c. 1850 · 1850s
The Cock of Tomorrow
The first great poultry shows (Birmingham 1847, Crystal Palace 1848) launch the Modern Game — a bird bred for type alone, the first show-bench breed developed purely for the visual eye.
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sortableYear: 1850
The Birmingham Poultry Show (1847) and the Great Poultry Show at the Crystal Palace (1848) — both founded by the showman Edward Hewitt and his circle — inaugurated the modern poultry fancy. They also created a new kind of bird.
The Modern Game was developed in the years immediately following these shows, by fanciers who crossed the Old English Game with Malay and, it is suspected, with several other Oriental and Mediterranean strains, selecting for type alone — for height, for length of leg, for tightness of feather, for the exhibition silhouette that the new fancy required. The first formal Standard for the Modern Game was published in 1865, in William Bernhard Tegetmeier’s The Poultry Book.
By the 1870s the Modern Game had achieved its iconic form: tall, slim, almost absurdly long-legged, narrow-bodied, fierce of eye, with the smallest head possible on a gamecock frame. It was the first show-bench breed developed purely for the visual eye, and it remains one of the most recognisable of all poultry birds.