(The following article has been updated from the article THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS written originally by Sidney Clayson).
Considerable research has failed to reveal the exact day and month on which our Club was
Founded, but there is a reference to 'late 1889'. There is evidence that attempts had been made to inaugurate the Club as early as 1886,'For the purpose of establishing a standard for the breed'. However, this attempt floundered through the extreme argument that existed, as to which of the types then known as the 'English' and the 'Scottish' was most deserving of recognition.
At a second attempt wiser counsel prevailed when leading Fantail men of that day, who included: F G Bird, J Collingwood , P R Harrower, C A House and J Lee - apparently mostly from the London area - met at Sydenham on the occasion of the 1889 Annual Show of Poultry and Pigeons at the Crystal Palace. Mr J Collingwood was elected Founder President and Mr J Lee Secretary. Theirs was the vision that saw the need to bring into close fellowship all who shares a love of the Fantail Pigeon, to foster healthy competition at the shows and to manage the needs of those who chose to make the care of these beautiful birds their hobby. This they achieved by a concentration of effort to establish Rules and Breed Standards by which their hobby could be pursued in harmony and to the mutual best interests of the fanciers and their pigeons.
Since its inauguration the affairs of the Club have been vested in the President, Secretary and Committee. John Bragg our current President is the fifty-seventh holder of that honour. Likewise the Club has been guided by the efforts of eighteen secretaries.
Various records have been passed on through predecessors in the Secretary’s office though it is unfortunate that no Minutes exist to cover the inaugural period from 1889 - 1896.It would appear that those early founders met as and when they could after shows and sometimes at various London hostelries. Their struggle to keep an organisation going was backed by such stalwarts as W Marshall-Harvey, George Gray, James Lee, Stuart Murray and W Stevenson. The last four named are still commemorated by the annual Club awards of trophies in their memory.
One of the major events in the early years of the club was the entry into the Exhibition Fantail world of George Gray .The story goes that Mr Gray, at one time a breeder of English And African owls, fell in love with fantails at a show and there he met James Lee, one of the most successful breeders of fantails the fancy has ever known. A partnership was formed with Lee providing the knowledge and contributing his own stock birds and Gray the premises and the all-important funds. The fruits of this partnership were soon apparent afterwards in the trophy awards to the partners in 1896 and 1897.
Gray's interest widened and he took every opportunity to purchase good birds and any prize- winners that were for sale. Lee seems to have become a somewhat unwilling participant in what he described as "The Fantail Trust Company" and the partnership soon dissolved. Thereafter Gray`s name regularly appears in the whites and coloured awards, winning the trophies year after year until 1919.It is reported that he must, at one time have possessed over 1000 Fantails, and he regularly sat long through the night planning the mating of his birds. When he died at the age of fifty-three from appendicitis, so famous had his immense collection of fantails become that there were obituary notices in the national press telling of his remarkable hobby.
One writer reports that he once visited the famous lofts in 1901 and he marvelled at the extent and order of the establishment. There were rows on rows of wire breeding pens all of a standard pattern, capacious aviaries, and pen-rooms with his picked youngsters in training for the shows and carefully secluded from visitors. Most imposing of all was a large span-roofed glass-covered veranda like building with paved floors and a central gully hollowed out at intervals with bathing pools connected by a runnel of flowing water for the birds to drink and bathe. The premises were lit throughout by the then luxury of electricity Gray was very generous to new fanciers and he started many fanciers with winning birds.
In the year 1900 an AGM was held and the minutes record that 'The Secretary was instructed to propose to the Dairy Farmers Association that saddles should in future be separated from laces and chequers. Also that the Dairy Farmers council should choose two Club judges for future shows as the work was thought to be too much for one!
At the Crystal Palace Show in 1903 the Treasurer reported that he ' found the liabilities of the Club account, considerably exceeded the income and although he had obtained some donations towards the deficit, a further sum was still required. There and then the AGM had a `whip-round` at the meeting and a further 21 pounds 19 shillings 6 pence was raised. This sum added to the members subscriptions, gave total receipts of 44 pounds for the year.
Regrettably there is another break in the continuity of the records from 1905 up to the early 1930s. This includes the period of the First World War and over this time the Club successfully survived, thanks to the guiding hand of Frank Jarvis.
In his review of our first sixty years the late Dr Armstrong acclaimed Frank Jarvis as the most esteemed and famous member of the Fantail Club. He must have been a most energetic and industrious individual. Joining the Club in 1901 he was a member for over fifty years. Fantails apart, he was very successful with a select stud of Racing Homers which he claimed had won him over 6000 pounds. Elected President for 1946-47 he marked the beginning of the Richard Armstrong era and backed the new Secretary in the revival policies so necessary after the Second World War.
The steady progress in the early part of this century was sadly disrupted with the advent of those 1939-45 war years. Shows, which had been regularly staged at the Crystal Palace and Olympia in London and other shows in York, Birmingham and Manchester, closed down for "the duration".
Morris Pugh rendered yeomen service to the Club in the early part of the century, and was President in 1922-23 and in the year 1937 at the AGM, he was made the first honorary member of the club, in appreciation of his long and valuable service.
The years 1939-45 wrought great havoc for all pigeon fanciers. Many good strains were lost to their owners who had been called away to war service and other strains perished through lack of food supplies. There were no opportunities for breeding or exhibiting in those days but, thanks to such trojans as W Miller-Higgs and especially H S C Dean, who held on to the reins of President and Secretary throughout those dreadful years, there was still an embryo of a Club left in 1946. In this year strenuous efforts were made towards a struggle for revival and re-vitalisation of the Club This was no easy task as the number of surviving birds was minimal but sufficient to form a cornerstone in the construction of a new Fantail era. Present-day fanciers who, lived through those times will recall that for some years after the war, food rationing continued and this included livestock feeds.
The National Pigeon Association organised a show in London at the Royal Horticultural Hall in January 1946 and thus afforded the opportunity for the revival of our Annual Club Show Eight classes of Fantails were put on and guaranteed by the Club. An AGM was held after the show. However, it was decided that a return to late autumn was the best time to hold Annual General Meetings. This obviously prompted the President and members to call another AGM on 26 November 1946 at the Grand Hall, Beckenham Baths, Beckenham.
It is thanks to those few who returned to the Club after the war - F H Jarvis, R Blair, D Thompson, H. H. Knightsbridge, R Arnold, W Bardell, E J Smith, Tom Meek and Will Taylor - to mention a few of the well-known Fantail men who, together with an active young Physician Dr Richard Armstrong, who had joined the Club in 1934, were all present at this 1946 meeting. It is they to which the credit must go for launching a post-war revival from which the Club has prospered, through changing times, to emerge, as we know it today.
Dr Armstrong became Secretary and his wife, who joined the Club at that 1946 meeting, became a most able husband and wife partnership and it was they who steered the Club through the years 1946 - 1965. The first part of this period, taking us to the mid-fifties, was a time of expansion as the Club took to the task of extending activities into more widespread areas of the country. Pre-war history records that a Scottish branch first existed in 1934 and this was re-formed in 1947 and has happily operated alongside the Scottish Fantail Club up to this day.
In any history of the Club mention must be made of the late H S C Dean who served continuously as Club Treasurer from 1926 - 1950 and when in 1949, having been a founder member, he attained fifty years of Club membership and to mark this special achievement he was invited to be President for that year. A silver salver for best adult bred by an exhibitor at our Club show annually perpetuates the memory of Herbert Dean.
Having succeeded in getting the organisation into top gear the next task undertaken by Richard Armstrong was to formulate and publish a Breed Standard, which expressed all that the Exhibition Fantail, should be to meet the requirements of judges and breeders alike. This subject dominated the agendas of meetings in the late forties.
There was likewise a striving to establish a means of communication between members. Yearbooks were published at intervals from the early 1920s up to 1947. These books gave the names and addresses of the membership and any show results were also included. One interesting fact is that from 1920 (or maybe earlier) until 1953, the annual subscription for an adult member was 10s 0d. In marvelling at this low figure one must pause to realise that our constantly inflationary economy has raised wages, forty-fold since those earliest days. In 1936 life membership was offered at five pounds and five shillings, and - perhaps fortunately - was never taken up by anyone!
As the Club has developed so has the Fantail pigeon - both in quality, in quantity and in colour. So great are the numbers that our Centenary Show did stage seventy classes under seven judges. In contrast there were nineteen Fantail classes at the Crystal Palace in 1898 under only one judge!
By 1926 the Club had been divided into three branches for ease of administration: (I) Scottish; (ii) Northern, consisting of the whole of Ireland and Wales as well as the Isle of Man, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland and all other English countries down to an including Cheshire, Nottingham and Derbyshire; (iii) the South - made up of all other English counties including the Isle of Wight and the Channel Isles. Also in 1926 the 'Fantail Standards' were published for white, black, silver, blue, red, yellow and dun, together with saddles and laces. It is interesting to note that laces were in existence long before our Club was founded. A good stud of Fantails was possessed by a George Ure of Scotland who was famous in Fantails about the middle of the nineteenth century.
Popular belief seems to be that the Fantail pigeon breed probably originally became scattered over England, Scotland, the USA and of course various other European countries by the voyaging of merchant seamen. At the time of the East India Company, when the Western hemisphere was waxing rich in trade with the Far East, it was not uncommon for our sailors to bring back specimens of these unusual birds which could be acquired on trips to such ports as Calcutta. It is interesting to note that Fantails were also known in the USA well before 1889.
George Ure contributes an account in Fultons 'Book of Pigeons' (Cassells 1895) in which he refers to English and Scottish types. The Scottish Fantails were said to be small in body and excelling in carriage and action, but were not so strong in tail. Whereas, the English type were described as larger, courser and with very large flat tails. Ure was uncertain of their origins but believed they came from the East and it was to standardise these variations of type that our Club dedicated itself in the first fifty years of its existence.
Our Diamond Jubilee was marked by the issue of a special enlarged edition of the Club yearbook. This worthy publication, long since out of print, was the culmination of much work and research by Richard Armstrong. It was the first of his two major literary efforts for the Club. The second was even more comprehensive and was published as 'The Fantail Club Handbook', this was designed to guide any pigeon fancier who had aspirations to breed and/or exhibit Fantails.
More recent history is that the club shows were continued at the Dairy Show at Olympia, with occasional switches to the BPSS shows at Harrogate. In all our history there has always been a small number of lady members. Mention has been made of Mrs Armstrong and when her late husband stood down as the Secretary in 1965 Mrs Jean Mould, the first lady to become Secretary of the Club, succeeded him.
Our next Secretary was Flt Lt Jack Penley-Martin who energetically served the Club from 1971 until 1976 when Jack had to give up for personal family reasons. Regrettably he was ultimately lost to the Club when circumstances dictated that he dispose of his Fantails. Jack was a pioneer in meeting the need for regular 'newsletters'. He sponsored this means of communication to replace the 'Year books' and ‘Supplements’ which had been issued from time to time in the 1930 - 1950 period.
Our next Secretary was Sidney Clayson who was Secretary from 1976-1994.Sidney did a fantastic job promoting the fantail. The highlight of his reign was the extremely efficient way he organised the Centenary Celebrations, which celebrated the first one hundred years of the Fantail Club.
In the late 1970s Bill Rogers published a twice-yearly edition for the Club, which was extremely well produced and stimulated much interest in Fantail affairs. Bill was known as Mr Fantail as he kept around 330 fantails and won every trophy in the club apart from the Saddle trophy.
Over the last decade the Newsletter has been maintained as the Secretary's means of communication and is posted out to all paid-up members in July each year. Nigel Wycherley our current Secretary undertakes the actual production of the letter.
Nigel also is the compiler of ‘Fanfare’, which is published, for wider consumption, in the 'Feathered World' magazine. Fanfayre was first contributed to by the late E J Smith of Heacham who was one of the best silver breeders in the Club's history. After his death 'Billie' Cooke took over for a period and then John Bragg rendered many years yeoman service in this role. John has an extensive collection of Fantail literature and can always be relied upon to promote the fantail with very interesting and informative articles.
During the past twenty-five years the Club has established itself as a leading breed club in the Fancy. Classes have gradually increased at the shows and the degree of increased interest has been marked by the addition of twelve more trophies. Our Annual Club Show now has 30 trophies up for competition whilst eight are offered at our branch shows.
Many worthy Fantail men have served and still serve the Club. It is difficult to mention all by name but a glance through the trophy winners of the last quarter of the century reveals that at least thirty-six different members have held one or more of these trophies on at least one occasion. The trophies themselves are a symbol of the success of our club - after all there were only twelve on offer in 1925! They are also a mark of the generosity of our members and serve well to commemorate many of the names I have mentioned in this history of the Fantail Club.
The quality of the majority of colours at the present time is due to that over the past twenty years many fine birds have been imported from the USA and Canada. These birds have improved the type of our birds dramatically and now all the top studs in the British Isles have the influence of these imported Fantails. More fanciers are being more adventurous in their pairings, crossing different colours together in order to improve the standard of their birds.
Our Annual Club show held at Doncaster attracts an entry of around 300 birds and we now use the American method of judging which everyone agrees is a far superior way of judging than was used in the past. The Club holds another eight shows at various venues throughout the British Isles from late October to mid January. At present they are held at the following towns or areas: Whitehaven, Colchester, Scotland, Darlington, Stafford, Cornwall, Manchester and Swansea. The Scottish Fantail Club also holds a Fantail Only show, and it was this Club and its members who were the first to use the American Judging System and they must be congratulated on that fact.
Finally we here in the U.K. do feel that the future of the Fantail pigeon is in safe hands of a younger generation of Fantail breeders who have true respect for the aims of their illustrious fore-fathers and are doing everything to improve the standard of their birds and pass on all their gained knowledge to future fanciers in the hope that our hobby will progress successfully into the new Millennium and well beyond.
May our Clubs' best wishes go to all followers throughout the world of the Queen of the Fancy and our special thanks must go to Tom Pritchett for taking on the difficult task of producing the 5th Fantail Special.
