page_title: Brown Dog affair
section_title: November–December 1907
hierarchical_section_title: Brown Dog affair / Riots / November–December 1907
caption_attribution_description: Statue created by Joseph Whitehead, erected in 1906 in Battersea, London, in memory of the Brown Dog. The statue stood in Battersea from 1906 until 1910.
context_page_description: The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration by Swedish feminists of University of London medical lectures; pitched battles between medical students and the police; police protection for the statue of a dog; a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice; and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that divided the country.
  The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London performed an illegal vivisection, before an audience of 60 medical students, on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team; conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists. The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Outraged by the assault on his reputation, Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, sued for libel and won.
context_section_description: Medical students at London's teaching hospitals were enraged by the plaque. The first year of the statue's existence was a quiet one, while University College explored whether they could take legal action over it, but from November 1907 the students turned Battersea into the scene of frequent disruption.
  The first action was on 20 November, when undergraduate William Howard Lister led a group of medical students across the Thames to Battersea to attack the statue with a crowbar and sledgehammer. One of them, Duncan Jones, hit the statue with a hammer, denting it, at which point all ten were arrested by just two police officers. According to Mason, a local doctor told the South Western Star that this signalled the "utter degeneration" of junior doctors: "I can remember the time when it was more than 10 policemen could do to take one student. The Anglo-Saxon race is played out."
  The students were fined £5 by the magistrate, Paul Taylor, at South-West London Police Court in Battersea and warned they would be jailed next time. This triggered another protest two days later, when medical students from UCL, King's, Guy's, and the West Middlesex hospitals marched along the Strand toward King's College, waving miniature brown dogs on sticks and a life-sized effigy of the magistrate, and singing, "Let's hang Paul Taylor on a sour apple tree / As we go marching on." The Times reported that they tried to burn the effigy but, unable to light it, threw it in the Thames instead.
  Women's suffrage meetings were invaded, although the students knew that not all suffragettes were anti-vivisectionists. A meeting organized by Millicent Fawcett on 5 December 1907 at the Paddington Baths Hall in Bayswater was left with chairs and tables smashed and one steward with a torn ear. Two fireworks were let off, and Fawcett's speech was drowned out by students singing John Brown's Body, after which they marched down Queen's Road led by someone with bagpipes. The Daily Express reported the meeting as "Medical Students' Gallant Fight with Women".
caption: The old Brown Dog by Joseph Whitehead
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