Which side would you have been on in the riots of 1907 - pro-dogger or anti-dogger?
The dog in question (why, what were you thinking of?) was a male terrier, brown, and died horribly, and that's about all we know of it - except that it became probably the most famous, and certainly the most controversial dog in British history.
The Brown Dog (as it later became known) was put to death at the medical school of University College London in 1903, after having been subjected to months of surgical procedures carried out in front of audiences of medical students. This was not an unusual event; today the word vivisection is used to describe any experiment on a living organism, but then it referred more specifically to performing operations or dissection on animals while they were still alive, and it was an increasingly controversial subject.
On the day the Brown Dog died the audience included two undercover anti-vivisectionists. Lizzy Lind af Hageby (1878-1963) and Leisa Schartau (1876-1962) were Swedish feminists - and all sorts of other things; I urge you to look them up, they lived quite extraordinary lives. Having spent some time studying vivisection at first hand, the women wrote an expose - The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology - which included an account of the Brown Dog's life and death.
On reading the book, Stephen Coleridge, of the National Anti-Vivisection Society (actually, look him up, as well; another fascinating life), believed that the Brown Dog’s treatment was illegal, on the grounds that he hadn’t been properly anaesthetised. Unable to get the Home Secretary, Aretas Akers-Douglas (don’t bother looking him up; a total shit, the only interesting thing about him was his daft name and the fact that his father was called Aretas Akers) to authorise a prosecution, Coleridge made his allegations in public instead.
This led to him being sued for libel by the surgeon who’d been in charge. Coleridge lost the case, but the publicity made the Brown Dog, and its alleged persecutors, famous throughout the country.
In September 1906, anti-vivisectionists erected a statue of the Brown Dog, sitting on a memorial stone more than seven foot tall, in a public park in Battersea. The inscription didn’t hold back: “In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903 after having endured Vivisections extending over more than two months and having been handed over from one Vivisector to another till Death came to his release. Also in memory of the 232 dogs vivisected in the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England - How long shall these things be?”
The location chosen for the statue was not surprising; the working-class Battersea area of London was a centre of radical, socialist, trade unionist, feminist, vegetarian and anti-vivisection sentiment and activity. The local council reflected all that, with its Progressive Party majority, and Battersea was also home to a hospital known as the Antiviv.
The National Anti-Vivisection Hospital was founded by animal welfare campaigners in 1896. It publicly declared that there would be “No Vivisection in its Schools. No Vivisectors on its Staff. No Experiments on Patients.” (That last pledge perhaps needs some context: there was a widespread belief in those days, rightly or wrongly, that posh, arrogant doctors, made callous by years of experimenting on live animals, were perfectly happy, when they could get away with it, to conduct similar research on live humans – poor ones, obviously. One reason for the Antiviv’s popularity was that patients felt they were safe within its walls from being butchered by mad scientists.) The hospital’s strong relations with local unions and the local council all helped to cement the status of Battersea as the anti-vivisection borough.
The medical Establishment was furious about the Brown Dog memorial, and especially about the inscription, which they felt was "an insult to the London University and the medical faculty generally." The campaign to demolish the dog soon turned violent.
On 20th November 1907 a mob of medical students and allied young toffs, armed with sledgehammers, attempted to destroy the memorial. Four of them were arrested and fined £5 each, with the magistrate, Paul Taylor, telling them to remember that people were entitled to hold different opinions to theirs. He got his answer two days later when about a thousand students carried an effigy of the magistrate along the Strand, singing "Let's hang Paul Taylor on a sour apple tree," before attempting unsuccessfully to burn the effigy and eventually tossing it into the Thames.
Demonstrations by “brown doggers” featured chants of “Down with the Brown Dog!” and a marching song which included the chorus “Ha, ha ha! Hee, hee, hee! Little brown dog how we hate thee.” Toy dogs were held aloft on sticks (not necessarily the strangest things London demonstrators have stuck on the end of their poles over the centuries, as regular readers of the Reb will discover).
Whenever the brown doggers dared to venture into Battersea they were met with gangs of local youths, determined to defend their dog – and their anti-vivisection hospital – from the posh vandals. Weeks of three-way running battles (between pro-doggers, anti-doggers and police) became known as the Brown Dog Riots. In one instance, the cops - unable to keep pace with a rowdy and illegal march by fit young students - commandeered a tram and chased them in that.
Arrests of pro-vivisectionist students continued throughout November, for offences such as drunk and disorderly behaviour, lighting bonfires in the street, insulting behaviour, and on one occasion hitting someone in the face with "a large, ill-shaped model" of a terrier during an impromptu late-night demo. Because the offenders were respectable young gentlemen they were usually treated leniently by the courts.
In early December about 100 medical students staged a violent invasion of a women's suffrage meeting at Paddington Baths, causing injuries and considerable damage to property. (People on both sides of the arguments tended to link the campaign for votes for women with the campaign against vivisection.)
In their attacks on their enemies’ meetings, the students used stink bombs, trumpets, firecrackers and in one case "a little by-play with a number of kippers" - whatever that means. Speakers were howled down, stewards were beaten with sticks, and chairs were smashed to kindling.
A massive anti-dogger demo was arranged for December 1st, mainly because that was the day of the annual rugby union Varsity Match which would see thousands of Oxford and Cambridge students in town, on the booze, and ready for a rumble. The rally was set for 11pm in Trafalgar Square, which gives a fairly clear hint of its nature, and the disorganised groups of tipsy twits who turned up through the night were dealt with by mounted police.
Another attempt on the statue itself had taken place that afternoon. The plan was for a selected crack troop of anti-dog students to rush the dog, remove it from its plinth with crowbars, and dump it in the river. It didn't go too well. Apart from anything, the people of Battersea were on the lookout all day for anyone in their streets who looked remotely like a student in need of a good bashing, with the result that the anti-doggers were short of numbers when the time came to attack. The police, craftily, left two bobbies on duty guarding the dog, while the rest of the cops hid round the corner. This ambush manoeuvre left the students trapped between anti-vivisection locals on one side and truncheons on the other and they soon dispersed.
The Brown Dog riots became one of the nation's major talking points. Newspapers carried endless editorials and think-pieces concerning the statue, its inscription, vivisection, and the anti-vivisection movement. The students had few supporters; even writers sympathetic to the scientific defence of animal experimentation argued that vivisection should be seen as a sad necessity, to be undertaken only when unavoidable, and then with humility, regret and kindness. The anti-doggers, however, were accused of acting in bad taste, seeming heartless and mirthful, apparently glorying in the suffering of the experimental subjects. The point was made many times in the press that these unpleasant specimens, drunk, lawless and apparently without conscience, were the doctors of tomorrow. The British Medical Journal was horrified that the anti-doggers had, "as anyone might have foreseen," handed the anti-vivisectionists their greatest ever weapon of propaganda.
The anti-doggers never did succeed in destroying the Brown Dog; the working people of Battersea defended it to the end. But the pro-doggers were betrayed from behind their own lines, when the local council changed hands from Progressive to Moderate. The new conservative administration voted to remove the memorial, ostensibly because the cost of protecting it had become too great, and it disappeared, under cover of darkness, on 10th March 1910.
Demonstrations demanding its restoration took place, but the statue was never seen again and is assumed to have been hurriedly melted down. But the Brown Dog Affair had a long-term effect on public opinion, and ultimately on legislation – and in 1985 a brand new Brown Dog statue was erected in Battersea Park, bearing the original inscription.
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Sources:
The brown dog and his memorial by Edward K. Ford (Euston Grove Press, 2013; originally published 1908)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513711/
https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/the-brown-dog-affair
Animal Issues Vol. 4:2 (2000)
www.navs.org.uk/about_us/24/0/286/