The 1960s – Dedication and Qualification
The 1960s – Dedication and Qualification
The fledgling HPR breed clubs began to organise dedicated HPR field trials in the 1960s. Foremost of the clubs was the German Shorthaired Pointer Club, (GSPC), and in the early 1960s they held a number of “Qualifying Stakes” which appraised dogs broadly along field trial lines enabling the award of a Qualifying Certificate to a dog which had shown sufficient merit. The significance was that the dogs were shot over and were then asked to retrieve, and so more was demanded than simply the hunting and pointing characteristic of Pointer-Setter trials. Dogs were then regarded as “Field Qualified”.
Strawbridge Oliver (d) handled by GV Webb was the first Weimaraner to pick up a Qualifying Certificate at a stake held by the GSPC at Hailes Castle, East Lothian in October 1962.
Mrs L Petrie-Hay’s bitch Andelyb’s Balch followed suit in 1964 along with DG Roberts’s Theocsbury Abbie (b) at the same GSP Qualifying Stake at Cerniau, Welshpool.
These early owner-handlers pioneered the Weimaraner in field competitions in what were the formative years of the breed in the United Kingdom. They were also the formative years for the WCGB and other HPR breed clubs, and a great deal is owed to the dedication and persistence of this band of breed enthusiasts in confirming the Weimaraner as a hunting-pointing-retrieving gundog in the UK.
The efforts of the Club/Breed founders in implementing their vision of the hunting Weimaraner in the UK were rewarded in October 1967 when Lt. Col. HD Tucker’s 5 year old bitch Lotti Go-Lightly became the first Weimaraner to win a first place in a Field Trial organised by an HPR club, in the GSPC’s Novice Stake at Wynyard Hall, Stockton-On-Tees under judges GC Sterne and Mrs M Sanderson.
Lotti Go-Lightly was to dominate the field awards among Weimaraners in the late 1960s through to the early 1970s and in a modern results analysis features at 19th place in a “Weimaraner All-Time Field Awards” (WATFA)2 table for dogs with 94 points. Other than the Qualifying Certificate winners, there was only one other Weimaraner to win a recognised field trial accolade in the 1960s and that was CL Church’s Border Cleopatra (b) with a Certificate of Merit (CoM)3.
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