English White Terrier

The English White Terrier was a British show terrier that is now extinct. The name was given in the early 1860s to a prick-eared form of the small white working terriers that had lived in Great Britain since the late 18th century.

History

Small working terriers in Britain were always a varied lot. They stood anywhere from 10 to 15 inches, had drop or prick ears, and came in smooth, broken and rough coats. When dog shows took off in the 1860s, fanciers hurried to name and improve every type they could find. The white-bodied working terriers gave rise to the Fox Terrier, the Jack Russell Terrier, the Parson Russell Terrier and the Sealyham Terrier.

In the 1860s and 1870s a small group of breeders claimed that the prick-eared white dogs were a separate breed from the drop-eared ones. The claim was weak, since both kinds of ear turned up in the same litter. The dogs first appeared at London shows in 1863–1864, in two classes divided by weight. Writing in 1894, the Kennel Club judge Rawdon Briggs Lee passed on a suggestion that the breed had begun as a fox terrier crossed with a white Italian greyhound, and noted that some early show dogs looked more like an Italian greyhound than a terrier.

The English White Terrier was always a pet and show dog and never a working one. The Kennel Club came to see it as no real distinction from other white terriers, and its inherited problems made it unpopular with the public. Within about thirty years of its first appearance it had died out. Before then it was crossed with the Old English Bulldog, giving rise to the Bull and Terrier and the Boston Terrier.

Appearance

The club description quoted by Lee called for a close, hard, short and glossy coat, pure white, with any colored marking a disqualification. Flesh and muscle were to be hard and firm. The weight was set at 12 to 20 lb, though Lee wrote that he could not recall seeing a pure one as heavy as 20 lb. The latest London-bred dogs he had seen were under 10 lb, with a rounded apple head that he put down to inbreeding. A well-known show dog named Silvio, born in 1876, weighed 19 lb.

Temperament

Lee called it the most fragile and delicate of the British terriers. He wrote that it was no sportsman’s companion but made a nice house dog, one that needed a good deal of cuddling and care.

Care and health

All-white terriers were prone to deafness, and Lee noted that the breed was particularly subject to total or partial deafness.

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