The Twilight Barking Starts on Primrose Hill
Dodie Smith's The Hundred and One Dalmatians was published in 1956, by Heinemann in Britain and Viking Press in the United States. It had been written under the working title The Great Dog Robbery. The plot turns on a piece of invented canine machinery that Smith called the Twilight Barking: a relay of dogs passing messages across the country at dusk, which is how Pongo and his mate Missis learn where their stolen puppies have been taken, and how they are fed, sheltered and directed on the journey to retrieve them.
The Twilight Barking is not launched from a vague London rooftop. It is launched from Primrose Hill. The hill is the natural choice for the job — it is one of the highest points in what is now the London Borough of Camden, with a clear view over central London, and it stands immediately north of Regent's Park, where the Dearly family lives. For a book about signals carried by sound across a city, Smith picked the one place in the neighbourhood where you can see everything.
Dodie Smith, Nine Dalmatians and a Remark at Dinner
Dodie Smith was born in Whitefield, Lancashire, on 3 May 1896 and died in Essex in 1990, aged 94. Before the Dalmatians she was known as a playwright — Autumn Crocus (1931) and Dear Octopus (1938) — and as the author of I Capture the Castle (1948).
She and her husband Alec kept nine Dalmatians. The first of them was called Pongo, and the name went straight into the book. The origin of the plot is equally domestic: a friend, looking at the dogs, remarked that they would make a lovely fur coat. That single remark produced Cruella de Vil and the fur farm.
Smith's own London address was 18 Dorset Square in Marylebone, where an English Heritage blue plaque now commemorates her — with her birth year given, incorrectly, as 1895. Dorset Square is a walk of well under two miles from Primrose Hill by way of Regent's Park, which is the walk the book's geography assumes.
The Dearlys' House — and the Pink House on Albert Terrace
In the novel the Dearlys live in a house on the Outer Circle of Regent's Park, given to Mr Dearly by a grateful government in return for financial services. That is the address the text supplies, and it is a Regent's Park address rather than a Primrose Hill one.
A particular pink stucco house on Albert Terrace, on the eastern edge of Primrose Hill, is nonetheless widely linked to the book. The property, an eight-bedroom Victorian house dated to 1847, is described as being thought to have been the model for the Dearlys' home. The case made for it is circumstantial: the resemblance between the house and the semi-detached, porticoed building shown in the first edition's illustrations, its position on Smith's dog-walking route between Dorset Square and the hill, and its proximity to the site of the Twilight Barking. No documentary statement by Smith identifying the house appears to have been produced. It is best treated as an attractive local tradition rather than an established fact.
Missis, Perdita and What Came Later
Readers who know the story only from the screen often meet a different cast. In Smith's novel Pongo's mate is Missis, and Perdita is a separate Dalmatian; the puppies' owners are Mr and Mrs Dearly. Disney's 1961 animated film — and the 1996 live-action version — established Pongo and Perdita as the pair, with Roger and Anita as the owners, and it is those names that now attach themselves to the story in general circulation, including in property write-ups of the Albert Terrace house.
Smith returned to the same dogs in a sequel, The Starlight Barking, published in 1967. The 1956 book has since been adapted repeatedly, most recently for the stage, and Smith named the novelist Julian Barnes as her literary executor.
Reading the Book on the Hill
What makes the Primrose Hill connection more than trivia is that Smith used the real shape of the ground. The hill rises abruptly out of an otherwise level district; from the summit the city is laid out to the south and Hampstead and Belsize Park to the north. A network of dogs communicating by sound over long distances needs a high, open, quiet place to start from, within earshot of a residential district, and Primrose Hill is exactly that. The park is also, and was then, a dog-walking place — the daily habit that produced the book in the first place.
Nothing on the hill marks the connection. There is no plaque and no statue, and the fictional house on the Outer Circle has no fixed address. The link survives instead in the way the neighbourhood tells the story to itself: the hill where the barking started, and the pink house on Albert Terrace that may or may not have been the one.