Ann Storey
I have to say that writing this has not been the walk in the park that I thought it was going to be. Virtually all the information is in the form of club notes to Fur and Feather sent in by the various mouse club secretaries or other regular contributors. Fanciers instead of writing in themselves often wrote to the secretaries or the other contributors with their news and views who would then incorporate them into their weekly news article. This did mean combing through a lot of club notes in order to put this together, as the information is by its nature very spread out, so that the story of the development of a variety for instance may well go over several years worth of contributions, mixed in with show reports and the frequent moaning by secretaries about the members.
Before I start I thought that I’d give a synopsis of the chief protagonists of the early years, before ploughing on with the story in later editions.
Fur and Feather
Fur and Feather magazine was first produced in 1888 by Watmough’s as the Rabbit Keeper magazine, not becoming Fur and Feather until 1890. It was produced as a weekly newspaper for the small livestock fancier and at the time included cats, rabbits, cage birds and cavies. Quite early on though, from 1892, articles on mice started to appear. Really it supplied a forum for any fancier of any livestock to get together and it undoubtedly formed the springboard for both the mouse and rat fancy to get off the ground. Priced at 1d or one old penny, it was within the price range of all interested parties.
The Potential Fanciers
Breeding livestock had been popular and indeed necessary among the population as a whole going back possibly to Mesolithic times due to the introduction of farming. Obviously at first this was important in order to feed the population and to refine the wild species that they had to work with, but going on into more modern times it also became a hobby, even though the utility of many species especially farm animals was paramount. What you bred tended to depend on your social class and finances, for instance, if you were rich you tended to breed horses and hunting/sporting dogs, if you were farmers, various farm livestock and the general public, birds, rabbits, and dogs for the fighting sports.
The recently emerging middle classes tended to go for cats due to the money involved and it would also appear that it was from this class that the majority of rat breeders came from. This was certainly the view of at least one mouse fancier of the time. The only eye witness we had of this period was Roger Edmonson, an original member and indeed judge for the NFRS, although as far as I know he never did breed or keep rats. Him and his brother Alan were farmers and big mouse breeders. In ProRata, No 18 Nov/Dec 1983, Roger was interviewed by Nick Mays for a series called The Fanciers. In this he said ‘ The old rat fancy completely baffles me, I can’t understand how it died basically apart from the fact that the working man has been the backbone of the fancy in most cases. .. for some reason at that time the Rat fancy never appealed to the man in the street. I was discussing this with the well known fancier, Ralph Blake, (more of him later) some 30 years ago. He was the Hon sec of the NMRC and he also judged rabbits. He said that the rat fancy was ‘Just the hobby horse of a group of well off people with very few men-in-the-street, numerically the members were never that great.’ Of course the number of rat exhibitors could never compare to those exhibiting at a mouse show.
I can’t comment on the truth or otherwise of all this. Roger and his brother Alan didn’t join until after WW1 and indeed Ralph Blake didn’t join until 1916. At this point the rat fancy had already passed its peak as we shall see. Of course working people of the time would possibly have a lot more contact with their wild cousins which may well have put them off a bit.
Not all people were anti rat. White and piebald rats had been kept as pets, generally by middle class young ladies, for some time. A prolific writer of childrens’ books at the time – Charlotte Maria Tucker aka A.L.O.E (or a lady of England) wrote a somewhat moralistic tale about a wild rat called ‘Rambles of a Rat’ in 1857. She was also a well to do lady, probably very similar to Mary Douglas.
Whatever the truth, the early rats seem to have been pretty easily accepted into the fancy and it wasn’t the dislike of the rat within the fancy that led to their demise.
Also important to realise at the time was that the average wage per annum at this time was £42, rising to £70 by 1910. For this reason sales of stock was very important to the average fancier, I really have no idea how well rats sold but it could have been a factor. Mice certainly sold very well. In 1898, in the Harmsworth Magazine, there was an article entitled ‘Worth their weight in gold’, about mouse studs worth up to £100 and about fanciers earning £15 per annum from their mice.
The National Mouse Club
As has been said, articles on the breeding of mice started to appear in F&F from 1892 and about this time fanciers started to ask show committees if they would like to put a few classes for mice into their schedules. According to Tony Cooke, in Exhibition and Pet Mice, the first reported class for mice was one at a show in Oxford in 1892. This was won by William Wild with a cinnamon red, although later on Walter Maxey said that the winner was a black. By 1893, there were at least four shows putting on classes for mice and it was clear that there was enough support to form a club for mice. There appears to have been a club called The Mouse club formed about this time but it’s not clear what happened to it. There were dark murmurings about the secretary running off with the subscriptions. However, a club called The Mouse Club did rear its head on and off until about 1910 when it became defunct. I don’t know if it was the same club or not. The NMC, original proposed name The British Fancy Mouse Club, was formed sometime in 1895. The actual beginnings seem to have been around the middle of April, but there were so many arguments and fallings out about who was going to do what that initially members were slow to come forward. However by 28/11/95 enough people (40) had paid their 2s 6d membership fee to form the club. Some of the new members were cavy fanciers who came on board to give the new club a hand. The first President, Sam Woodiwiss, gave a solid silver punch bowl called the Woodiwiss bowl, valued at £10 10s at this time which is still awarded at Bradford to this day. The Club later became the National Mouse and Rat club in around 1911.
Annoyingly the club never published its standards, either in F&F or in Walter Maxey’s book on mouse and rat breeding. Presumably this was given out separately to members but I have been unable to find them. While these are generally the stds in the mouse fancy now, the rat ones, apart from a few fragments-do not exist. There was a set of standards used pre the NFRS that appeared in print in F&F in the late 50’s that I was told came out of an NMC stds book in 1934 (when the NMC formerly dropped the rats) but I have no direct proof of that.
Mary Douglas
It’s impossible to talk about the early rat fancy without talking at length about Mary Douglas. Indeed it’s probably true that there would’ve been no rat fancy at this time without her. She was virtually the only rat fancier who continuously drove it on or appeared to do even a lick of work. Now she was not the only rat fancier by any means, in fact there were quite a lot of them, many of whom later on were considerably more successful than her. Unfortunately they had this tendency which I still see to stay in it for a comparatively short space of time. Both the early rat and mouse fanciers were notoriously work shy and had to be nagged into everything. It’s a common myth that people in the ‘olden days’ were all paragons of virtue when it came to stepping up for jobs but it’s just not true.
Mary came from a privileged background and far from being middle class, was decidedly minor aristocracy. Her father, Henry Douglas, was the third son of the 17th Earl of Morton and was a vicar, holding the office of Canon of Worcester. In this the family was following the normal convention of the first son inheriting the title, second son into the military (he became a Vice admiral) and third son into the church. Mary’s mother was Lady Mary Baillie –Hamilton (interestingly Martyn’s mum’s maiden surname), daughter of the 10th Earl of Haddington. She was their only child (source: Douglas family archives). No wonder Mary described herself as a’ spinster of independent means. Mary, not surprisingly with her background lived her life by her Christian principles and apart from the rats, she also bred English, Dutch and Belgian hare rabbits under the Virgonian prefix, dogs and possibly cats. She spent a lot of time on charitable pursuits, such as the Blue Cross, as would have been normal for a woman of her social class at the time.
Mary’s life in rats began young. As a child, she writes in an article in F&F (2/6/1905), she had caught a wild doe by hand as it swam across a pond. She had some grit because despite the rat sinking its teeth into her hand she managed to transfer it into a basket. Later that night however it did chew its way out. Later on she was presented with a pair of ‘black and whites’ (probably hooded) from a friend. These died, but she soon got some more and ended up with more than she knew what to do with. In the course of advertising she did end up communicating with other rat keepers and it didn’t take long for someone to mention that they should start showing.
A number of comments have been made about Mary’s appearance over the years. I’ve not seen any written comments from the time and the first one appears to have been written by Tony Cooke in 1977, where he speaks of her being ‘something of a phenomenon – as her photos bear out’. It was then taken up and repeated by others in virtually any article written about that time. Roger Edmonson, in his interview with Nick Mays, after prompting, mentioned that when he met her he thought that she was’ rather mature’ . Well she was, Roger was a teenager and she was ‘for then’ an old lady in her ‘60’s, she was also not well.
Nick Mays, in his book, The Proper Care of Fancy Rats, says that ‘undoubtedly , she had a very strange, but striking appearance, as her photos bear out. She was very masculine in both appearance and dress. Apparently in her home town of Lostwithiel in Cornwall she would often drive a pony and trap into town clad in breeches, leggings and a wide straw hat, often puffing away on a clay pipe.‘
It’s my belief that this tale, which came I believe from the local vicar in the early ‘80’s at least 60 years after her death, was anecdotal and as such is open to exaggeration. Remember Mary was middle aged when she joined the NMC and old (by the times) when she died. She had a lot of animals, no one to answer to for her dress and was a committed Christian. I rather suspect that she preferred to dress practically and comfortably for her active life without resorting to the corsets and petticoats of her peers. I would agree though that she was a phenomenon, but for her sheer hard work and doggedness and not for her choice of clothes.
The Rats
Previously I have written about Jack Black and Jimmy Shaw, both heavily involved in the rat pits and both of whom had bred on some of the colour mutations that had been found in the rats caught for the pits.
It has been assumed that rats from them or people like them formed the basis of both the early pet rat trade and also the early laboratories, this is reported in ’ The Laboratory Rat’ (Suckhow, Wiesbroth and Franklin) and also by earlier authors. Jack himself said that he sold many of his rats to young ladies. This is all reported in Mayhew’s London and is available online. However it should be noted that rats, usually white ones, occurred frequently in circuses and travelling fairs. Mary herself mentioned that albino rats came to Britain from a travelling showman who obtained a pair from France, as does Frank Buckland who was a well known naturalist of the time and who I’ve included a quote from below. I’ve also got newspaper cutting from Cassell’s Illustrated Family paper from 1858 showing a drawing of a stall holder in Paris with a troupe of trained white rats. The possibility of tame rats being a French import is further backed up in ‘The Rat, its History and Destructive Capacity’ by James Rodwell, who talks about one Mr Ostin, who lived in Waterloo Road, London. He said that he had imported a pair of white rats from Normandy three years before Rodwell spoke to him (which would have made it the 1850’s) and had bred many of them for pets and subsequent sale since. In the book Rodwell, describes these rats as being ‘tame as kittens’ . Apart from whites (which are reported as having pink eyes so were most likely albinos) he had also crossed them with wild brown rats and so got piebalds (and to be pedantic, skewbalds), although whether or not these were hooded is not mentioned. It’s possible that Mr Ostin was the showman that Mary Douglas mentioned, as he seems to have ‘exhibited’ them on fine evenings in Regent Street and also at the foot of Waterloo Bridge as part of a Happy Families exhibit. Happy families exhibits were a popular sideshow in the 19th C and took the form of a large cage filled with a number of species who were usually bitter enemies, one is reported below.
The first successful effort at an exhibition of such a "Happy Family" in this country, (the USA) has been made by P. T. Barnum, of the American Museum, of this city. He employed John Sutton, one of those before referred to, to come to this country (from the UK) and bring with him a collection from the animals which he and his stepfather had trained. The wire cage in which they are kept is about twelve feet long, some three feet wide, and four or five feet in height. This family consists of about seventy members, including cats, doves, dogs, rabbits, eagles, house- rats, blackbirds, monkeys, white rats, parrots, squirrels, starlings, hawks, ant-eaters, guinea-pigs, magpies, etc.. . . aside their natural prejudices, and live together in as perfect harmony as if they all belonged to the same species.
John Sutton was said to be the stepson of one John Austin, who had a Happy families exhibit at the foot of Waterloo Bridge and who died in 1852.
According to Frank Buckland, published 1865 (remember him?);
There are two exhibitions of happy families in London ; one stands at Charing Cross and about the streets, the other remains permanently at Waterloo Bridge. They both claim to be the original 'happy family,' but I think the man at the bridge has the greatest claims to originality. He is the successor to the man who first started the idea, thirty-six years ago— Austin by name; the present owner has exhibited eight years, and always in the same place.
I suspect that this later Austin was the man that Rodwell spoke to.
According to Rodwell, the ‘happy family’ needed considerable training to appear that way.
He (Mr Ostin) has also initiated his son-in law in the art of subduing the natural cravings of various animals, and reducing them to one standard of peace and equality.
There is a further anecdote from Rodwell about Ostin’s Happy Family where he talks about how relaxed all the animals are except the monkey, which seems to delight in throwing all the other species about, although one of the rats was it’s personal favourite and spent a lot of time being cuddled by the monkey.
Indeed ‘Early in his career, P. T. Barnum created an exhibit, entitled "The Happy Family," consisting of a cage housing a lion, a tiger, a panther - and a baby lamb. The remarkable display earned Barnum unprecedented publicity and attendance figures. Sometime after its opening, Barnum was asked about his plans for the happy family. "The display will become a permanent feature," he declared, "if the supply of lambs holds out."
Austin, was a popular name for showmen and according to Lawrence Barber who has produced an online resource on Happy Families exhibits (where most of these quotes originate from) , Rodwell’s use of Ostin was an error, and should indeed have been Austin. However, Austin was of Anglo – Saxon origin and Ostin was an alternative spelling.
Where ever they came from white rats were certainly well known in the pet trade (Rodwell reports a price of 4s (20p) a pair) and get a mention (as has been said before) in Howard Spring’s ‘Fame is the Spur’ , a favourite book given to children of my generation. The early part of the book is based in the mid to late 19thC and involves two of the young heros trading scraps of metal for white rats, with a local businessman.
There were very few varieties about, basically albinos and black hooded . Irish and agoutis were also available but which were nearly all of wild extraction. This lack of varieties continued for the first decade of the rat as a fancy animal. The temperament of the early rats was also said to be pretty awful.