They appeared in portraits, official photographs and an Isle of Man golden jubilee crown and were even immortalized in China. Queen Elizabeth II with one of her corgis at Sandringham in 1970. Photo: Fox Photos/Getty Images When 13-year-old Monty died shortly after starring in the James Bond sketch of a parachuting queen at the 2012 London Olympics, obituaries praised his great screen belly. Corgis have their own Wikipedia page and “What are the names of the Queen’s corgis?” consistently ranks in the top 10 most asked questions on the official website of the British monarchy. It had been a non-negotiable part of her life since her father, then the Duke of York, bought Dookie, a Pembrokeshire, in 1933 and she was given her own dog, Susan, as a present for her 18th birthday. Princess Elizabeth with Susan at Windsor Castle, 1944. Photo: Lisa Sheridan/Getty Images Susan even went on her honeymoon, tucked under travel rugs and next to a hot water bottle, as Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip crossed London in an open carriage to catch the train to Hampshire. She introduced the “dorgi”, breeding Tiny’s corgi with Princess Margaret’s even tinier dachshund Pipkin. When once asked how the sisters had compensated for the difference in the size of the clans, she replied, matter-of-factly: “Oh, it’s very simple: we have a small brick for them to stand on.” The Kennel Club was less impressed. “The dachshund evolved to hunt badgers in holes and the corgi to herd cattle. If one loses a herd of cattle in a badger hole, then these are just the dogs to get them out,” he sniffed at the time. During her lifetime the Queen had more than 30 corgis and dorgis. Not everyone was so enamored, including Prince Philip, who is often heard exclaiming: “Bloody dogs. Why do you have so many?’ Susan, from whom most were descended, gained notoriety by biting the ankle of a royal watchmaker, Leonard Hubbard, and ripping off the feet of various servants, a detective, a policeman and a Grenadier guard called Alfred Edge. The Queen and her family walk their dogs in the grounds of Balmoral Castle in Scotland, 1979. Photo: Bell Ron Bell/PA Another, Kelpie, was suspected of defacing a puzzle borrowed by the Queen from the British Puzzle Library. Royal staff, constantly tripping over dogs, had to wander around the palace and castles armed with blotting paper and a siphon of soda to clear up these little accidents. A footman, out of revenge, once laced the dogs’ food with gin and whiskey and watched them roam around the palace gardens, before promptly demoting himself. Friends say it was the Queen’s relaxation: walking and talking with them was a way to escape the constraints of her job. She liked to feed them by hand and their meals were prepared by the royal chefs. The Queen’s corgis stroll past President Barack Obama’s car as he has a private audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, 2009. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Her former nursery nurse, later her drawer, Bobo Macdonald, once painted a vivid picture of the relationship between the monarch and her pets. If the Queen entered a room wearing a tiara, she would “lie mute on the carpet in a mood of Celtic depression”, but if she arrived wearing a headscarf, they would start “jumping up and down” knowing they were going for a walkie-talkie. She often had to call in a dog psychologist to correct their bad behavior. He advised her to use a rape alarm to break up the normal corgi fights. And when Princess Anne’s English bull terrier Florence attacked and killed Pharos, one of her older corgis, at Sandringham as the royals gathered for Christmas in 2003, it put a damper on the festivities. The Queen with some of her corgis walking the cross country track during the second day of the Windsor Horse Trials in May 1980. Photo: PA Farros was buried in Sandringham in a small plot where each of her corgis was placed under tombstones designed by the Queen herself. In 2009, partly due to her own longevity, she decided to stop breeding them. Eventually she was left with three dogs: Candy now quite old, a young corgi named Muick, and another corgi puppy who replaced Fergus the dorgi puppy, who died unexpectedly in May 2021.
