I have loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog

I have loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog is a phrase T. H. White used to explain why he loved Gos, his goshawk. In Helen Macdonald’s account, it speaks both to his affinity for a bird other falconers disparaged and to the imaginative companionship he found in training it. The phrase becomes a way to understand attachment to beings who resist easy instruction, and to question the assumptions that make resistance look like a fault.

White and Gos

White’s affection for Gos was bound up with the hawk’s difference. Gilbert Blaine had described goshawks as suspicious and difficult, a reputation shared by many falconers. White, by contrast, loved Gos in part for qualities that set him apart from the accepted ideal. The hawk offered White a means of imagining himself in several roles: benevolent parent, innocent child, patient teacher and pupil. He also imagined a bond between bird and man formed through sustained care, as if their inner lives had become connected. The phrase’s “unteachable” and “untouchable” do not simply describe a problem to overcome; they name the qualities that made Gos compelling to White.

Macdonald relates this attachment to White’s search for kinship. Her reading of The Goshawk finds in it a lonely man’s longing for fellowship with those who felt unlike others. Falconry could offer such fellowship among practitioners who understood an uncommon attachment to hawks. White’s phrase thus extends beyond his relation with one bird: it gives language to a sense of affinity that could be difficult to explain outside that small community.

A reputation built around the hawk

The phrase also gains force against the history of how goshawks were described. Falconry books often praised falcons as noble and graceful while depicting goshawks as unruly, ill-tempered or foreign. Those judgments could make the bird’s difficulty appear to be an inherent defect rather than a response to how it was treated. In a conversation about Mabel, a man suggested that Helen’s being a woman explained why she and her female hawk got on. Helen rejected the idea that their shared sex determined the bird’s behaviour, then examined falconry writing that repeatedly cast female goshawks as moody and troublesome. She recognized that such accounts could excuse a falconer from considering whether his own conduct contributed to a hawk’s fear or anger.

Earlier accounts offered a different relationship. Simon Latham described goshawks as shy but sociable, liable to take exception to harsh handling and capable of affection when treated kindly. Edmund Bert presented himself as his hawk’s friend and playfellow, and argued that the falconer should provide for the bird’s needs. The contrast matters to White’s phrase: what later writers called unteachable could also be understood as self-willed, fearful or responsive to treatment. The label shifts attention from the bird’s supposed defect to the relationship around it.

The underdog and social privilege

Macdonald places the disparagement of goshawks beside the status of different kinds of falconry. Flying falcons properly required large open spaces, such as grouse moors and extensive farmland, access more readily available to the wealthy or well connected. Historical writing explicitly associated possession of the “noble” falcons with aristocratic privilege. By contrast, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks—the austringer—was mocked as socially awkward and unsociable. The bird and its trainer were therefore both positioned below the prestigious falcon and its elite practitioners. “The underdog” names this joined social and cultural position, not simply an individual bird’s temperament.

Macdonald also contrasts that hierarchy with hunting in Maine, where common-law access to land supports a more egalitarian local tradition. That comparison makes the social organization of hunting visible: who can enter the landscape helps determine which practices acquire prestige. Against these hierarchies, White’s attachment to Gos gives value to a relationship that the dominant language of falconry could treat as inferior.

Meaning and limits of the phrase

The expression does not claim that Gos was easy to train or that difference disappears through affection. Rather, it marks White’s willingness to value a difficult, separate being without reducing it to a failing. Macdonald’s account connects that willingness to older falconers who sought to please their hawks and be their friends, while also recognizing that historical accounts could carry their own assumptions about gender and power. The phrase endures as a compact statement of allegiance: it turns attention toward the beings whom prevailing standards leave out, and toward the possibility of companionship without sameness.