The History of the Manchester Terrier
The Manchester Terrier is older than its name. Long before anyone called it a Manchester Terrier, England had black-and-tan working terriers: small, useful dogs kept around houses, farms, stables and shops to kill rats and other vermin.
During the nineteenth century those dogs changed dramatically. Their heads became longer and narrower, their bodies lighter and more elegant, and their black-and-tan markings increasingly precise. The working terrier was becoming a recognizable breed.
Exactly how that happened is surprisingly difficult to establish.
Victorian writers themselves disagreed about parts of the story. Rawdon B. Lee thought the changing dog probably carried some Greyhound blood, perhaps from a “small dark coloured greyhound.” Later histories usually say Whippet. A persistent tradition credits a Manchester breeder named John Hulme with making an important cross around 1800, but finding the original evidence behind that story is considerably harder than repeating it.
Even the name Manchester Terrier was disputed. Manchester unquestionably became a major center of breeding, and Henry Lacy called the dogs “essentially a Manchester breed.” Vero Shaw, however, called Manchester Terrier an “absurd sobriquet,” reported that the famous Manchester breeder Samuel Handley preferred the older name Black-and-Tan, and pointed out that Birmingham produced excellent dogs as well.
Then there are the rats.
The breed developed in a world in which rat killing was useful work and competitive ratting became a popular spectacle. Famous dogs such as Tiny and Billy entered the story, along with performances so extraordinary that separating contemporary evidence from later repetition has become part of the historical problem.
That is what this site is about. We are collecting the old books, contemporary descriptions, newspaper accounts, illustrations and breed records behind the familiar Manchester Terrier story. Where something is documented, we will show the evidence. Where Victorian writers were offering opinions, we will say so. Where later breed tradition fills a gap, we will call it tradition. And where the answer remains uncertain, we are perfectly comfortable saying that we do not know.
The Black and Tan Terrier Before the Manchester →
John Hulme and the Origin Story →
Ratting, Rat Pits, Tiny and Billy →
Was the Manchester Terrier Crossed With a Whippet or Greyhound? →
Read the Illustrated History
This research began as Black and Tan, an illustrated history created for Voice Agency Comics. The first two issues are free to read.
They tell this history another way—not as a replacement for the documents and research collected here, but as a visual journey through the same remarkable story.
[BLACK AND TAN — ISSUE ONE COVER]
[BLACK AND TAN — ISSUE TWO COVER]
Read both issues free at Voice Agency Comics.
A Longer Historical Overview
For readers who want the story in more detail, what follows traces the transformation of the old Black and Tan working terrier into the dog that eventually became known as the Manchester Terrier.
Before There Was a Manchester Terrier
In 1894, Rawdon B. Lee opened his history of the Black and Tan Terrier by imagining what would happen if one of his great-grandfathers could see the modern dog. He thought the old man would not recognize it. The dog remembered from earlier generations had run around stable yards, killed vermin and served as a household companion. It was more stoutly built and had not been bred to the exacting appearance demanded by Victorian dog shows.
Lee eventually described the Black and Tan of his own day with a wonderfully useful phrase. It was, he said, of “modern manufacture.” He did not mean that somebody had suddenly invented a new breed. Quite the opposite. Black-and-tan terriers were old. What was new was what breeders had made of them.
Vero Shaw, writing about the same breed, made much the same distinction. Earlier Black and Tans, he said, were heavier and coarser. Their skulls were shorter and heavier. There was more tan on the body, and the tan itself was lighter. The elaborate markings later demanded in the show ring—pencilled toes, thumb marks and tiny spots above the eyes—were largely absent.
There was a simple reason: nobody had been breeding for them. A useful terrier needed to kill vermin, go where its owner went and do whatever work was expected of a small working dog. A Victorian show champion had a different job.
[IMAGE: Early Black and Tan Terrier engraving or illustration]
The Black and Tan Terrier Before the Manchester →
Dog Shows Changed the Dog
The rise of organized dog shows gave breeders a new reason to make dogs resemble one another, and they became very good at it. By the 1860s the Black and Tan Terrier was already appearing in extraordinary numbers at British exhibitions. Rawdon Lee recorded 42 at the Holborn show in 1862. At Ashburnham Hall in London the following year, there were 95.
This was not an obscure little breed quietly waiting to be discovered. The Black and Tan was already a major show dog. But the dogs were still changing.
Lee remembered early show specimens that carried too much tan by later standards or lacked the sharply defined markings that would eventually become essential. As competition increased, so did the pressure toward uniformity. The old working dog was becoming something else: slimmer, cleaner, more elegant and increasingly difficult to breed correctly.
Even usefulness began to lose ground to appearance. Lee put it rather starkly. The older animals, he wrote, had been bred “for work and work only.” In the modern show dog, markings mattered more than gameness and elegance more than stoutness. It is hard to imagine a clearer description of what Victorian dog breeding was doing.
[IMAGE: Victorian show Black and Tan, ideally a named specimen]
The Victorian Black and Tan Becomes the Manchester Terrier →
So Why Manchester?
There is no question that Manchester mattered. The city and the industrial towns around it became one of the great centers of Black and Tan breeding. Rawdon Lee names Samuel Handley of Pendleton, James Barrow, W. Justice and R. Ribchester among the important men associated with the dog.
But he also gives us a detail I particularly like. The breed did not belong only to famous kennels. Lee wrote that sporting publicans and working men throughout Manchester and its neighborhood kept and bred Black and Tans. The best of those dogs might then be bought by better-known breeders and eventually find their way into the show ring. That sounds less like the invention of a breed than the refinement of a local working population.
Henry Lacy, one of the important breeders of the period, had no doubts about the geography. Black and Tan Terriers, he said, were “essentially a Manchester breed.” Use the words Manchester Terrier, Lacy wrote, and a knowledgeable dog man knew exactly what you meant.
Case closed. Except that another important Victorian authority said almost exactly the opposite.
Vero Shaw believed Manchester Terrier was an “absurd sobriquet.” He thought the name had become attached to the breed largely because Samuel Handley of Pendleton had become so famous for producing excellent Black and Tans. According to Shaw, Handley himself did not think much of the new name. Black-and-Tan was honorable enough for him. Shaw also added one more complication: Birmingham produced excellent dogs too.
So we have something better than a tidy breed legend. We have an argument. The people who were actually breeding and writing about these dogs in the nineteenth century did not entirely agree about why they were becoming known as Manchester Terriers.
The Victorian Black and Tan Becomes the Manchester Terrier →
Then There Is the Greyhound Problem
Look at an old working terrier and then look at the refined Black and Tans of the late nineteenth century. Something happened, and Victorian writers noticed it too.
Rawdon Lee believed the old Black and Tan had probably been crossed with a dog of lighter build. His candidate was “a small dark coloured greyhound.” He also thought the unusually long, lean heads appearing in the breed betrayed Greyhound ancestry, however remote.
That is important evidence. It is not proof. Lee was writing decades after the transformation had begun. He was giving an informed opinion, not reproducing a breeder’s notebook.
Later histories become much more confident. The Greyhound becomes a Whippet. Sometimes it becomes an Italian Greyhound. Sometimes the same story contains more than one of them. There is a problem with simply accepting those accounts: the dogs existed in history, but the names we now give breeds did not always exist in the same way.
A man breeding dogs around Manchester in 1800 could certainly have encountered Greyhounds and various smaller running or coursing dogs. Dogs ancestral to what later became standardized as the Whippet existed before the modern Whippet breed did. But saying that is not the same thing as proving which dog entered the Black and Tan.
This is one of the central mysteries in Manchester Terrier history, and it deserves better than another copied sentence about “a Whippet cross.”
[IMAGE: Black and Tan beside appropriate historical sighthound material]
Was the Manchester Terrier Crossed With a Whippet or Greyhound? →
And Then There Is John Hulme
Anyone who spends much time reading Manchester Terrier histories eventually meets John Hulme. The familiar story places Hulme in Manchester around the beginning of the nineteenth century and credits him with making an important cross that helped produce the later Manchester Terrier.
The story has been repeated so often that repetition itself has begun to look like evidence. It isn’t.
John Hulme may prove to be extremely important. But our question is not whether the story is famous. Our question is: How close can we get to the original source?
Who first wrote about Hulme? When? What exactly did that writer say? Was the other dog called a Greyhound, a Whippet, an Italian Greyhound, or something else? And how much of the familiar story appears only in later retellings?
There is nothing wrong with breed tradition. Sometimes tradition preserves real history. But first we have to find out which parts are history and which parts are tradition.
John Hulme and the Origin Story →
Rats
We should probably talk about the rats.
The history of the Manchester Terrier has become inseparable from stories of rat pits, rat-killing contests and spectacular performances by famous dogs. Some of those stories are very well documented. Others have been copied for so long that their details have become difficult to trace.
The association itself is certainly real. Even Vero Shaw, writing after the breed had moved far toward the show ring, said the modern Black and Tan could still “hold his own with most breeds at ratting.” That was not enough to satisfy Shaw as a working-terrier man. He thought the refined dog had lost some of the sustained courage required for harder work against foxes and badgers. But rats remained part of the story.
And then there are the famous dogs: Tiny, Billy, the great rat-killing records, the pits themselves. What actually happened in them, who witnessed the performances, which contemporary newspapers recorded them, and which details were added later are questions worth asking separately. There is enough material there for an entire history, so we gave it one.
[IMAGE: Historical ratting illustration]
Ratting, Rat Pits, Tiny and Billy →
One Breed, Several Sizes
There is another complication hiding in the old dog-show records. Black and Tan Terriers came in remarkably different sizes.
Early exhibitions divided them into weight classes that included extremely small animals as well as the larger terriers. The miniature dogs were not merely an unrelated toy breed that happened to share the same colors. Their histories overlap.
That eventually leads us into the Toy Manchester Terrier in America and the English Toy Terrier in Britain, along with another collection of changing names, standards and breed boundaries. For anyone trying to understand how the Manchester Terrier developed, the little dogs cannot simply be left out.
Toy Manchester Terrier and English Toy Terrier History →
What We Know. What They Said. What We Think.
There is a simple rule behind this site: we don’t want to make the history tidier than it was.
Where an old book or newspaper gives us contemporary evidence, we will show it. Where a Victorian writer gives an opinion, we will call it an opinion. Where later breeders preserve a tradition, we will call it tradition. Where the evidence points strongly toward an explanation without proving it, we will say that too.
And occasionally the proper historical answer will be: We don’t know.
That is not a failure. It is considerably more interesting than pretending we do.
The primary books, historical descriptions, old standards, illustrations and other documents used throughout this site are collected in our source archive.