Below is a digitised version of an article which appeared in the Observer in August 1983. I think it is a lovely account of the spirit of the mouse fancy!
Just a few comments:
Of course Fur & Feather is not defunct, as the article stated (in fact, we have a running ad for the NMC in it!). I think they probably mixed up some information about show reports and NMC-related content being moved to our own magazine. Fur & Feather is now largely a rabbit magazine.
Not sure about the blue-eyed long-haired mice of Roger Hutchings either. I have never seen a blue-eyed mouse in my life. Possibly, some journalistic over-zealousness.

Beads of sweat stood out on the top lip of burly Jack Hartley, as the Manchester man folded his arms in concentration and stared at the white-coated judge. Alongside him, Tony Jones, a tall dark Londoner, drew himself up to his full height, rigid with tension. Once again, the judge raised first one animal by its tail, then the other. With an emphatic nod, he held one mouse above all the rest. Jack Hartley’s agouti was Best in the Show, and the winner of the National Mouse Club’s annual top trophy. Moments later, when Hartley was assuring me that he had never had any doubt about the outcome – I had my fortune read before I came and she said, “Don’t worry, Jack, it’s a cert” – Tony Jones challenged the decision. Jack Hartley’s agouti doe had been entered in the show in the Under Eight Weeks Old class. Tony Jones inferred that the lady was older than she looked. A hasty committee meeting was called in one corner of the hall. Voices were raised, and fists seemed ready to be During the argument, a Club member drew me on one side and explained carefully that such disputes were not unusual. ‘Although the animal itself is so minute, it’s the work that has gone into it, you see. And when you are breeding something so small, to improve such fine points, the judging also has to be very, very precise. But don’t worry, lass, they’ll all turn up to next week’s meeting and be the best of friends again.’
After a tied vote in committee, the lady President of the National Mouse Club ruled that the judge’s decision should stand. Passions in Britain’s National Mouse Club dwarf belief, and the animals. Mouse breeding has a long tradition in Britain, and the Club itself goes back to 1895. At present, 290 members pit their skills as breeders against each other and bring their mightiest contenders along to numerous local club shows and half-a-dozen prestigious national challenge cup events. Here 57 cups, some of them nearly 100 years old, rosettes and certificates are fiercely competed for, and a young boy finding himself clutching a third prize rosette for a favourite doe can become hooked for life.

The British love of small animals, cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs, is proverbial. But among the miners of Yorkshire, in industrial Manchester and in the East End of London especially, there has always been pride in fancy mice. Not only are the mice referred to as ‘fancy’, the hobby itself is called ‘the Mouse Fancy’.
Mouse fancying is traditionally a man’s world, now penetrated by afew pioneering women. Fanciers of all ages and professions are attracted to mice as keen sportsmen. ‘I used to run, box, play football very competitively,’ said Jack Hartley, aged 59, ‘now I’ve got my mice. Mouse breeding is a sport until you get them on the table in front of the judge. Then it’s no longer a sport; I don’t go to a show to lose.’ There are a number of other things Jack Hartley doesn’t do. ‘I never go on holiday,’ he said firmly, ‘neither do any of the top breeders. We live with our mice.

I don’t need a holiday anyway. I can relax just watching them.’
The National Mouse Club not only organises events, but sets standards of what a good mouse should look like – ‘the Mouse should be long in body, with a long clean head, not too fine or pointed at the nose; the eyes should be large, bold and prominent; the ears large and tulip shaped, free from creases, carried erect with plenty of width between them …’
The Club also draws up innumerable rules controlling the eligibility of particular mice for particular categories of competition. Some refer to the finer points of mouse safety and etiquette: ‘No under eight weeks mouse shall be eligible for competition unless of sufficient age to warrant travelling alone unaccompanied by its mother.’
Like all clubs the NMC acts as a useful container of its members’ obsessions. ‘It’s small enough to cope with the infighting and the personality clashes,’ said one breeder. ‘People leave in high dudgeon but come back later. Many come back when their children want mice, or when they reach retirement. A lot of our turnover is not lost forever’.
If the enthusiasms generated in the Mouse Club are of a high order, so also are the animals. Fancy mice reach remarkable standards of health and beauty, and one 16-year-old newcomer at the Annual Show commented admiringly, ‘These mice have nothing in common with your ordinary pet shop specimen. Nor with anything that you see in the laboratory.’ Not only do breeders try to produce mice of excellent ‘type’ large, strongly muscular, fresh-eyed, with tails as long as their bodies, and even, dense fur – they soon become involved in breeding and enhancing the 70-odd colours and patterns that Fancy Mice sport: from champagne, through blue, black, cream or red ‘selfs’ (all one colour), through tans (underbelly a rich brown with top coat of another colour), Dutch (black saddle like a Dutch rabbit), agoutis (rich brown or golden hue with even dark ticking) through cinnamon and tricolours. Fashions in colours come and go. ‘The cream is the mouse of the moment,’ one competitor confided. In the last 20 years two new mouse breeds have arisen to whet interest.
The satins are a strain of glossy mice with high sheen coats, thrown up in laboratory work and quickly seized upon by the Fancy, whose members now perfect them in many shimmering shades. At the Annual Show, 59-year-old Frank Hawley from Manchester said, ‘I’ve got a 14-week-old ivory satin who is a double champion, and if he wins two more points he will be a triple champion.
But I have to pick my judges carefully because they don’t all know ivories that well. It’s a subtle colour.
An ordinary white looks very white. But the fur on a satin is transparent. It’s the difference between snow and ice. The judge has got to appreciate that.’
And the National Mouse Club’s President, Mrs Doreen Cooper of Manchester, a blonde lady with some of the éclat of Mae West, hit upon the only new breed ever to occur within the Fancy, the seal-point Siamese with markings exactly like the cat. Doreen Cooper’s father, Jack Watts, is the NMC’s oldest member, a famous mouse breeder in his day, who never allowed his daughter to keep mice of her own. Only when she married could she indulge passion and enter the Mouse Fancy.

‘The new breed was a million-to-one chance,’ she says. The new mice were white at birth, at about four weeks their points appeared and then the blue coloured up. I was lucky.’
To appreciate the details of fancy mouse breeding, I called on Tony Jones, secretary of the North London Long-tails, at his brick terraced house in Walthamstow, northeast London. A glass cupboard housed a large number of silver cups. ‘Some are for football, most are for mice,’ he explained. ‘It’s an élite band of fanciers who keep winning, about 10 of us in all, and most of the trophies we just leave in a bank vault in Manchester. He is the winner who keeps London at the top, but admits ‘The main area for mouse breeding is Yorkshire. Bradford is the Mecca.’
He became interested in mice as a 16-year-old schoolboy when a friend bought him a couple from Petticoat Lane, and he took them home for a joke. He grew curious, tracked down the magazine Fur and Feather (now defunct), which featured all small animal societies, and joined the National Mouse Club. After a year, he won a ‘Best in Show’ at a small competition and he was away.
Tony Jones keeps some 500 mice in a large shed, neatly stacked in 70 boxes, all housing mouse families.
Everything is immaculate, and smells only of warm hay. He pulled out one box and fished among the hay and
uneaten oats for a particular mouse, so far unnamed, a long, lean creature of an elegant champagne colour. He stroked the quivering body with his right hand and spread it out on his left palm. This small contender, with delicate, chiffon-like ears, was, I was left in no doubt, a potential champion. ‘I show creams, champagnes, silvers,’ he said. ‘I like the delicate colours, the pastels. Also, I prefer a variety that is large, with big ears and big bold eyes. My creams can reach 11in from nose to tip of tail.’ The breeder’s talent – ‘It’s a question of having a good eye, looking at one animal and another and knowing that breeding from those two would produce something good’ – can sometimes collide with the exhibitor’s competitive streak.
‘Basically you exhibit the does, not the bucks which have harsher coats and less attractive shapes, and if you have a very good doe you have to make the choice to breed from her or exhibit her,’ explained Tony Jones.

‘The mouse is a very delicate animal, and the doe is pulled down by breeding. A mouse is finished by eight or nine months, it’s not a long career. So the main object is to produce a stud, a strain which will turn up winners all the time. If you breed from your best does you may get three new ones, just in time, you hope, for the next big show. You have to keep on your toes.’ Mice, in nature, can breed at the age of five weeks or so, but in the Fancy they restrict their mice to four generations a year.
Feeding the mice takes an hour of Tony Jones’s time each night, and the feed – oats, sunflower seeds, wheat, brown bread, carrots (never cheese) – costs about £3 a day. At the weekend, boxes are cleaned out, new litters culled, breeding decisions mulled over.
Rivalries between the generations and north-south differences quietly brooded on. ‘The Yorkshiremen are more dedicated,’ Tony Jones thinks, ‘there are fewer distractions perhaps.’
Later, I went to Yorkshire to see for myself. I was informed that Shipley, a small town now enveloped by the suburbs of Bradford, is ‘the mouse capital of the world’. Among Shipley residents, the young
secretary of the NMC, Dennis Capstick, 21, is so preoccupied with organising shows and editing the Club’s monthly organ, The Mouse Fancy, that he has abandoned breed ing for the moment. But he came with me to call on John Kellett, 71, secretary of the Airedale Mouse Club since 1956 and past President of the National Mouse Club.
John Kellett’s house contains a large collection of mouse statuettes, presided over by a large silver mouse presented to him by grateful fanciers. When he designed himself a garage some years ago, he built it extra long and blocked off a spare room at the end. In this room live 500 mice, the pride of the collection being the pearls, mice with off-white fur ticked with grey, and black eyes, a comparative rarity which he developed over 10 years. ‘As long as I live there’ll be pearl mice in Shipley,’ says John Kellett. Right now he is working on a new strain, a pearl with a tan belly. He picked up one small creature by its tail; its underside was covered with mustard fur. “That’s my first, and it’s the only one in the country. While gently fingering through his boxes, Kellett recalled some of the great fanciers he had known. Like C.H. Johnson, Club President in the late 1930s, a rich man who had given over stables on his country estate to house up to 10,000 mice, employing a full time mouse-manager. Or Manchester stalwart Percy Ashley, a fierce character, famous for his outspoken comments on judges’ decisions. He regularly stormed out of the Fancy, only to rejoin six months later. ‘He was a large, loud-mouthed, brusque man, but when he was with his mice he was quiet and gentle in his movements. He had a respect for mice that he didn’t have for human beings,’ I was told. ‘You can always tell a good fancier by the way he talks and moves in his mousery.’

The mouse traditions of Shipley have recently attracted 67-year-old novelist and retired geneticist Roger Hutchings, who moved to the area a year and a half ago, drawn by the prospect of settling down to breed
mice surrounded by like minded enthusiasts. There are seven or eight mouse shows each year within walking distance. As we walked down the mousery late in the evening, he explained that his ambition was to redevelop a number of almost extinct varieties – most notably long-haired mice. He switched on the light and the mousery was swept with a noise like heavy rain, as 700 mice rushed forward and pattered their paws against the mesh of 100 immaculate boxes. ‘Mice are nocturnal animals,’ explained Hutchings, pulling out box 61 containing a glossy chocolate family. ‘The mouse metabolism is geared to life in the wild. They appear to live on their nerves.’ The next day, I made the rounds of the boxes as Roger Hutchings pushed along a trolley of oats and round white saucers of liquid feed – skimmed milk with vitamin and mineral additives. Roger Hutchings
outlined the chess-like skills of plotting how to breed for certain characteristics in the shortest number of moves. Unlike most mouse fanciers, he keeps detailed written records of the genetic background of all his strains. To work up his long-hairs, he found a few depressed specimens in laboratories, not very long-haired and poor in type. His blue-eyed long-haired whites are already winning prizes, and long-haired chocolates are already on the way. ‘I don’t breed to win,’ said Roger Hutchings, but I like to win because it shows me I am on the right lines.’ He considers that mouse fanciers, like other animal enthusiasts, are devoted to the creation of living beauty. It’s akin to green fingers in a gardener or being good with children. If you’ve got the urge to breed you can do so much with mice in a short time with limited space and cost. Improvement of the breed is the achievement.’ So why do grown men live for mice? ‘It’s a sport, like any other breeding,’ says Jack Hartley. I keep mice because I can’t afford to keep a race-horse.’ ‘You’re doing something you want to do in miniature,’ explains Eric Jukes, secretary of the London and Southern Counties Mouse Club. ‘Why do men play with model railways? Because they can’t afford to run a railway line of their own. ‘It’s kind of a strange hobby. It attracts the lonely,’ says Tony Jones. ‘But it needs flair.’ ‘The appeal is the love of breeding livestock,’ sums up Frank Hawley, six times a producer of double champions. ‘It’s not sentimental. Because the breeding is so quick, it’s a real test of the breeder, more than with cats or dogs. The mouse really shows the man.’