Barbara Kathleen Vera Woodhouse (1910–1988)

by unknown photographer, 1980

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Woodhouse [née Blackburn], Barbara Kathleen Vera (1910–1988), animal trainer and broadcaster, was born on 9 May 1910 at St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, co. Dublin, a boys' public school where her father, the Revd William Blackburn, was headmaster; her mother, Leilah Alice (née Masterman), was the daughter of an English banker active in tsarist St Petersburg. Later in life, Woodhouse claimed that her affinity with animals was initially the result of overhearing her mother ask of a friend 'Why can't Barbara be beautiful, like the other children?' Animals, she reflected, in contrast to fickle human beings, 'didn't seem to mind what I looked like' (Daily Telegraph). Her idyllic childhood in the Irish countryside, surrounded by pigs, rabbits, and other pets, was ended when she was nine by her father's sudden death from a heart attack. The family decamped to Sandfield, a house on the outskirts of Oxford, where Barbara trained her first ponies, and continued her education at the nearby Headington School. 'Every mistress had hated me [there]', she later recalled, 'because I always went to school smelling of horse' (Woodhouse, Talking to Animals, 27).

In 1926 Barbara Blackburn moved to Harper Adams Agricultural College at Newport in Shropshire, the only girl among those studying agriculture. She gained the second-highest marks at the end of the course, having meanwhile also taught herself to be an excellent car mechanic, and was offered a temporary job experimenting on 'Which foods tainted milk and why?' as part of a larger Ministry of Agriculture project. On completing this research—and, to her surprise, finding herself sacked by the ministry for presenting her (well-substantiated) conclusions nine months early—she returned to Oxford and, with the enterprise that characterized her entire life, immediately opened a riding school. She enhanced her horse-training skills during a period in the early 1930s managing a series of estancias in Argentina, where a chance meeting with a Guarani Indian provided her with an extremely valuable insight: 'he told me that horses always go up to each other and sniff each other's noses, … and that he always did the same thing when he wished to tame a horse himself' (Woodhouse, Talking to Animals, 28). This formed the basis of an infallible horsebreaking technique, which is depicted in a delightful group of photographs, reproduced in her autobiography, showing her approach to a nervous pony (ibid., 64–5).

Barbara Blackburn's first marriage, to Allan George Mill, had ended in divorce by 1940; perhaps reflecting the view of divorce common at this time, she made no mention of the relationship in any of her books. Shortly after her return to England she met and married, on 5 August 1940, Michael Clayton Woodhouse (b. 1910/11), a recently qualified doctor, the son of Alfred Edward Clayton Woodhouse, a medical practitioner and dental surgeon. Her husband's wartime general practice in the Wiltshire town of Melksham allowed her to manage her first farm nearby, and when after the war he began a long hospital career in London (mainly as consultant in physical medicine at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington), she was able to exchange it for the first of a pair of farms—both called Campions—in the home counties. There, at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, she returned to agricultural research: after discovering by chance that her cows' milk yield markedly increased when their backs were covered with horse rugs, she designed and made—on a sewing machine in the middle of the farmyard—waterproof winter rugs and rather more delicate cotton sheets for the cows to wear in summer. A letter to a farming paper reporting her discovery led to her first brush with the national press, as Pathé and television cameras and journalists from Europe and the USA descended on the farm.

After moving to the second Campions, at Croxley Green in Hertfordshire, in the late 1940s—and by this time with three small children, two daughters and a son—Barbara Woodhouse began slowly to develop these media connections in typically enterprising ways. Her residential dog-training courses led to a notable appearance in the second edition of What's my Line? (in which the panel failed to guess her occupation), and a regular spot as dog trainer on the Scottish television series The Smokey Club in the early 1950s. As well as this television work—which also included training a succession of old English sheepdogs for Dulux paint commercials—she became involved in the world of film, producing documentaries about her training centre and a short film for the Children's Film Foundation shot entirely in and around her home.

Woodhouse was rarely afraid to mix her work with her domestic life: her dogs also provided the inspiration for a series of children's books, the products of a kitchen-table publishing operation which lasted over thirty years and resulted in eight original works. The first, a picture book, Jyntee, the Tale of a Dog with a Broken Tail (1951), was initially, like many children's stories, written to amuse her own sick child. Her books were not exclusively animal-related: among them are a set of (sociologically fascinating) foreign-language phrase books covering the phrases that 'we most need, in daily contact with foreign “helps”' (Talking in French/English, 1961, 4).

Although these activities made her well known in several specialist areas, Woodhouse did not become a household name until the age of seventy, through her BBC television series Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way, for which she was named Pye Television and Screenwriters' Guild female personality of the year in 1981. Although she called the celebrity this brought her 'unexpected success' (Woodhouse, Just Barbara, 117), it had been prepared for and, perhaps, planned, for many years. She had been a frequent broadcaster for the BBC since being asked in 1951 to present a radio talk entitled 'The kind way to break horses', while her book Dog Training my Way (1954) had been accompanied with a gramophone recording of her voice commands for the owner to use. For over a decade she had been urging the BBC to consider a series on dog training, and the direct approach eventually worked. The first episode was broadcast in January 1980: Woodhouse was shown teaching a group of dogs and their owners—her attention being at least as much on recalcitrant people as on their disobedient pets—chosen from over 2700 applicants.

The purpose of the series was to help the dog owner to train the animal so that it gave of its best, and in this Woodhouse was extremely successful. That it appealed to a larger audience than she had envisaged and rapidly became something of a cult was a tribute to Woodhouse's ability to present on screen, utterly unaffected, her natural 'mixture of shabby grandeur in appearance and imperious command in voice' (Day-Lewis). She directed her instructions at both dogs and their owners, her command 'Walkies! WALKIES!' becoming a catchphrase which she heard for the rest of her life—shouted to her from buses, trains, and the cabs of lorries, and providing inexhaustible material for impressionists. Her television work continued until a severe stroke in 1985 left her barely able to walk or speak. Even so, with typical determination, she still managed to write (jointly with Charles Warlow) and publish a final book: Stroke (1987), offering coping strategies to fellow sufferers. After a second and more serious stroke she died, at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, on 9 July 1988.