Brown Dog Affair - Brown Dog Memorial

Brown Dog Memorial

After the trial, Lind af Hageby was approached by Anna Louisa Woodward, founder of the World League Against Vivisection, who suggested the idea of a public memorial. Woodward raised a subscription, and commissioned from sculptor Joseph Whitehead a bronze statue of the dog on top of a granite memorial stone – 7 ft 6 in (2.29 m) tall – containing a drinking fountain for human beings, and a lower trough for dogs and horses.

The group turned to the borough of Battersea for a location for the memorial. Lansbury writes that the area was known as a hotbed of radicalism – proletarian, socialist, belching smoke, and full of slums – and was closely associated with the anti-vivisection movement. Battersea General Hospital refused to perform vivisection or employ doctors who engaged in it, and was known locally as the "Antiviv" or the "Old Anti". The chairman of the Battersea Dogs Home, the Duke of Portland, rejected a request in 1907 that its lost dogs be sold to vivisectors as "not only horrible, but absurd."

Battersea council agreed to provide a space for the statue on its newly completed Latchmere Estate, a housing estate for the working class offering terraced homes at seven and sixpence a week. The statue was unveiled on 15 September 1906 in front of a large crowd – speakers included George Bernard Shaw and the Irish feminist Charlotte Despard – bearing an inscription described by The New York Times as the "hysterical language customary of anti-vivisectionists" and "a slander on the whole medical profession":

In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February, 1903, after having endured Vivisection extending over more than Two Months and having been handed from one Vivisector to Another Till Death came to his Release. Also in Memory of the 232 dogs Vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England, how long shall these Things be?