By all accounts, Lady Anne Blunt was a remarkable woman. The only granddaughter of Lord Byron, she was a musician, author, artist, scholar, and an adventurer in the true sense of the word at a time when ladies in the 19th century were expected to be more demure. Wilfrid Blunt, a poet, would-be politician, and devastatingly handsome,  was intrigued by this quiet and self possessed woman. She shared his interest in Arab culture, and in 1869, they married. Eight years later, they took a historic journey to explore the Middle East, and part of their plan was to find the best Arabian horses they could, and bring them back to England.

Despite not knowing more than a handful of Arabic words when they set out, the couple travelled amongst fierce and often warring Bedouin tribes. Before long, Lady Anne learned to speak Arabic fluently, and even became an authority on the language. She gained the trust and respect of the Bedouins, and this enabled the couple to buy their first Arab horse in January of 1878, a quality mare named Dajania who would became one of the foundation horses of their Crabbet Arabian Stud breeding farm.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Lady Anne Blunt had brought the first Arabians into England.

In her accounts of her travels, Lady Anne first mentioned the Saluki when describing a camp of the Shammar tribe, and noted that the tribemen called their dogs “Tazi, or “tazeh,” a northern term for the breed. On their next trip, this time to Arabia, the couple meant to acquire some dogs as well as horses, and in due time, the Blunts did get a brace of Salukis, a bitch named Shiekhah” and “Sayad,” a male given to them by a sheikh’s headman traveling with them.

In her book, “Sight Hounds,” Juliette Cunliffe mentions that the first Salukis came to England with Arab horses in the early part of the 18th century. Another source writes that the Salukis (known then as Persian Greyhounds or “slughi shami”) were first brought into England in 1840, and a third indicates that the Hon. Florence Amherst imported the first Arabian Saluki in 1895 from the kennels of Prince Abdulla in Transjordania.  One account has the breed in England before the Blunts even married, another has the breed coming to England long after the first Arabian horses were brought in.

We already know that we’ll be editing this piece once we ascertain when the breed did first arrive in England, and we always invite the input of breed experts.

Image: Saluki by Ron Krajewski
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