The first Clumberfest was held in 2015. It came about after numerous attempts by the Clumber Spaniel Committee to organise a Fun Day in the Nottinghamshire area, all of which failed due to lack of interest. I decided to base the concept on Spinfest that Pam and I had attended in Pembrokeshire and brought together many Italian Spinone dogs and owners from all parts of the country and it didn’t matter if they were rescues, show dogs, working dogs or whatever.
I also decided that I wanted to retain control of the event and to be able to decide what to do without the recourse to a committee for every decision, so this event is run for all Clumber Spaniels, but outside of any Clumber Spaniel Committee.
So, the first Clumberfest was organised by Pam Sheppard and myself (Peter Sheppard). Since then we have been ably supported by Adrian and Lynn Peters and Paul Stockford and Julie Guest.
If I am to be honest, we probably over-reached ourselves on the first Clumberfest by organising a Companion Show on the Sunday! Since then we have learned our lesson and we are much more relaxed, in fact every other year we now have a Clumber Gathering with very little in the way of organised events and just a relaxing and chilling time with our dogs.
To see what happened on previous Clumberfests have a look at the What You Missed tab.