It is the end of an era for several reasons. No God save the Queen no more, no more brightly colored suits, and the Pembroke Welsh Corgis are also disappearing from the world stage. As long as their owner was, they were a stable factor in Buckingham Palace. But with Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) they disappeared from the palace. Replaced by two terrier-types, Beth and Bluebell. King Charles has nothing to do with the corgi.
Short on legs, big ears, long happy snout – Queen Elizabeth was devoted to the breed from the very first corgi in her life, Dookie. It was her father, King George VI, who brought this family dog into the palace in 1933. When Elizabeth turned eighteen, he gave her her first corgi of her own. This Susan became, in dog breeder jargon, Elizabeths foundation bitch: the foundation dam of a decades-long breeding program. Elizabeth often had as many as ten dogs at a time, sometimes all walking ahead of her. “A walking carpet,” Lady Diana would later have called them.
Reportedly, Elizabeth liked the dogs so much because their fierce disposition could terrify guests and employees. “They are herd dogs, so they bite,” she once said with a teasing smile to a guest (American journalist Sally Bedell Smith describes it in her biography of the Queen). People were actually bitten sometimes. In 1991, Elizabeth herself got three stitches in her left hand after a corgi bite (she wanted to break up fighting dogs).
It didn’t lessen her love. The corgi became her trademark. Statues, bags, photos, baubles, mugs – all sorts of merchandise has been made of the Queen and her corgis, and even an animated film: The Queen’s Corgi (2019). When the 2012 Olympics were held in London, Elizabeth pretended to be a ‘Bond girl’ and parachuted into the stadium with James Bond. In the internationally acclaimed movie Susan’s last two offspring, Monty and Willow, walk ahead of her.
Also read Queen Elizabeth II’s obituary: The queen who outlived everyone by remaining silent for 70 years
Around that time, she quietly stopped breeding. According to some sources because she didn’t want to leave any puppies behind when she died, according to Others because as an old woman she was afraid of tripping over the low-legged dogs. But when her last corgi Willow passed away in 2018, and the line of dogs that had accompanied her since 1933 came to an end, she was reportedly heartbroken. And then her husband Prince Philip also fell ill a few years later, in corona time. He died last year.
Earlier that year, Elizabeth still had two new corgis, from her son Prince Andrew (who had already become discredited, he was accused of sexual abuse in Jeffrey Epstein circles by Virginia Giuffre). Sandy and Muick comforted her in difficult times. On her birthday, she posted photos with the corgis on Instagram, with the caption: “The presents that keep giving.” And at her funeral they stood along the mourning route. The dogs now live with Andrew’s ex, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.
So the corgis have disappeared from the palace. When Prince Charles, now King Charles, was twenty years old, he said in an interview bot: “I like Labradors.His current two Jack Russell-type terriers Beth and Bluebell have no pedigree and were rescued from the shelter. Reader’s Digest wrote: „The corgi’s reign has ended”. Nevertheless, the corgi will always remain the dog of the British queen in the Netherlands, thinks corgi breeder Yvonne Gouweleeuw. “I think people will still say: hey, there’s the queen’s dog.”
Not the nicest dogs
Gouweleeuw has been working with the breed for over 26 years, and it shows in the things she carries with her. Her purse, wallet and even her debit card have images of corgis on them. Those on the pass are her own dogs. “Three champions,” she says proudly. Gouweleeuw is active in the Dutch Welsh Corgi Club (NWCC) and wrote a piece about the death of the Queen for Corgi Comment, the club magazine. “Queen Elizabeth has put the breed on the map.”
That breed has been vulnerable for a while. The popularity kept pace with the queen’s popularity. In 1944, the year Elizabeth Susan gave birth, the breed rose 56 percent in popularity. By 1960, seven years after Elizabeth’s coronation, nearly 9,000 puppies were being registered in England each year. After that, the popularity dropped somewhat, until Queen Elizabeth’s 70th anniversary came up. In 2021, according to The Kennel Club 1,223 puppies registered – the most in thirty years. After her death, searches for corgi breeders were ten times more frequent, reported The Guardian.
It is not a cheap variety and the price now seems to be rising even further. “But”, counters Gouweleeuw, “all varieties are expensive these days.” A corgi used to be about 800 guilders. “Now you pay 2,000 euros for a puppy, but you also pay that quickly for a dachshund. In fact, people sometimes pay as much as 3,500 euros for those mixes with a dwarf keesje or a poodle. For a bastard, he doesn’t even have a pedigree.”
Although the queen has done a lot for the corgi, Gouweleeuw does not think she has actually influenced the appearance of the breed. “That is too much honor,” she says. “She didn’t show her dogs, she certainly didn’t have the most beautiful dogs.” Sometimes one of her corgis even had a litter with her sister Margaret’s dachshund, pups called dorgi (dachshund-corgi) crossbreeds. “Not the most beautiful crossing,” says Gouweleeuw, “but she would have loved it just as much.” True: the first litter was an accident, but the British royals have brought dorgi’s into the world on purpose a few more times.
To safely breed her own puppies, Gouweleeuw always looks for the best stud, in the Netherlands but also abroad. “For fresh blood.” It is important to keep the breed healthy. “Especially in America they are good at making what is long longer and what is short shorter, but we have to be careful that the legs of the corgi become too short. It must remain a healthy dog, with a nice appearance.”
Influencing race
This is also the opinion of the two judges, Roel van Veen-Keur from Zwolle and Godelieve de Wit-Bazelmans from Nijmegen, who recently attended a breed inventory of the NWCC in Elst: an afternoon at which owners of more than twenty dogs had their Pembroke Welsh judged. Corgi or Cardigan Welsh Corgi (the somewhat larger sister breed) meets the breed standard. For the NWCC, the inventory is a way to get a picture of the corgi population that is used for breeding.
Although that is somewhat relative, says Van Veen-Keur, because in addition to the NWCC there is another Dutch corgi association (the Dutch Welsh Corgi Association) and, in addition to the breed inventory, there are various competitions, such as the NWCC Champion Club Match and the large, three-day Winner Show in which foreign dogs also participate, of all kinds of breeds. “Not all people with a corgi go to all those days.”
And you also have, she says, people “who buy a bitch with a pedigree, because they want a litter, and when the time comes, they don’t ask a breeder or the breed club for advice. No, they think: I like the neighbor’s dog, he also has a pedigree, otherwise I might have to go all the way to the other side of the country. I personally think that is wrong, but you have no control over it.”
While that was a reason for her to become a judge, about forty years ago: grip. You can influence a breed by punishing unwanted characteristics (such as corgi legs that are too short) during inspections and competitions. And you can help breeders, adds De Wit-Bazelmans, to make choices in their breeding plans, including when it comes to health and behaviour. In that sense, Van Veen-Keur and De Wit-Bazelmans probably have more influence on the corgi than the British queen.
Van Veen-Keur and De Wit-Bazelmans don’t just judge corgis (they don’t have them themselves either: De Wit-Bazelmans has a sheepdog and Van Veen-Keur a basenji). After a compulsory general cynological training, judges specialize in a number of breeds, which they are then allowed to judge. Van Veen-Keur and De Wit-Bazelmans, who have been in dogs for decades (“a hobby that got out of hand”, both say), are both allowed to judge more than a hundred breeds, which are divided into breed groups. Both are, as it is called, group judge of ‘Breed Group 1, Sheepdogs and Cattle Drivers’, and are therefore authorized to judge all almost sixty breeds of shepherds from that group. And one of those sheepdog breeds (or actually two, the Pembroke and the Cardigan) is the corgi.
Yes, those calf biters are real herding dogs. Traditionally: the little dogs herded cows. They stood low enough on their feet to avoid a kick from their hooves. Only a century ago it was thought that it would be nice to describe the corgis as a breed in a breed standard. That was fashionable at the time: a century and a half ago, the very first kennel club (umbrella of national pedigree dog associations) in the world was founded, the British Kennel Club. Other countries followed. The Netherlands has, since 1901, the Board of Directors in the Kynological Area in the Netherlands.
So Elizabeth was there early on, with her pedigree dogs. In photos you can see how her first corgis are still a bit coarse sheepdogs and how the breed later developed into the stylishly brushed fashion model splendor of her later corgis.
But it is all wasted on the current British royals. Crown Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton also do not have a corgi. Even before their black English cocker spaniel Lupo passed away at the end of 2020, they added a cocker spaniel puppy from the breeding farm of Kate’s brother James. So there is plenty of love for dogs in the British royal family, but the days of the corgi as a royal breed seem to be over for good. It has now become a folk dog.
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