Hidden Deep: The Bullmastiff Contribution to the Mastiff

Going through old files recently, I came across a long-forgotten letter from Betty Baxter.

She was synonymous with brindle Mastiffs in the United Kingdom, where she was a successful breeder, sought-after judge and — important for the purposes of this story — breed archivist.

I had written to her in 2011 to ask about the Mastiff progenitors of the Bullmastiff. I had heard that she had extensive records going back to the late 1800s, and I wondered if she knew exactly the foundational Mastiffs that helped form the Bullmastiff.

Several months later I received a typewritten letter, full of apologies for not answering sooner.

“I have a big chest in the hall, full of archive material,” she wrote. “There are pedigrees from 1875, registrations from the same date, stud books from 1890, USA pedigrees, European, Australian, etc. These should all be separate files … but to my horror I find that they have gotten all muddled up, and all the old bullmastiff stuff is somewhere in the middle.”

By the time she had written me back, Mrs. Baxter (she had addressed me as “Mrs. Flaim,” so I won’t take the liberty of referring to her in any less formal a way) had more or less returned some order to the stacks of papers, and was readying to go through the registrations from 1890 to 1920 to see if she could find any Bullmastiff ancestors. But that was the last correspondence I received from her, and of course now she is gone.

Re-reading her letter today, there was some interesting information that I think bears publishing, although it was in an entirely different direction than I had been digging in.

An Epidemic of Absence

Perhaps to temper any expectations of what she might — or, more aptly might not — find in those vintage Bullmastiff pedigrees, Mrs. Baxter continued by explaining that most of the old publications were persistently vague, simply annotating, “DOB unknown, parents unknown, breeder unknown.”

“But every now and then the breeder’s name is given and a parent’s name — ‘Floss,’ unknown or ‘Kitty Marten,’ unknown,” she wrote. “And then of course you get the occasional Bull and Mastiff names given on the registration. But it takes so long to find them.”

(That “Bull and Mastiff” wasn’t a typographical error: While the Bullmastiff was still in development, it was called the Bull and Mastiff, which was linguistically a rather apt descriptor: Its breed type, like the two breeds used to create it and the two nouns used to describe it, had not yet melded together.)

Mrs. Baxter was at heart a Mastiff breeder, so of course it was inevitable that the letter should eventually turn to her own breed. And it’s here that we’re reminded just how tenuous pedigrees and concepts of breed purity can be.

“Then of course, I have to make out a proper pedigree for the two B&Ms that are most important to mastiffs, Penkhull Lady and Crescent Rowena,” she continued. “Lady is three quarters regency bulldog and the grandmother of the Havengore foundation bitch. And the other is behind Miss Bell’s Withybush kennels.”

In truth, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are Bullmastiffs behind Mastiffs: In previous centuries breeders were concerned about what their breeding programs needed, not how their pedigrees would read. In fact, Victorian dog writers made a point of noting how a number of breeds — short-coated Saints, Tibetan Mastiffs, dubiously pedigreed Danes and, yes, Bulldogs — were used to recreate the breed in their own century. But the breeders of those times were generally savvier and more disciplined than those of today, who instead of selecting away from their outcrosses instead create a cute moniker and start selling the most atypical offspring as “designer dogs.”

(Speaking of that modern phenomenon, it’s somewhat applicable to Mrs. Baxter’s mention of a “regency bulldog.” The term was used in the 1970s by former Bullmastiff breeder and judge Clifford Derwent. He attempted develop a line of longer-legged Bulldogs through outcrossing, naming it after the Regency period in Britain, presumably as the dog he used as a model — “Rosa,” depicted in an 1817 painting — was from that time. According to canine historian Col. David Hancock, Derwent had to abandon his project because of temperament issues; other sources say it was because the Kennel Club would not register them as a new breed.)

Rosa, bottom left, in an 1817 painting by Abraham Cooper, was the model for the Regency Bulldog, a modern re-creation that never gained traction.

Postwar Pickins

Now let’s get back to those Bullmastiff interlopers in postwar Mastiff pedigrees.

Of the two Bullmastiffs mentioned by Mrs. Baxter, Crescent Rowena was actually the granddaughter of Penkhull Lady; they were born in 1923 and 1916, respectively. Penkhull Lady is listed as a Bullmastiff in Rowena’s pedigree, and Rowena’s mother, Shirebrook Lady, is listed as a “Mastiff, Bullmastiff,” as her father, Eng. Ch. King Baldur, was a purebred Mastiff.

Incidentally, King Baldur’s parents, Young John Bull and Young Mary Bull, both English champions — yes, they were full siblings — are worthy noting, in particular his dam. In a typically insightful piece that he wrote for us years ago, Mastiff authority Bas Bosch calls her photo “my number-one Mastiff photo of reference.”

High praise indeed, coming from him.

But one glance at Rowena’s photo at the top of this article shows that not even an inbred Mastiff father and a generation of breeding away from her Bullmastiff grandmother was enough to disguise her bully heritage.

Havengore Jim, a son of Crescent Rowena. Whle camera angles can be deceiving, it appears the Bullmastiff type is receding with this subsequent generation.

More Mixing

Rowena belonged to the era after World War I. Still more Bullmastiff crosses happened after the next war — and it’s quite likely the breed would not have survived without them.  

It’s widely known that the Mastiff breed flirted with extinction after World War II, as British breeders had barely enough food for the humans in their household, much less their super-sized canines. A 1946 article in the Sunday Express newspaper entitled “No Meat— No Mastiffs” noted that the breed was down to two dogs after the war, and that “it seemed likely the mastiff’s gluttonous maw would be the death of it.”

As a result of that 1946 article, another breeding prospect was discovered, though he was very likely a Bullmastiff.

Templecombe Torus — his name is misspelled in official pedigrees as Taurus, thanks to some creative license from the kennel club — had a rather murky history.

“Aside from the fact that his owner was killed in the bombing during the last war, little is known about him,” wrote Graham J. Hicks, past president and the first archivist for Britain’s Old English Mastiff Club. “A few have speculated he was a purebred Bullmastiff. One researcher in the breed told me, circa 1971, that Torus was thought to be a red or a red brindle, and that much of the red colouring in our breed came down from him. Torus was, in fact, a fawn brindle, a hard muscular dog who, in his prime, weighed 200 pounds.”

Torus and his brindle daughter Juno, the puppy kept by his owner Miss Fawell, who rescued him during the war. Unfortunately, Juno — along with all but one puppy in her litter — died of distemper.

As luck would have it, Torus was taken in by his dead master’s best friend, who then was called up for military service. A chance conversation with a stranger atop a double-decker bus saved Torus from being put down, and he was transferred, sight unseen, to the man’s fiancée, Miss P. Fawell. Together the two survived the war in London — Torus was apparently would sit bolt upright and stare straight ahead whenever a bomb approached, even if it was miles away.

When she spotted the newspaper article, Miss Fawell contacted the Old English Mastiff Club, which was desperately trying to revive the breed. Torus was bred to the only remaining Mastiff bitch, Sally of Coldbrew. But if the Germans weren’t destructive enough, Mother Nature topped them: All their puppies died of distemper, but for one: Nydia of Frithend.

Torus was reportedly bred to two other bitches — including, possibly, one at Havengore, where he was driven in a van surrounded by stacks of furniture, as thanks to gasoline rationing travel was still restricted after the war, and the Scheerbooms of that famous kennel were furniture transporters. If there was a breeding, there is no record of any ensuing litter.

In 1948, as the Mastiff situation grew even more dire, Torus was also bred to his daughter Nydia. Not only did she not conceive, but Torus died soon after.

America to the Rescue

Major Hulbert, who owned Nydia, had a backup plan: He had purchased a male, Valiant Diadem, from American breeder Robert Belden Burn of Connecticut. (A million years ago I was contacted by his daughter, though we never connected, and her email is now lost to the mists of time.) Though Valiant Diadem was only 10 months old when it discovered that Nydia hadn’t settle puppies — Hubert had hoped to use him on one of the resulting daughters — the missed breeding and death of eight-and-a-half-year-old Torus changed that plan. Bullmastiffs were a distant presence in Valiant Diadem’s pedigree, too: He had a Crescent Rowena son, Bill of Havengore, behind him at least three times in the first four generations, two of them being a brother-sister breeding.

Every Mastiff alive today descends from a small clutch of a dozen or so Mastiffs that either survived the war in England or had escaped its ravages with breeders in North America: Nydia — with her dodgy pedigree — was one of them.

All’s Well That End’s Well

The infusion of Bullmastiff blood into the Mastiff had long ago been brought under control: If anything, today it is Great Dane blood that the breed struggles with, bringing in long legs and losing the deep chest that is so critical to breed type.

Mrs. Baxter’s rediscovered letter was a welcome reminder that our dogs are products of their day and age — and, in desperate times, the result of desperate measures.