A Brief History.
By Guy Radford.
On February 11th 1994, fifteen Gundog enthusiasts met at the Duncombe Arms Public House in Ellastone, halfway between Uttoxeter and Ashbourne, to form a Gundog Club! Looking back, I'm not sure that any one of us had any idea of what we were trying to achieve! The idea originally came from George Handley, our first Chairman, who, for a long time, had been suggesting to me that we form our "Own Club" as we were travelling miles to Training Classes, Working Tests and Field Trials run by other Clubs. Lots of ideas were kicked around and a Committee was formed with yours truly as Secretary, (no surprise there!), George as Chairman and John Mead as (and still) Treasurer. We had, as a guide, the Kennel Club's official "Guidlines for Forming a General Canine Society" to work to and at the end of the meeting we had come up with a name, fixed the membership subscription fee and arranged a course of Training Classes. All we needed now was some members! As I had suspected, the Secretary of any Club always draws the short straw so I got stuck in with an advertising campaign to promote our Training Classes, the first of which was scheduled for March 27th, a mere 6 weeks after our first meeting! To cut a long story short, that first class had 52 (that's FIFTY TWO) handlers and dogs present and you can imagine the problems we had. It was a nightmare, to put it mildly, but we got through it. We learnt very quickly. We had to! Working Tests followed and membership numbers soared month by month. In 1999 we held our first Novice Trials and 2006 saw our First Open Stakes. A few said we were wasting our time as we would never achieve Trial Status.
Enough said!.
Photo. Looking East (ish) over the Dove Valley.
