During her life, Mrs Newbery senior gave Joan a bound three month copy of the Our Dogs canine newspaper, which had originally been donated by the Our Dogs Publishing Co, as a Special Prize for one of the Western Counties Canine Society shows, dated October to December 1926 and including the Christmas Supplement. Joan has now allowed us to borrow this tome and I am currently extracting relevant items for preservation, including the precursor to the modern breed notes then known as ‘Collie Chatter’, show reports and judges critiques.

The sheer thickness
together with the tightness
of the binding of this volume of Our Dogs makes scanning pages difficult, particularly as the page size is no longer standard, and rather larger than most scanning equipment, including mine. It is therefore perhaps fortunate that early canine newspapers were largely text based, in fact the
Our Dogs newspapers of this period only included images on the front cover and page two,
throughout the remainder the publication relies
on descriptive text, with occasional cartoons.

 

Top right — Accepting these limitations who could
not be intrigued by this image of exhibitors at
a Midland Collie Club members’ show which
appeared in the Our Dogs issue dated October 29, 1926.

Joan Parker, who worked for the Newbery family over many years, must be congratulated on her perseverance in encouraging the daughter of Mr and Mrs Newbery junior
‘Alphington’ to allow the
National Rough Collie
Archive access to
Alphington Scrapbooks
and photographic albums.
We understand that this
collection is ongoing,
and that further material
should be forthcoming
in the future.

In addition to this bound copy of Our Dogs, Joan has also
acquired permission to supply images from the Alphington
Scrapbooks, and many of these, like the two examples
reproduced here, are of a less formal nature.

 

 

Centre right — Mr Alf Newbery senior, relaxing with three of his
collies in the gardens of his Newlands home. Well perhaps relaxing is not the most appropriate description.

Clicking on the image will allow you see this image
within the context of the printed page
in Adobe Acrobat pdf format.

Bottom right — Mr Alf Newbery junior in a more informal pose with
three of his collies, including the tricolour dog Ch Alphington Nigger King, the kennel’s first post war champion, in the centre.