Diary of a Dog-walker by Edward Stourton

whose diatribes against canine mistreatment make my own episodes of dog-rage look positively insipid – was Stephen Coleridge, a son of the former Chief Justice Lord Coleridge (and great-great-nephew of the poet), who went on to help found the NSPCC. George Bernard Shaw turned up to see the statue unveiled and John Archer, a Battersea councillor who championed its preservation, was Britain’s first elected official of African descent.
    Anyone worried about the way modern students behave would do well to read the accounts of what was apparently considered normal student protest at the time: the Brown Dog Riots were exactly that, riots, not peaceful demonstrations that went wrong. The students wore dog masks (one Cambridge undergraduate who joined in was arrested for ‘barking like a dog’) and chanted this piece of ‘doggerel’ (forgive me – an irresistible pun):
    As we go walking after dark,
    We turn our steps to Latchmere Park
    And there we see, to our surprise,
    A little brown dog that stands and lies
    Ha ha ha, he he he,
    Little brown dog how we hate thee.
    On the day the riots reached a climax, 10 December 1907, the students fought the police for several hours. When they were eventually driven off the streets a local doctor told a newspaper that their failure to hold out for longer reflected the ‘utter degeneration’ of the youth of the day – which suggests their cause had support from a class of person who should have known better.
    That may reflect a reaction against the way the Brown Dog cause became – rather weirdly – identified with the suffragette movement. The late actress and academic Coral Lansbury, who wrote a rich account of the affair and the cultural forces behind it, argued that ‘Women were the most fervent supporters of anti-vivisection, not simply for reasons of humanity, but because the vivisected animal stood for the vivisected woman: the woman strapped to the gynaecologist’s table; the woman strapped and bound in the pornographic fiction of the period.’ Warming to her theme later in the book, she writes that ‘Woman’s suffrage had very little in common with anti-vivisection, but the two become confusedly entwined through the accident of circumstance: the image of the vivisected dog blurred and became one with the militant suffragette being force-fed in Brixton Prison.’
    Coral Lansbury admits (boasts?) that ‘many people will be puzzled and disturbed’ by her book, and I am never quite sure whether it makes sense to impose the language of late-twentieth-century radical academic discourse on the past, but it is certainly true that many suffragettes were prominent pro-doggers. Opponents of women’s suffrage recognized theconnection between the two protest movements by making barking noises when they disrupted suffragette meetings.
    It is also striking that the Brown Dog was one of the few causes that succeeded in uniting what we might broadly call ‘the forces of the Left’ of the early twentieth century; the socialist culture of a working-class area like Battersea was very male, and its leaders were not especially well disposed towards brainy middle-class women living in Chelsea across the river (Sylvia Pankhurst has a blue plaque in Cheyne Row, just up from Battersea Bridge). But both groups were moved by the Brown Dog’s story, and both saw their enemy in the bullying yahoos from the medical profession, who seemed to represent all that was worst about the moneyed male Establishment. One modern writer has argued that the Brown Dog’s mongrel nature was a reflection of the political coalition he inspired.
    Of the Brown Dog’s character, we of course know nothing at all; he is, as it were, all symbol, a universal Platonic Idea of Dog rather than an individual creature you can imagine thumping its tail when you open the front door. And in the voluminous literature this dog has generated there is