Page 28 Daily Mail, Monday, August 12, 2019
I’m fed up
with men.
Why can’t
they be
more like
sheepdogs?
by Jenny
Johnston
She’s had FOUR husbands — and dumped
them all. Now as she returns to our TV
screens, our most famous shepherdess
explains why dogs are a girl’s best friend
K
aty CROPPER knows
about love, loyalty and
mutual respect. Of course
she does. She’s a shep-
herdess and so spendsher life with dogs. Sheepdogs. Highly
trained, highly intelligent, off-the-
scale-obedient sheepdogs.
two of them, Border Collies Butch and abi,
are sitting at her feet now, exhausted and
exhilarated from a training session in the
Cumbrian fields, gazing up at her adoringly.
the thing about sheepdogs, she says, is that
their eyes don’t lie.
‘What you see is what you get and I like
that. Even if it’s a naughty sheepdog — and
you do get naughty sheepdogs — it’s fine
because it’s straightforward. I mean they can
still disappoint you, but they don’t play
mind-games with you.’
Other life companions, by comparison, are
irritatingly complicated. Katy has been
married four times, and has walked out on
every one of her husbands. at 58, she still has
infinite patience with dogs, but none for men.
‘Why can’t they be more like sheepdogs?’
she says, only half-joking. ‘It’s not just the
ones I’ve been married to. I’ve met some
recently who haven’t been who they said
they were and I can’t bear it. Dogs are
genuine. Bloody hard work, but worth it.’
Nearly 30 years ago, Katy’s bond with her
dogs made her the most famous shepherdess
in Britain. In 1990, she became the first
woman to win the iconic televised sheep trial
One Man and His Dog. Seven million viewers
watched the slight woman with the big smile
sweep to victory with her collie, trim.
this year, in another remarkable first, she
is returning to the competition. though One
Man and His Dog was axed in 1999, it is an
annual special in BBC1’s Countryfile.
She seems nervous, not about her own
chances, but about whether her dogs, aged
two and three respectively, are experienced
enough to perform under pressure.
‘It takes a couple of years to train a dog up,
so they are still both young,’ she admits.
Her own crook is ready, though? ‘God, yes,’
she says, giving her trusty worktool a shake.
‘there is life in the old bird yet.’
there certainly is. Spending a day with
Katy Cropper and hearing her views on life,
love and leatherette trousers is bracing.
T
HOSE in the dog-training world
have always known Katy — now
one of Britain’s leading sheepdog
trainers — as a character. She once
competed in a county show wearing a bikini
(‘I was showing sheep and someone dared
me to take the white coat off.’)
today, she isn’t in a bikini but
you still worry that John Craven
might not be ready for this because
she’s wearing cut-off denim shorts,
which show an expanse of lithe
mahogany thigh, teamed with a
tweed jacket, african bangles and
an Indiana Jones hat.
Katy is part Camilla Parker
Bowles, part Kate Moss. She
could have stepped out of Vogue
magazine, but this is normal Katy
Cropper attire, apparently.
She always wears lipstick when
she competes and has her hair
done ‘to show respect for the dogs.
I don’t want to be one of those
smelly country types’.
We clamber into her 4x4 to travel
to a nearby farm where she has
arranged to borrow a larger flock
of sheep for today’s training. Inside
are us, the dogs and associated
muck and farming detritus.
But lo, there by the gearstick is a
bottle of Emporio armani perfume,
which she opens and sprays
liberally. ‘It’s called yOU,’ she
points out. ‘y-O-U, not E-W-E.’
I watch mesmerised as she takes
her dogs through their paces.
there are ear-piercing whistles
and whoops of ‘come by’, as she
directs both dogs at once, but a lot
of it seems unspoken, magical. But
just when I think she’s got mystical
superpowers, she loses her rag
with Butch, who has got up when
he should be lying down. Or
perhaps it’s vice-versa.
‘How BLOODy DaRE yOU,’ she
yells, loud enough to be heard in
Cheshire. ‘Will you f***ing lie
down!’ She apologises for swearing.
‘I swear a lot. you can’t in the
competitions, obviously, but the
dogs have to get the message.’
Her 1990 win turned her into a
feminist mover-and-shaker. She
recalls invites to ‘inspirational
women’ functions, and sitting near
Princess Diana with her dog.
She triumphed in a male-
dominated world. ‘Back then, they
just couldn’t cope with being
beaten by a woman,’ she says.
‘With me it was worse because my
first dog had three legs.’
Katy embraced celebrity whole-
heartedly. She appeared on theWogan show (bringing terry some
Wensleydale cheese, which would
have been lovely had she not taken
a bite out of it en route). She toured
the UK giving doggie demonstra-
tions. Sometimes she travelled
with a menagerie — a gaggle of
ducks, some show-jumping turkeys
and a horse called Eric.
Once, she left a sheep in a taxi.
Why did she have a sheep in a taxi?
‘Oh, it went everywhere with me.’S
HE’S gone clay-pigeon
shooting with actor
Richard E. Grant (‘lovely
eyes’), rubbed shoulders
with Prince Philip at a country
show (‘now he can swear’) and
trained dogs for the Dubai royal
family. Many sheep in Dubai?
‘Nope, it was just something that
the family was into.’
For much of the past three
decades she’s been training dogs,
or teaching humans how to. She
once took her brood into a prison,
to show inmates how to herd.‘Completely bizarre, with all these
big Brummie gang leaders, but
they loved it.’
about 25 years ago, Katy bowed
out of the sheep trial world. She’d
won a major trial with her then
dog, Max (one of the big loves of
her life), and a few days later he
was killed on the road.
‘It broke my heart. I gave up dogs
for ten years.’ yet they pulled her
back. ‘they always do. they saved
me. I don’t know what I would
have done without them.’
as far back as she can remember,
animals filled a void that other
people couldn’t.
Katy was the second youngest of
five children born to John Mayor,
who founded St David’s College in
Llandudno, an independent school
with a strong Christian ethos. the
family lived in the school, along
with a collection of real pets
(‘rabbits and guinea pigs, mostly’)
and also imaginary ones.
While she adored her father (‘my
whole life was about wanting to
impress him’) her parents were
‘very busy, setting up the school’and she, for whatever reason ‘felt
quite unloved’.
the person she was closest to
was the school matron and when
she died suddenly, the young Katy
was grief-stricken. ‘I’m not sure I
ever got over it. Mum and Dad told
me off for getting upset at the
funeral, but I loved her. She was
quite eccentric, and ever since I’ve
been drawn to eccentrics.’
Some of these eccentrics became
her husbands, although she’s at
pains to point out that while four
marriages sounds a lot, it’s not.
‘I’m very old-fashioned, you see.
and I’m still very religious. I
thought if you had sex outside
marriage, you’d be struck down by
a bolt from the sky. So I basically
married all my bloomin’ boyfriends.
Or most of them.’
She doesn’t want this piece to be
about her disastrous love life, she
insists, but it is quite a car crash,
though she seems to have suffered
amnesia with some of the details.
It turns out there weren’t just
husbands, but other lovers and
near-husbands. ‘Do you remember