New Zealand citizens have found many and varied ways to support the troops who have gone to war in the country’s name. Most commonly we think of fundraising, the campaigns to send cards and letters to lonely servicemen, volunteer service in peripheral roles and the knitting and baking efforts that provided comfort to the men and supplemented their basic provisions. But some people chose to gift an animal to a unit.
Regimental pets or mascots have been important to soldiers away from home because while some may become a recognisable symbol for the unit, they also offer distraction, a different kind of companionship and some animals also perform jobs of their own. Caesar the bulldog is probably the most well-known NZEF First World War mascot. In 2019 he was awarded an animal Blue Cross Medal, New Zealand’s first recipient, for his bravery as a Red Cross assistant helping to find wounded men on the battlefield. His heavy leather collar is part of the Museum’s collection.
However, the Museum also holds a khaki dog coat, proudly embroidered with the name of its owner ‘Sam’ and bearing appliqued silk flags of Britain and of New Zealand. The coat still has a few dog hairs embedded in the fabric.
Sam was ‘a handsome English collie dog’ gifted to the Canterbury section of the New Zealand Army Service Corps (NZASC) on 25 August 1914 while the men were in training at the Epsom mobilisation camp in Auckland. He had belonged to Violet MacMahon, wife of Auckland picture theatre owner and entrepreneur Joe MacMahon. A short film, ‘Sammy my old friend Sam’ was made in his honour and screened in MacMahon’s theatres as part of a film compilation featuring the Auckland contingent of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF). Contemporary advertisements for the films refer to Sam as a Manx collie, a reference that has been repeated since. However, British sheepdog expert and researcher Carole Presberg is clear that as a breed the Manx collie doesn’t exist. Carole notes that there was no such dog indigenous to the Isle of Man. ‘The original Manx sheepdog was probably descended from spitz-type herding dogs brought to the island by the Vikings. The only record of herding dogs on Man comes from an article written in 1911’. She quotes the article which also says that the dogs used on Man were different to collies and ‘were only sheep-dogs by special training.’ Article sources had said the dogs ‘did not work the sheep as the collie does … The collie is said to have been brought to the island by the Scotch shepherds who came over to take charge of the larger sheep farms. The collies were not generally used until 1860.’ Carole adds that border collies are the only sheep dogs found today in the Isle of Man.
The film of Sam (which borrowed its title from a popular song well-known from the 1895 Australian musical pantomime ‘Djin-Djin’) doesn’t appear to have survived. The first film in MacMahon’s triple-header, ‘Auckland's Expeditionary Force. 1. The Minister for Defence Reviews the Troops’, has survived and shows a black and white collie-type dog ‘parading’ at the front of the troops. Was that Sam? Perhaps. There were other dogs around the camp. A reporter who visited the mobilisation camp the day after Sam was presented to the NZASC wrote that ‘Most of the regiments at the camp have a "mascot" in the shape of a goat or a dog…’, and added that that the 6th Hauraki Regiment was looking for one, preferably a bulldog. The popularity of bulldog mascots was a reference to the British plucky bulldog spirit.
Sam’s military career and fate are unknown. The intention when he was gifted was for him to become the Plugge family dog if he returned to Auckland. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Plugge had by then been appointed Officer Commanding the Auckland Infantry Battalion in the NZEF. Plugge survived the war but Sam doesn’t appear to have been mentioned again. It would be nice to think he got to run around on the Plugge farm in the Waikato after the war but we hope he got to enjoy a dog’s life wherever he went.
With thanks to Carole Presberg.
NB: If you are interested in reading more about breeds of British sheepdog, keep an eye out for Carole’s book The History of the Working Collie Breeds which is due to be published by Rowe Publishing in the first quarter of 2022.
Cite this article
Romano, Gail.
A collie for the service corps. Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira. First published: 18 February 2022. Updated: 7 March 2022.
URL: www.aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph/features/Sam