Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

AS, arguably, the world's most famous dog, it's not surprising that Nipper - the cute canine in the renowned "His Master's Voice" trademark - should have a well- documented life story.

The bull terrier-Jack Russell cross has been dead for nearly 103 years and had actually been a deceased dog for three years when the celebrated portrait of him that became the HMV logo was painted.

Such is his lasting fame that today his biography can be found not just in books but even on the Internet.

He is, after all, an international icon - billed, for instance, on one Web site as the "most popular mascot and advertising logo of all time" and claimed to be on a par with the likes of the Mona Lisa in terms of global recognition.

Though the London-based Gramophone Company, as HMV was first known, bought the copyright to the picture of Nipper listening to a record player in 1898, across the Atlantic he is famed as the "RCA dog," having been a trademark over there for almost as long.

But though his last resting place can be found under what is now a bank's car park in Kingston, Surrey, it is where Nipper started off that perplexes Looking Back.

According to the official biographies of this monocular mega-star mongrel (he lost an eye in a scrap with a rat), he started off as a stray in Bristol in 1884. The tale goes that he was brought home as a pup by theatre scenery painter Mark Barraud, brother of the artist, Francis Barraud. From a photograph of the by-then dead pet, he painted the His Master's Voice picture that gave Nipper his unique place in perpetuity after it was bought by the Gramophone Company and was first used as an advertising aid in 1900.

Yet, apparently, in East Lancashire they knew a much different version of the dog's antecedents - one that said its home town was Darwen and that its owner was someone else altogether. In 1932, the Northern Daily Telegraph served up this story in its Table Talk column...

"Perhaps the most familiar picture of any dog in the world is one of the smooth-haired fox terrier figuring in the famous trade-mark of His Master's Voice gramophone records.

"Doubtless the question has often been asked, 'Whose was the dog, if it ever was a real dog?'

"It was a real dog and Darwen can supply all the information that relates to the picture of the famous canine pose, as the dog was none other than a Darwen dog.

"It belonged to a gentleman called Ramsden, who was a particularly well known tradesman in the town for many years.

"He kept the stationer's and bookseller's business just below Duckworth Street Congregational Chapel.

"It was in the very early days of the gramophone when the photograph was taken and it was done in this way.

"Mr Ramsden purchased a number of gramophone plates in which nothing had been registered and one day, using one of these plates, he addressed the dog through the gramophone horn.

"The utterance was registered on the plate which was then played on the machine. The dog, his curiosity aroused, pricked his ears as he heard his master's voice coming from the horn.

"While in that attitude a camera clicked and a perfect picture materialised." A shaggy dog story or one with a grain of truth to it somewhere?

After all, the official version of the Nipper story does say his picture was painted from a photograph and that Nipper did come to Lancashire - being taken by Francis Barraud to the Liverpool home of yet another of the Barraud brothers who had recently acquired a brand new invention, a "talking machine" called the phonograph.

Nipper's engrossed response to this became the inspiration for the world-famous picture.

But did Mr Ramsden, who we find in business in Darwen some six years after Nipper's debut in an advertisement, take the photograph and was he really either the "voice" or the "master" in HMV?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.