Dog Fight Causes Feud Between Putney Literary Giants
Hugh Thompson on the canine conflict which broke a friendship
J R Ackerley (left) and Leonard Woolf (right). Picture: Facebook
July 22, 2025
Love me love my dog. How many dog walkers have fallen out because their dogs don’t get on. A lot spend their walks scanning for the potential foe.. But none more famously than two of Putney’s literary giants Leonard Woolf (Colinette Road) and J R Ackerley (Star and Garter Mansions). For many years literary and social friends.
While Ackerley edited the BBC’s preeminent Listener magazine, he and Woolf often cooperated. Despite occasionally being edited and complaining Woolf, a prolific author who wrote eighteen books, contributed to the Listener for twenty years.
In 1960 Leonard the ageing Hogarth publisher turned down the award winning “We Think the World of You” (made into a film with Gary Oldman and Alan Bates) about the loss of Ackerley’s homosexual lover and his intimacy with his Alsatian dog Queenie. Both aspects upset Woolf who ironically had many queer friends. Elsewhere he wrote, “What odd books he (Ackerley )writes”. In another twist of fate, the book won the WH Smith Award which Woolf’s autobiography also won.
But it was Queenie fighting with Woolf’s dog Niggs in Leonard’s famous Rodmell, Sussex garden which caused the rupture. A year after Ackerley’s death in 1968 Woolf writes, “After years of friendship...he complained that my dog attacked his beloved Queenie and I paid no attention to this and had not even said I was sorry. Joe never came near me again. ”
A very dramatic case of love me love my dog. Or attack my dog attack me. Or just literary folk.
Hugh Thompson
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