Items24The creator’s order
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Barry (dog)Barry worked for the Great St Bernard Hospice from 1800 and is credited with saving more than 40 people, although the count has shifted over the years. The famous ending, in which a lost soldier mistook him for a wolf and killed him, is false: a canon of the hospice took him to Bern to retire, and…0i - 2
Boatswain, Lord Byron's NewfoundlandByron's black-and-white Newfoundland died of rabies at Newstead Abbey in 1808, and the poet is said to have nursed him without fear of being bitten. The memorial he built in the abbey grounds is larger than Byron's own tomb, and it carries his poem "Epitaph to a Dog".
Here is the twist for anyone…0 - 3
Greyfriars BobbyThe firmest piece of evidence is a collar. In 1867 Edinburgh's Lord Provost, Sir William Chambers, paid Bobby's dog licence and gave him the collar now held at the Museum of Edinburgh, and a veterinary post-mortem recorded his death from jaw cancer on 14 January 1872.
The 14-year vigil over John…0i - 4
Fido (Abraham Lincoln's dog)Abraham Lincoln's yellow mongrel never lived in the White House. Crowds and fireworks after the 1860 election terrified him, so the family left him in Springfield with a friend, John E. Roll, along with Fido's favourite sofa and instructions that he was never to be scolded for muddy paws.
His end…0i - 5
Bummer and LazarusTwo San Francisco strays who lived outside a Montgomery Street saloon full of reporters, so their rat-killing and squabbles filled the city's papers in the early 1860s. When a dog catcher seized Lazarus in June 1862, a crowd forced his release and the supervisors exempted the pair from the stray…0i - 6
Old DrumA Missouri foxhound shot on 18 October 1869 by a sheep farmer, Leonidas Hornsby, who had warned that he would kill any dog on his land. Owner Charles Burden sued, and at the September 1870 trial his lawyer, George Graham Vest, set the evidence aside and delivered his "Eulogy of the Dog".
The jury…0 - 7
NipperThe dog on a century of record labels was a real Bristol terrier cross, born around 1884 and named for nipping visitors' ankles. He never posed for the famous picture: Francis Barraud painted His Master's Voice in 1898, three years after Nipper died, working from an old photograph.
The machine in…0i - 8
Bum (dog)San Diego's town dog reportedly stowed away on a steamer from San Francisco in December 1886 and spent the next 12 years riding streetcars, joining parades and sleeping across busy pavements. In 1891 the city council put his picture on its first dog licences and exempted him from needing…0i - 9
Owney (dog)A scruffy terrier mix who slept on mail bags at the Albany, New York, post office from about 1888 and then rode Railway Mail Service cars across the country. Clerks tagged his collar so he could be sent home, other post offices added their own tags, and the National Postal Museum still holds 372 of…0i - 10
Station JimSlough's collecting dog wore a box for the Great Western Railway Widows' and Orphans' Fund from 1894 and barked his thanks for every coin. The inscription in his case records about £40 raised, a single half sovereign, and 265 coins at one Southall hospital parade in 1896.
He died in harness on the…0
