Ann Storey
As far as the early rat fancy goes these were the last few years, culminating as they did with the death of MD in 1921, although there were a number of new or developing varieties around and there seemed to be enough fanciers around to breed them.
Although PEWs had been shown since the beginning of the fancy, H.C Brooke (HCB) in the 3rd Ed of Walter Maxey’s book states the following: ‘The eyes should be deep ruby, not pink’. This was in the std still circulating up until the formation of the NFRS. Whether they had a different idea of deep ruby, or there was something else going on I couldn’t say, I suspect the former.
There had been some talk in 1915 of using PEW to ‘break up’ the markings in order to get BEW. This was proposed by Mackintosh Kerr, (who later became a geneticist, writing a book called Colour Inheritance in Fancy Mice, a much sought after tome to this day. He was responsible for the dove mouse). Most fanciers didn’t agree with this however. PEWs were generally misunderstood by the early geneticists as they didn’t understand that they effectively carried a background of other colour and marking genes, but thought they were some sort of blank sheet of paper. Most fanciers however knew that PEW carried a load of other things. Some believed that it was possible to get a ‘pure’ strain that indeed carried nothing but the available PEWs were generally believed to be ‘extracted whites’, that is extracted from another colour which they would then carry.
In F&F, 10/9/15, MD writes; ‘BEWs are also on the road. Mr H.C Brooke has recently bred some youngsters in which the colour is reduced to a minimum and I have one, not yet moulted out, which if not quite a BEW is so light a cream that I am at present unable to determine whether it is white or cream. In either case I can take no credit for it , as it is the sole survivor of a litter which it was hoped would be black Irish. Mother Nature doesn’t always work in the lines we suggest to her!’. MD’s rat was probably a light buff, then called a BE cream. She admitted herself some years before that she had difficulty distinguishing pale colours, which is why she always refused to judge.
In the 3rd ed 1920, HCB goes on to talk about the black eyed white. ‘The BEW, singularly enough, has always been a longed for but unattained ideal, no authentic case being on record until ,in 1919, the result of five years hard work, I produced Champion Snowflake and her sister who died unshown. About the same time, Sir Claud Alexander bred a buck which was very near the mark but never shown’.
Indeed there is a picture of this doe in the book, she is reported to have won 1st and silver medal BIS at the NMRC Summer Cup Show Bristol 1920. The silver medal would have meant that the mouse won the gold medal for best exhibit. She looks somewhat cobby in the photo, as do HCB’s other rats. Mr Brookes had been working on rats that were some type of extreme hooded for years, originally to get Dutch, so it’s not surprising that he bred BEWs in the end.
The standard for whites circulating in the 30’s states the following;
Whites should be pure in colour, free from ivory, cream or brown tinge. Head fine and long, rather than round, ears of good size, fine and clear, eyes full of a deep ruby colour or black, ears, feet and tail should be slightly covered in fur, bright in colour like satin.
Last issue (PRA 241) I wrote about the discovery of the fawn and cream rat quoting a reference from The American Naturalist. Unfortunately that reference, despite being widely quoted in several textbooks, is incorrect and only leads to a short letter about the yellow mutation in Rattus rattus. The correct reference is as follows:
Some new varieties of rats and Guinea Pigs and their relations to problems of colour inheritance. Castle. The American Naturalist (Feb 1914) 48:566 p 65-73.
As I have already said, I will be writing more about the genetics in a later article.
Before writing his paper, Castle ( who BTW was American and a Professor at Harvard) had asked for information about the fawn (he calls them yellow ) and cream rats in F&F. The letter from Mr Marriott to Castle was in the last ed of PRA and has been widely quoted before. This letter, from Mr Tilling and written to Castle on 18/10/13 is not so widely known however.
‘I see by F&F this week that you are interested in the yellow and cream varieties of rats. I am also much interested in these and have produced the latter Varieties within the last few months. We have two kinds over here, the yellow and white hooded with pink eyes and the self yellow (and cream) with black eyes. Both are quite distinct . The first mentioned was produced some 2 or 3 years ago. Mr Marriott of Chesterfield, bred the first I heard of from a wild caught fawn. He bred a couple of yellow and white hooded bucks of which MD bought one and I the other. I mated mine to about 15 does of various colours and definite strains. He was a splendid breeder and got some very fine youngsters, but not one of his own colour from the first cross. I subsequently mated him to some of his daughters and these produced a good proportion of yellow and white young. These are now fairly plentiful over here and are in the hands of several fanciers.
Of the other kinds, black eyed fawns and creams, the first one exhibited and from all which all of mine are descended, was a very fine wild caught, deep coloured, fawn specimen. I got her partially tame (from Mr Robinson as I mentioned last issue, more of this later) and exhibited her at the NMRC’s annual show at Bristol, Nov 27-28th 1912, where she won first in the self class and was well commented on. From this doe I have built up my strain or BE creams. I mated her to a self black buck (presumably the previously quoted ‘savage old black buck who mastered her after a terrific battle’) and she bred 8 youngsters, all wild coloured. This was the only litter I bred from her, as shortly afterwards, during my illness, my man while transferring her from one cage to another let her get away and was unable to recapture her. However, I have bred from her youngsters, mating brother to sister, and the litters have invariably contained at least one cream or fawn each time. I have now just bred for the first time from the three does so produced, again mating brother to sister and the results have all been self cream’.
I did manage to find some more information about this doe. MD reported on the 4/11/10 the following; ‘Good news for rat fanciers, Mr T. Robinson of Leyland writes ‘ I have in my possession a fawn rat. It is as good a fawn as any mouse that I have (the name red and fawn were used interchangeably by mouse fanciers at this time. They had been called fawn, but the name had been changed to red for the black eyed ones, however most breeders carried on calling them all fawns) The rat was caught in a trap where I work, and was given to me by the foreman of the department where it was caught. I am sorry to say that the trap broke one of its front legs, but I hope that it will be all right. It is about three parts grown and a good fawn. It is not for sale and is currently the only rat that I own.’. It was reported by Mr Tilling at the end of Castle’s paper that his original BE fawn rat was caught on a ship in Liverpool, but that sounds too much like the origin of Mr Burrows’s fawn Rattus rattus to me. There’s still a big question mark about the doe that Mr Robinson caught, as the dates don’t really add up. She would have had to have been over 2 when she was shown and well over that when she had her first litter.
Indeed, Castle had been told that Mr Robinson and Mr Marriott independently established the pink eyed variety, which would have meant other rats being involved. This is possible if Mr Robinson had indeed bred from his doe before giving it to Mr Tilling but I’ve got no evidence for this. Nor have I got any evidence for him obtaining subsequent fawn rats. It does appear that all the rats bred from Mr Marriott’s Chesterfield rats were pink eyed, the black eyed ones originating from Mr Tilling, whatever rat his original Robinson doe was. Unfortunately Mr Robinson never replied to Castle’s requests for information, which would have clarified things greatly.
Castle did wonder, as the PE and BE rats seemed to be associated with the same general area, that they may have come over on board ship from a foreign country. However fawns, pink eyed ones anyway, had been reported before, not just by Black and Shaw in the 1850’s but also much later on. On the 16/12/10 in F&F a Mr Wood from Codnor reported ‘I caught a fawn buck in a harmless trap and I thought it would be a very good variety. So I mated it to a PEW as they called it, although it was very yellow. The result was four nice fawn and whites.’ There were also various reports of wild fawn rats from the middle of the previous decade, mostly found in the NW, mentioned in the Sept edition of PRA.
HCB in the 3rd ed 1920 writes, ‘Fawn rats have cropped up in the wild state at various times and places. As mentioned they were domesticated nearly a century ago, died out and were forgotten. How this can happen the reader will more easily grasp when I mention that within the last 5 years or so, despite the existence of the rat fancy, we have entirely lost that very handsome variety, the black eyed fawn, all the present ones being pink eyed…they did a lot of winning, and to my mind were handsomer that the pink eyed variety. I said just now that all our present day fawns were PE, but have we really any self fawns in 1920? I rather think that we have only silver fawns. They are certainly a very pretty variety. They should be evenly ticked or silvered with white hairs all over the body, on a ground colour rich and dense. The belly colour should be richly coloured too but they all have white bellies.’
The belly colour on all these varieties were meant to match the top, as if they were selfs, (like the mouse fawn) and fawn was even written into the Irish std as well as being shown as selfs. However, there is no evidence that the belly colour ever did match the top and Castle indeed considered both to be agoutis. He writes, ‘I am informed that Mr T Robinson and Mr Marriott of Chesterfield independently established the PE fawn Variety, or what would better he called pink eyed agouti, since apparently it differs from the wild grey agouti by the PE variation alone. It is not a true yellow variety at all, like the mouse is, though it resembles one superficially because of the yellow ticking of the agouti fur’. Castle goes on to discuss this further and also said that the BE fawns he was sent by Mr Tilling had light bellies.
Personally I’m as confident as I can be that BE fawn was our topaz, BE cream our buff, PE fawn our silver fawn and PE cream our champagne. The disappearance of the BE forms was easy to explain as the two genes are linked, and if as I suspect they were bred together then the BE forms would have been effectively ‘submerged’.
There had been a number of comments in F&F early on that chocolates could be developed from bad blacks, that is as many blacks had chocolate areas of fur on them that this could be used to breed chocs. This was the reason given for Walter Maxey not buying the chocolates that he saw in the market in 1903. In F&F, 12/4/12, MD writes that a Mr Lyon appeared to be making progress with chocolates and also about the breeder Mus rattus, whose supposed blue buck, turned into a chocolate and then sired a litter which contained five white bellied (ie Berkshire) choc kittens.
The first properly documented ones though seemed to have been bred by Mr A Baker of London, in 1915. The parents of the first chocs were a fawn buck and his daughter, a black doe whose mother was an agouti. Later that same year Sir Claud Alexander was reported by MD as having bred a chocolate, but HCB later writes that this rat moulted out ‘wrong’. In 7/4/16, T Patterson-Riddle, in his column London Mouse and Rat Mems (probably for the embryo LSCMRC) reported that Mr Baker had had a litter of 7 from his chocolate rats, of various shades but that he thought that three of them should be good ones. T P-R goes on to say ‘I cannot understand the difference of opinion with regards to the colour of the two adults. Mr Selby Thomas at the club show called one of them a good attempt at a blue and I hear that Mr Kilminster, judging at Gloucester, thought it was a poor black. I have seen both in daylight and say that they are both undoubtedly chocolate, the doe being of an especially deep and rich colour.’
HCB in 1920 goes on to say ‘The career of the early chocs was very chequered, some judges calling them bad blues, others bad blacks. The best blue ever seen, which won the breeders cup at Bristol and was described as being ‘as good a blue as any mouse’, came from Mr Baker’s strain. It moulted out into a good chocolate later on’. (I mentioned this rat earlier in the previous PRA, In fact it was shown in 1917 by Mr Tilling and not 1915 by Mr Baker as I had surmised.) The std is rather vague. It says 'Chocolates should be the colour of rich eating chocolate , feet, ears and tail to match'. Well one can buy eating chocolate so dark as to be almost black or a lighter, warmer tint, which I personally prefer.’ Quite! HCB was a chocolate breeder and so had some experience of what he was talking about and he declared that ’chocolates were one of the most striking varieties that we have.’
These had been present all the way through, almost always from wild extraction. As HCB said, it was the ordinary wild rats colour improved and idealised. He also said that they came in two shades, grey and golden but that the golden shade was the most handsome. ‘The latter is incomparably the more handsome, In fact, a really good golden agouti is one of our handsomest varieties (Amen to that). The ground colour is a rich, ruddy brown, evenly ticked with black. The belly colour in existing specimens is grey, but a ruddy colour is desirable if possible’
This ruddy belly colour is normal in show mice and was part of the original rat std, but to my knowledge there have never been ruddy bellied agoutis in the domestic rat population, which is why the std was changed in November 1976. In the 1930’s std there were 2 shades of agoutis given, brown and fawn. From the std the fawns would appear to be cinnamon.
Due to the general lack of colours, marked varieties were much more popular than they are now Indeed HCB in 1920 says that in his opinion the marked varieties were the best for novices to start with, because ‘Further removed from the wild state, they are usually more tractable than selfs (unmarked). Their markings can be determined at a few days old and the useless ones destroyed. Nor will the novice be disheartened by vexatious moulting changes.’ This comment about tameness is interesting, as it is in agreement with the work of Belyaev on silver foxes, who reported that the ones with white spotting (among other things) showed more domesticated traits than the wild type. This is not something I’ve noticed myself (and indeed there is some scepticism now about Belyaev’s work) but rats have undergone some 200 generations since HCB’s day, more than enough time to flatten out any temperament differences due to markings. The point about selection is certainly true, whether you choose to cull or rehome, but the temptation to select for markings over everything else must be resisted. Indeed, looking at the photos, I think that there were some problems there.
The varieties that they had were 1) Japanese or hooded, 2) Evens and 3) Brokens. As hoodeds have been well covered before I’ll leave these, except to say that from the photos they were generally equal to anything we have now.
Now apart from chocolates, HCB was a marked specialist , especially of evens and brokens and certainly during this period they were very successful. He points out that both could be found in the same litter. Despite his obvious success (most of them seemed to have been either shown or bred by him), he couldn’t help giving a dig at the std, and this was in the 3rd edition of what was effectively the club’s textbook too.
He writes, ‘The compliers of the std imposed, to my thinking, too hard a burden upon breeders by running counter to the laws of nature, which appears to lay claim that colour remains to the last on the head of the rat, and when you drive it from the head you also drive it from the body. Consequently, years of experiment on my part and that of others goes to show that if you want really nicely broken up hoods, reducing the head markings to a ‘dutch’ head marking in the case of evens, or a nose patch and unevenly patched head in brokens, you have to be content with an all white body, or one with either very few or very thinly coloured patches.’ What he was saying is that the std compliers did not allow for the persistence of the hood, but once more were looking at rats as big mice.
The early spotted evens (the striped ones remember were hooded) mostly had hoods with a few spots down the centre of the spine and so in fact were hooded with a broken saddle, what we would call mismarked. By the time the 3rd ed was written however, things had moved on considerably. By then it was possible (and there are photos to prove it) to get nice spots on the sides and haunches with the centre of the back unmarked.
HCB considered that hooded breeders had it easy as they were only refining what nature had given them. However, he also said that one of the joys of breeding evens and brokens was the variations that could turn up, so that in the same litter you could have a rat with 28 spots and another with 3 or 4, and that, depending on placement, both could be good and fulfil the std’s requirements. The std for evens had it that the markings should be as evenly balanced as possible, and a broken, unevenly placed, as long as a harmonious effect was achieved. HCB points out that a rat with 7 spots on one side would not produce the required harmonious effect. Also that ‘Number of spots, odd or even, do not matter. A 20 spotter may be a good broken or a seven spotter a good even. A rat with a hood reduced to a mask on the face only, with a spot in centre of the back and one at the root of the tail is an even of merit, and hard to get. In brokens the edges of whatever head markings they have should be raggedly cut’.
Obviously there were a lot of rats that were neither one thing nor another and I’ll repeat what HCB used as his definition. ‘A rat is an even if the markings on one side of an imaginary straight line drawn from nosetip to root of tail reasonably correspond with those on the other side.’ Or the mirror test if you prefer. Both brokens or evens could be shown in any colour.
The NMRC had no equivalent of our modern capped or variegated std, although it’s likely that they had the same alleles on the hooded locus available as I said in PRA 241, they just chose to do different things with them. A lot of this was undoubtedly due to trying to fit them into the available mouse stds but on the other hand a number of interesting marked rats were produced. The stds for capped and variegated that we have are a purely NFRS construct.
These were standardised in 1918, possibly by MD, although this marking had been around all the time, generally known as ‘white bellied’, to my knowledge these weren’t shown nor standardised. The distinguishing mark asked for by the std was a white spot in the middle of the forehead (as it is now). HCB says that the name came from a breed of pig, whose markings it’s supposed to imitate. It’s generally considered, without any evidence that I could find, that MD named them. She may have done, she bred Irish so would have seen a lot of them. HCB said that the white spot had not been produced. I rather doubt that, as blazed ones seem to have popped up quite often. Incidentally the Berkshire pig normally has a blaze rather than a spot and no or little white under. Of course 100 years ago the markings may well have been a bit different.
The only other variety that I can see may have been a cinnamon. These seem to have turned up around 1921 but there isn’t much about them, just the report of a skin that was sent to a museum. Whatever the truth of this rat, the name didn’t make it into the std, although a fawn agouti, which sounds like a cinnamon from the description, was. The name cinnamon for rats didn’t make it into the stds until the birth of the NFRS, and it’s probable that this rat may have been a chocolate agouti.