Midland Counties Labrador Retriever Club thanks Sporting Saint and Skinner's dog food for sponsoring our event.

Ancaster Puppy August 2025

After an aborted attempt to run the Midland Counties Labrador Retriever Club Novice & Puppy Working Test at the end of July due to the heatwave, we were finally able to go ahead yesterday and were blessed with near perfect conditions.

The venue for the test, Ancaster, by kind permission of our landowner Mr Jon Ireland and keeper Mr Nigel Partridge, was a great setting. It offered a multitude of options for our judges and hopefully made for a really interesting event for our competitors. It was well supported with 26 Novice dogs and 12 Puppies taking part.

I would like to thank all our competitors for supporting this event, your patience with a Secretary that is new to the role was appreciated and the camaraderie between competitors and between competitors and judges was lovely to see. Hopefully see you all again at a test or trial in the future.

Thanks also to our generous sponsors Sporting Saint - Gundog Training Equipment and Skinner's.

We were blessed with plenty of helpers, which had a huge impact on the success of the day. About 2 weeks ago I was feeling like we would need to cancel as without helpers it would be impossible to go ahead and then gradually, I received kind offers of help, mostly from people that had either never helped before or who had only maybe been to one working test in the past. From dummy throwing, to stewarding, distributing snacks to other helpers and judges and even catching windswept gazebos. You were all amazing!

Lastly but by no means least, I would like to thank our judges, Andrew Slingsby, John Day, Andy Sweeney and Garry Ellison. They were simply superb from start to finish. They arrived super early to set up the tests for me and set great tests that were challenging but achievable and really gave the handlers an opportunity to showcase the abilities of their dogs. A mixture of seen, memory and blind retrieves, heelwork and wall jumping abilities put all of the dog's skills to the test. They also took time to give great feedback to the competitors.

Their sterling support also extended to gazebo catching and dismantling, displaying some great marking skills when a dog had to stop for a poop mid test and tolerated a new FT / WT Secretary who whilst remembering to thank them, completely forgot to hand them their thank you gift until after the presentation speech!

With that, I’m off to prepare for our Open Walked Up Working Test on Field Trial Lines at Stoke Rochford on the 24th August. Hope to see some of you there and in the meantime, here are the results.

Well done everyone! :

Puppy

1st - Ravenstag’s Aurora Of Camlann handled by Mira Solanki

2nd - Diglake Eclipse handled by Sara Briggs

3rd - Straight As An Arrow At Deepvale handled by Lynda Carr

4th - Diglake Pharaoh handled by Michael Featherstone

COM - Hanrebor Woldnewton Goosy handled by Jane Lidster

Birtlesbriar Azalea of Quillismere handled by Jess Burrows

Cuckavalda Red Wanya handled by Danielle Ramsden

Kenleap Harmony handled by Louise Barrington-Earp

Novice

1st - Laurinco Water Lilly handled by Max Gresham