essentially a rabbiting dog, is faster than a bullet over 75 yards but is a short runner inheriting little of the Bedlington’s famed stamina. Bedlingtons also bring a hardiness to the cross that means, unlike a whippet, they do not need to spend Midsummer’s Day under the duvet.

But Gypsy, whose toughness was proven by surviving eight hours in a fox snare, was incredibly balletic when she galloped. Another trait she had in common with her Bedlington brethren was an ability to sleep in the most absurd, contorted positions; half in, half out of a basket or half on or half off a sofa, twisted as if she was double hip jointed. There is even a Ridiculous Bedlington Poses group on Facebook to record this phenomenon but the flexibility of their spine makes them able to turn on a sixpence on the field of play or while chasing a rabbit.

Perhaps in spite of her coming from a long line of showing Bedlingtons, when I bought Gypsy, I enquired about her mum’s hunting history to be told she once caught a rat in her kennel. But, even in a multi-generational, bluest-bred showing Bedlington, the hunting gene is not far from the surface. It only took one rabbit before that instinct, dormant for years, kicked back in and, from that moment on, when her nose was in action it closed her ears.

Of course what you save in dry cleaning and housekeeping costs you lose in visits to the poodle parlour unless you go down the DIY clipping route, which was never a good look when the scissors were in my hands. Changes in the trim are, according to Hurley, the only real changes to the breed in 300 years. Gypsy had a basic ‘trim’ with a tuft left on the end of her shaven ears. This, I assumed, was for the rat that fought back only to get a mouthful of fluff but it all stems back to what was clean and practical when they were hunting dogs, as with the pom-poms on poodles.

The tuft on the end of the ear was to stop the blood dripping if their ear was scratched or torn by a thorn in the undergrowth; we’ve all had the murder scene of splattered blood on a wall after a dog has cut an ear and shaken its head – but not with Bedlingtons.

The great thing about a Beddie coat is that it is waterproof and keeps them warm in the winter yet cool in the summer. The feet should be cleared out of hair to stop snow balling and, again for practicality, the white top knot was so someone shooting with a gun could quickly differentiate between the dog and the quarry. “It all goes back to purpose,” says Hurley.

All-round fun

In 1990 when I won the Grand National on Mr Frisk, the runner-up Durham Edition was ridden by Chris Grant who also had a Bedlington, a liver dog called Rolo. We tried to breed from them but without success and whenever we meet the chat usually turns to Bedlingtons. “They’re very loyal, grafters and all-round fun terriers,” says Grant, who farms and trains near Sedgefield. “Ratting, bushing, owt like that. They’re placid and quiet but if there’s a bit of frisk they can sort themselves out. I only had a couple but I had great fun. I got Rolo when I had a broken leg. I picked the smallest of the litter thinking he’d go to ground but he wasn’t so keen; the he was better on top. A lot of them would be too big to go to ground now but for ratting and rabbiting, they’re game for anything,” Grant believes.

Paul Hosgood, a West Country point-to-point trainer, extols the virtues of the breed as a pet. “Ruby,” he says, “is essentially a family pet. And, like a lurcher, she’s very happy lying in front of the fire, has a selection of jackets and is lovely with kids. However, her parents were working Bedlingtons and you’ll never take that out of her. She’s like greased lightning, so we’ve stopped taking her out with the horses because she gets distracted by her nose.” The arrival, surely, of my next Bedlington moves a significant step closer.