This week’s History Thread looks back at one of the odder events in English history: a series of protests and riots over a statue of a dog in Battersea. The Brown Dog of Battersea stood at the center of a longstanding dispute over animal welfare in Edwardian England. Warning: non-graphic descriptions of animal cruelty follow.
In February 1903, animal activists accused University College London Professor William Bayliss of performing vivisection on a live dog as part of a lecture. Bayliss heatedly denied these charges (he claimed to have anesthetized a sick dog before operating), which resulted in a massive, nationwide controversy. A libel trial against Bayliss’s chief accuser, activist and gadfly Stephen Coleridge, resulted, along with a flood of books, pamphlets, media coverage and parliamentary debates. The Court found for Bayliss, which only inflamed animal rights activists further.
The dispute simmered for several years, until Anna Louisa Woodward of the World League Against Vivisection raised funds for a large bronze statue of the unlucky pooch (described as “a small brown mongrel allied to a terrier with short roughish hair, about 14–15 lb [c. 6 kg] in weight”) in Battersea at Latchmere Recreation Ground. Carved by Joseph Whitehead, the statue was erected in 1906, with an accusatory inscription:
In Memory of the Brown Terrier
Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories
of University College in February
1903 after having endured Vivisection
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 at the same place during the year 1902.Men and Women of England
how long shall these Things be?
Unsurprisingly, the statue triggered widespread outcry and frequent vandalism, by Bayliss’s medical students, supporters of animal vivisection and workaday hooligans. After several students were arrested for attacking the statue with crowbars and sledgehammers, others retaliated by attacking not only the statue but disrupting animal rights meetings throughout the city. Their harassment spilled over to women’s suffrage groups, since it was assumed that suffragists supported animal rights. Millicent Fawcett found her December 5th speech to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society disrupted by anti-dog hooligans who exploded firecrackers and stink bombs while singing over her attempts at oration.
The main event occurred five days later, on December 10th. A group of about 100 medical students made a concerted attempt to destroy the Brown Dog. They were opposed by Battersea residents, not necessarily sympathetic to the anti-vivisection cause but certainly tired of roughneck college choads smashing up their neighborhood. Brawls erupted throughout the area, while a second, larger group gathered in Trafalgar Square and gave speeches in defense of killing dogs for medical research. When the students tried marching through the city with effigies of the dead dog and insulting slogans, they clashed again with police and pro-dog activists.
Further violence erupted around London throughout the following days, with varying degrees of intensity (though no deaths and only a few serious injuries.) The protesters consisting mostly of medical students, doctors and various anti-suffrage groups who made a bizarre alliance against what they perceived as a “feminist” conspiracy to promote women’s rights and, um, save dogs. City officials stationed a permanent police guard around the statue to prevent vandalism, which in turn led to complaints about whether the statue was worth the hassle.
Eventually, Battersea officials decided it wasn’t. Despite protests and outcry from anti-vivisectionists, in March 1910 the Brown Dog was removed and the unrest subsided. What became of the original Brown Dog is uncertain, though a widely-held rumor claimed that the city council commissioned a blacksmith to melt down the troublesome pooch.
The Brown Dog got the last laugh, though. The unrest led in part to the Protection of Animals Act of 1911, which consolidated and strengthened disparate anti-cruelty laws; however, vivisection remained legal until the Animals Act of 1986. And in December 1985, 75 years after the original Dog’s disappearance, a new statue appeared in Battersea (though its friendly appearance, based on one of the designer’s pets, still triggered controversy among more militant animal activists). Never let it be said that the English don’t take dogs seriously.