A Shaggy Dog Story

Having watched the tail end (oops!) of Crufts the other night, (9^th March 2025) I remembered one of our beloved dogs of days of yore, Kepler by name, who came second in a sausage catching competition at a local dog show. The contest was obviously rigged because in 99 cases out of a hundred he would have caught and scoffed against all comers even if he had to compete twice to their once[1].

This has nothing to do with the next paragraph except that the day before I had attended the International Women’s Day event at the Council House. I stopped at the Bristol Radical History Group’s stall, – thanks for your welcome girls – and made the acquaintance of the only man (possibly) in the place, Chris Bowkett. Chris is the writer of pamphlet no. 68 in BRHG’s canon, “The Miserables of Bristol” – the enemy soldiers and sailors of the Napoleonic Wars, who were incarcerated in the old Stapleton Prison. We had a chat and exchanged “WOW!” moments. His was finding Stapleton’s POW registers at the National Archives.

Reading the booklet at home later, I regretted not doing more on the same subject I had started about 30 years ago, when at Gloucestershire Record Office, looking for Kingswood coalminers among the coroner’s inquests, (ref D260) I also jotted down the names of a few French prisoners. A year or so later attempting to follow up the matter in the N.A. (formerly the Public Record Office) with my younger daughter Celia, who then lived in London, we copied as many of the names as we could from this very same record. I have rooted round my own archives but have yet to find the pencilled list we made of that day’s adventures, but I did find something else, and this is where the dog connection comes in.

Along with the many advantages of trawling historical newspapers is the occasional heartsink that none of those who wrote the articles can foresee what is to come. The Western Daily Press, 28 December 1914, (note the year) reprimands some Bristol members of the Naval Brigade, stuck in Holland, who were moaning about the monotony they were enduring. (Old as time, the younger generation is usually classed as a bit flaky.) “Your life must be regarded as luxurious compared with that [in] the old French Prison at Stapleton more than a hundred years ago,” the paper scoffs, going on to praise the ancestral kindness of some Bristol citizens who a century before had collected £200 to buy a bit of Christmas cheer for the “French prisoners” (there were many different nationals among them), at Stapleton, tobacco, soap, extra food.  As for monotony, candles being too expensive, the POWs would have endured long dark evenings, huddled together with the black night held at bay by the weak light of a wick stuck into a marrow bone. The piece concludes……

“It is not surprising that animal pets were kept by those who could get them. So many dogs were owned by the prisoners that on one occasion when a well became polluted by a dog falling into it, there was a fiat [a formal decree] against the keeping of their canine friends which resulted in there being no fewer than 710 four footed victims.”

 I suspect the number of dogs is slightly exaggerated, (71 dogs with 10 pups apiece?) and I don’t think the dogs would have just been set loose either. Sorry for the sad ending.

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“The Miserables of Bristol” can be obtained from Bristol Radical History Group. 2025. www.brh.org.uk

[1] Kevin writes

“There was more to this tail than meets the eye. In the first round eliminator of the Victoria Park Dog Show sausage eating competition, I gave our 9 year old daughter the task of dropping the sausage pieces into Kepler’s expectant mouth. However, at the key moment when she was about to drop the first sausage piece, Kepler was distracted by an itch to his nether regions. As a result, the first 5 seconds of the competition were lost due to Kepler having to frantically locate the sausage piece in the grass. In the next 5 seconds he used his keen mouth-eye co-ordination to snaffle 5 more pieces. In doing so he clawed near victory out of the jaws of defeat and was tied second (the winning dog managed 7 pieces). Kepler therefore was required to partake in a 2nd place eat off for a rosette. As a very proud and competitive Dad, I asked my daughter to stand aside at this point and I took her place. (I always compared Kepler to Novak Djokovic in terms of his athletic prowess and called him my Olympian. I considered myself his coach and I would often bask in the reflected glory of his amazing ball catching ability). So I took a large handful of sausage pieces and this time the activity was delivered with military precision. In 10 seconds I was able to drop 14 pieces of sausage into Kepler’s very willing and attentive mouth. So, on paper, Kepler was second but in the grand scheme of things he well and truly got the doggy bragging rights of the neighbourhood by getting to eat nearly three times as many sausage pieces as the winner!”