He was a dog unimpressed by rank or social importance.  His “victims” included novelist and playwright, John Galsworthy, the prominent British surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves, and Sir Barry Jackson, a distinguished theatre director.  Cynthia Asquith, the English writer and socialite, insisted that the dog was a menace who dominated the luncheon table and “contested” every forkful of food on the way to her mouth.  He was a known shredder of trouser legs, and delighted in terrorizing servants. He had a particularly strong aversion to postmen, but by contrast, he quite liked T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Henry Watkins, the Honorary Secretary of the Society of Dorset Men in London.  His name was “Wessex” (“Wessie” to his confidants), a relation of “Caesar,” Edward VII’s terrier, and had he not been owned by the inventor of the “cliffhanger” story, and the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, we might not know about this feisty dog.

It will comes as a surprise to no one that Wessex was a Wire Fox Terrier who was made more incorrigible by Hardy’s over-indulgence.  Hardy routinely got Wessex into a state of frenzy, and corrupted him with morsels of cheese rind. Spoiled?  The creator of Peter Pan, J M Barrie, reported that Hardy once showed him a letter from a company that had presented him with a radio. They’d been delighted to find out that the man liked it, only to be disheartened to learn from another source that the radio was in fact bought for Wessex.

We suppose that naughty dogs are humorous only when they belong to someone else and are from the past, but reading about Wessex causes us to reflexively grin.  He was so……..so terrier!