JAMIE (Darkbeck Wispa. O.W.)

This is Jamie.

Jamie was born in July 1988 and was a complete impulse buy. I had already had Sam for 2 years when Pat Batchelor told me at the Gravesend show that she’d got another litter from Sam’s Mum (Runfold Izzy), although this litter had a different dad (Joanna Hill’s Runfold Leith).  She told me that there was one white dog with a black spot on his head and I fell in love with him just from the description. 

I took the next day off work, went to Pat’s to see the litter, and left a deposit on the spotty one. He was just as gorgeous as I'd imagined him to be.

Jamie had a lovely personality. He didn't like mornings and was very grumpy if I got him up early, but I taught him to smile on command, and when I asked him to smile, his face would light up and his bad mood would be forgotten.

He was a bit of an escapologist. I never saw him do it, but he used to escape out of the 8" x 6" cat flap in our back door during the night. The first few times he did it, I accused my Dad of locking up without making sure he was in, but then one night, I heard Jamie barking in the garden at about 2am, so I got up and  let him in (cursing my Dad), but then at 4am, he was barking in the garden again.  The windows were all shut, so the only way he could have got out was through the cat flap but he was a big dog and I couldn't understand how he could have done it.  

A few weeks later, I was in the garden training Sam, and I heard the cat flap banging, and suddenly Jamie was leaping at me. He had definitely come through the little cat flap. My vet said that a dog's rib cage is very flexible but even so, it was a very small hole for a big dog to squeeze through. I don't even know how he got his shoulders through (see the photo above). 

Jamie was a very special dog and we had a very close bond.  He was very affectionate, but he wasn’t easy to work, as he was quite nervous in the show ring and sometimes legged it back to the car in the middle of his heel free. Several times I almost gave up on him,  but with the help of Rescue Remedy and some advice from John Rogerson and Bing Bellamy, he was ‘C’ only by the age of 4, and won a ‘C’ the following season.  

Like Sam, Jamie got 2 qualifiers to go with his win, but before he got the third qualifier to put  him into Championship C, he suddenly developed auto-immune haemolytic anaemia  and died 2 weeks later, in May 1995.  He was just 6 years old.