Edward Laverack: the Father of the English Setter

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“Suddenly into the middle of the coterie of breeders a bombshell was flung, so startling as to cause a violent upheaval of all the old theories, and a complete revolution in setter breeding, the effects of which have lasted to the present day.” —Walter Baxendale

Walter Baxendale’s “bombshell” was a man named Edward Laverack, now universally regarded as the father of the modern English Setter. Little is known about his early life, but as a young man, Laverack was apparently a shoemaker’s apprentice, but where he worked and for whom is not clear. According to Robert Armstrong in All Setters, Laverack “spent his youth in Hawick, a town in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, but at the age of 17, not liking it after he had been there some time, he ran away.”