Libby Hall (1942 – 2023) began collecting photographs of dogs in 1966, saving unwanted pictures from being discarded into dustbins or thrown on bonfires. What started as a hobby ended up as one of the most famous and distinguished collections of canine photography in the world. Indeed, with her several books of photographs she attracted what the Telegraph Magazine called a ‘cult following’. In 2019, she published A Measure of Dogs, which she described as ‘an autobiography told through the lives of her dogs’. Very kindly, Libby gave us permission to publish an extract from the book. We have chosen the story of Chloe, but it could have been any of the other dogs she writes about with a warmth and level of feeling that every dog lover will relate to.
A Measure of Dogs is available from Blurb.
Libby’s preface to ‘A Measure of Dogs’
From my very first beginnings…
… a dog’s face was as firmly imprinted on my mind as the faces of my parents. Like Lorenz’s goslings hatching out and finding Lorenz, I arrived to find the face of our Dachshund. In this photograph, my father holds me in one arm and our dog Kirstie in the other. Kirstie and I are studying each other intently. A life without talks has, from the start, been inconceivable to me.
When many years later, a beloved dog of ours was dying, my husband said to the vet: ‘We measure out our lives in the lives of our dogs’. Mine has been a good life measured out in dogs.
Chloe
Then, in June 1967 the Dogless years ended and I have lived with at least one dog ever since.
Before we had even moved into our new house, I had bought a puppy from a cage outside a pet shop. What an appalling admission to make now. But I, like many others in 1967, knew no better. At least then, at least in Hackney, the puppies for sale were not ‘pedigrees’. They hadn’t come from the evil puppy farms we were yet to learn about. Chloe and her littermates were mongrels. Healthy and happy and undoubtedly from a mother that had puppies ‘by accident’. I can’t remember how much Chloe cost, but I know it was so little that the expense wasn’t a consideration.
At the time I was waiting to move from my flat in Abbey Road to our new house. I was going back and forth to do work on the house before we moved in. I had walked over to shops in Stoke Newington about a mile away to buy something or other that was needed for work on the house. I had no intention of buying a dog. But the moment I saw Chloe and her siblings – black and white as Chester had been – I realised: ‘I can’t have a dog again now’. I can’t remember why I chose Chloe from the others. I remember them all being roly-poly and falling over each other. I certainly didn’t think I needed to buy the puppy out of pity for its fate. I only thought I needed to buy the puppy because I wanted one!
I walked home with my puppy held in my arms. She was totally motionless. By the time we arrived home I had begun to fear I had somehow bought and ill and dying puppy. I put her gently down on the grass in the garden: she instantly sprang up and went wild with free excitement. Tearing around the garden, rushing back to me, leaping and chewing and yelping. And that is how she remained throughout growing up. A joyous soul who expected to love and to be loved by every dog and person she met. And so she almost always was.
Chloe grew up to be quite a sober and sensible bitch – though a wanton one when she was in heat. Before we could get her spayed, and before there were middle-class fences separating our low-walled East End gardens, Chloe had a litter of eleven puppies that were obviously fathered by several different dogs. One of those puppies grew up with our neighbours and turned into a spectacularly handsome dog, with a shiny horse-chestnut coloured short coat and the build of our Labrador. We were sad when after several years that family moved away and we lost touch with such a handsome son of Chloe’s.
Though everyone in our household was working, we mostly all worked shifts – in the BBC, in Fleet Street, in a hospital… so Chloe was rarely left at home alone all day, and she soon had a canine companion. A friend who was living with us at the time brought home a dog from Battersea, she called ‘Sage’. Sage was a gentle creature who immediately decided to defer to Chloe in all things and so they were fine friends. Sage is the only dog I’ve ever known who used her front paws like a primate. She would sit up and hold things between her paws, or she would grasp your hand with her paws. It was a sweet trait.
Sage and Chloe could get into the garden through a dog flap and, with those low brick walls, Chloe often came home with treasures. She was an obsessional burier. We would frequently find stale chapatis buried under cushions that had been given to Chloe by the Sikh family whose garden backed onto ours. This determination to bury things could be very funny. Once, in the front room, which had a smooth lino floor, I found a piece of dry toast that Chloe had tried to hide under a pile of fluffy dust. It looked like a silent comment on our house keeping skills.
We never taught any of our dogs tricks but Chloe by chance worked out a trick of her own that meant people she met on our walks would smile or say ‘ahh’ or ask if she was ‘taking herself for a walk’. Her lead was a thick, short braided one. She was quickly trained to walk more or less to heel and so she carried her lead in her mouth. Because of the way people reacted Chloe learned to walk with self-important pride and was reluctant to relinquish the lead when we needed to move through traffic. I don’t know why we never got round to taking a snapshot of Chloe with her lead. I wish we had. In fact, I have almost no photographs of Chloe as a grown-up. Taking photographs at home seems to have come and gone in waves. There are some coloured snapshots but none of them really good enough to reproduce now. But that doesn’t mean Chloe, with her sweet-smelling soft black and white coat, her gentle tongue for greeting you with a kiss, and her quiet dignity as she grew older, is not engraved in my mind.
Chloe, a joyous soul who expected to love and be loved by every dog and person she met.
A Measure of Dogs is available from Blurb.
Other books by Libby Hall include: Prince and Others (2000), Prince and Other Dogs II (2002), Postcard Dogs (2004), Postcard Cats (2005) and These Were our Dogs (2007) all published by Bloomsbury.
