Pet Revolution by Jane Hamlett

Author:Jane Hamlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

‘My desk was part of his domain’, photograph in Michael Joseph, Charles: The Story of a Friendship (1943).

Acquiring an animal in the early days of marriage, and working out how to look after it, could set up marital and family dynamics for decades to come. This was clearly the case for wealthy newlyweds Alan and Morag Withington as they settled down to married life with their new cairn puppy in the early 1930s. Almost as soon as the little dog arrived it became the subject of marital wrangling. Alan was unsure about the animal from the start, but his misgivings were overridden by Morag, who was smitten with the dog. By the interwar period, an affluent husband like Alan could no longer speak with quite the authority of the Victorian patriarch. In this marriage at least, Alan’s strong sense of masculine superiority – informed by a public-school education, working role and gender stereotypes of the age – did not completely hold sway. Morag and Alan appear to have been feeling their way towards a ‘companionate marriage’ in which compromise was the order of the day. The naming of the cairn is a case in point. Alan hoped to give the animal the androgynous, anonymous moniker ‘Smith’ (it is not clear why). However, references in his diary to Smith were quickly replaced by ‘Sally as I suppose I’ll have to call her’.77

Although Morag won over the name, the couple continued to bicker over dog training. Alan was very much in favour of taking a firm hand, with the odd slap on the rump to mitigate bad behaviour. But, he notes: ‘Morag thinks I’m a bit savage with her, & of course it’s no use at all being firm at the weekends if she’s allowed to develop annoying habits the rest of the time.’78 Alan established a link here with children and evidently envisaged the dog as a sort of dry run for later parental practices (Morag was pregnant when he wrote this): ‘a dog’s just like a child, & will go on doing what it wants until you make it quite clear that it’s not going to be allowed to.’79 Later in family life, Alan embraced the role of authoritarian father, insisting that the boys be sent away to boarding school and evacuated to America during the Second World War.

Pets are usually evoked in a light-hearted manner in family narratives, often supplying comedy and sometimes pathos, but they could be part of darker, more dysfunctional family lives too. In Victorian homes, dogs were renowned for their fierce loyalty. Lucky was the wife whose faithful dog could keep a drunken spouse out of the house at night or intervene when men turned violent. Unfortunately, dogs that readily bared their teeth against nasty husbands tended to be dispatched to other households.80 Likewise, in marriages that were already fractious, pets could get caught in the crossfire, with one spouse’s rage being taken out on the other spouse’s pet as ‘revenge’.81

An unusually frank exploration of

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