'Tramp'

In the beginning my parents didn't have a dog, but I always yearned to have a dog. As a young lad I would go down the town to with my friends, one of my pals parents owned a pet shop. There was one dog in particular that had been sold several times but each time it kept being returned to the shop, since nobody could do anything with it. My friends dad told me that since it couldn't be homed it was going to be 'put down' the following day. I was determined that would NOT happen so I told him I would take it home...at which point I nearly found myself looking for a new home! - I nicknamed him 'Tramp' and the name Tramp stuck.

After a lot of arguments at home, I was given an ultimatum, "You either go to a training club and train it, or you get out." So off we went to training classes, and after a lot of hard work quite a few battles with him, we became best pals, so we'd won! We went on to win some minor obedience competitions, and later some major obedience competitions.

A film director came into the training club looking for a 'scruffy, unusual looking dog' to feature in a film called 'The Dustbin Men', featuring Bryan Pringle. He became the best dog on the street for the dustbin men, he really enjoyed it and it taught me a lot about him and dog training for television.

'Douckla' Erics first German Shepherd - Show, work
and film

I wanted another dog so got a German Shepherd which I named 'Douckla', this would have been around 1965. This dog was particularly easy to train in comparison to Tramp. I showed her in Crufts in 1966, didn't win anything, but that really didn't matter. We then did another film with Douckla, which starred Windsor Davies and Aubrey Richards, which was extremely good indeed.

After a couple of years I was approached by a guy called David Round, the head prop master for Granada Television at the time, who came along and said "we are filming the whole of the Sherlock Holmes series, and YOU are doing the dogs." Not left with much choice, my answer was "Yes". There were a lot of small parts but some of the larger parts were on The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles. We continued right through the series, it was a great series to have worked on, with all sorts of dogs and cats.

The prop buyer for Coronation Street, John Eccles, asked me for a Great Dane, there was only one person I could think of to help me find one, that was my good friend of many years, Ann Lunt, who had shown and bred Great Danes, indeed it was Anns dog who appeared for us in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Schmeichel No.1 was owned by me, unfortunately he developed 'wobbler's' and no longer could appear in the show. Anns dog 'Magnum' took over from then on. In 2006 after 35 years with Granada Television we moved to Scotland, Ann and Clive took over our work with their company Animal Capers.