Celebrating Canterbury’s celebrity canine.
We go a bit nuts for clever dogs. There was war rescue Rin Tin Tin who nearly won an Oscar in the 1920s, Dorothy’s Toto (also a rescue) in The Wizard of OZ, and Sinbad the sailor dog, who, as the mascot of the USCGC Campbell, was at sea for 11 years and saw combat in WWII. It’s not clear how smart Sinbad actually was, but he walked away with countless media appearances and his own military retirement ceremony. And in rural Aotearoa, there was Marlow’s Maharajah.
Rajah to most, Marlow’s Maharajah was a resident of Methven. He was born in 1929, son of Spearwood Dreist and Pixie of Quarrywoods. As the pomp of his folks’ names might suggest, he was a purebred, a wolf-grey German Shepherd no less, and a very good boy. So good, in fact, that his legacy includes a bronze statue outside the Mt Hutt Memorial Hall, a Facebook Page, a Wikipedia page and a kid’s picture book, Rajah the Wonder Dog of Methven, written about him by the staff and students of Mount Hutt College.
Rajah belonged to Constable John (Robbie) Robertson, Methven’s only police officer, who bought him as a puppy and set about training him. Soon, the dog’s astonishing ability to discover hidden objects and weapons, amongst other tricks, became a major asset and cause for a flurry of fame. According to a 1932 story in the Northern Advocate, Rajah’s “great and uncanny instinct was shown in his ability to retrieve anything that was hidden, whether he had seen the article or not, and from wherever it was hidden.”
Constable Robertson reckoned his dog was keener than any Scotsman – mostly for the way he could throw a threepenny coin into the grass out of sight of Rajah, and he would run straight to it without so much as a sniff around. By way of being the exceptionally well-trained pet of the only cop in town, Rajah became a police dog, sort of. There were no official police dogs in Aotearoa until the 1950s.
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Plus, there was more to Rajah than his diligent work in the public service. He was also a star of the stage, a showman. The same Northern Advocate article describes how Rajah could perform “over 50 tricks with a deftness and sagacity declared to be quite extraordinary.”
One of these tricks was an improbable grasp of English. The Constable would bring a piece of meat on stage and say, “Here’s a nice piece of meat, Rajah.” The dog would eat it. Then he’d bring another and say, “This piece is poisoned, I probably wouldn’t eat it.” And Rajah the Wonder Dog would turn up his nose.
There were even rumours Rajah was telepathic. To get to the bottom of these, two professors from Canterbury College, Dr Beeby of Psychology and Dr Farr of Physics, came out to Methven and subjected Rajah to a series of gruelling tests. These were, according to the Auckland Star in June 1934, “designed to eliminate possible explanations of his powers until the likely one was found.”
Rajah gave a “startling” performance in the tests, but, alas, didn’t manage to convince the professors of any telepathy. Instead, they put Rajah’s feats down to extremely high intelligence, a keen sense of smell and thorough training. Kudos to Constable Robertson.
It brings to mind Clever Hans, the German horse who created a frenzy with his so-called ability to do maths. He would stomp out the answers to equations with his hoof – a miracle! Turns out, though, Clever Hans was watching his trainer closely, responding to involuntary clues of anticipation in his body language when the horse reached the right number.
But back to Rajah. Was he, like Clever Hans, somehow able to outwit the humans in his life by reading them like a book? Or was he, contrary to the conclusions of Dr Beeby and Dr Farr, really a mind reader?
In 1932, a Hollywood bigwig, Dr A L Lewis, came to town, visited Rajah, and declared him brilliant. He said that of all the dogs he had seen, including the many brought to American Film studios, this “New Zealand discovery seems to have the greatest possibilities.”
In fact, Rajah almost became the next Rin Tin Tin. Also a male German Shepherd, Rin Tin Tin was born in Flirey, France in 1918 and was rescued from a bomb site by American soldier Lee Duncan. Duncan trained him and got him into showbiz, where he went on to appear in 27 Hollywood films. It was rumoured that he garnered the most votes for Best Actor at the first-ever Academy Awards in 1929, but that the Academy deemed a dog unworthy of the Oscar. German silent film actor Emil Jannings won instead.
After Rin Tin Tin died in 1932, the Fox Film Corporation looked to Rajah to potentially replace him, but Constable Roberston turned Hollywood down. Rajah stayed happily at home, helping with police work and touring around New Zealand doing shows, fundraising for social projects. He and the constable eventually moved to Bluff, and then to Geraldine, where Rajah died at age 14. (The family connection remained, however. When Rajah’s bronze statue in Methven was unveiled in 2015, Timaru’s Ian Robertson attended. The son of Constable Roberson, he was 100 years old at the time.)
What can we learn from Rajah the Wonder Dog? Well, perhaps that we all underestimate what we’re capable of. With some dedicated training and a Constable Robertson who believes in us, maybe we could all be stars, or legends of public service, or whatever we really want to be. Why stop at fetch?
Georgia Merton
