ARTHUR’S ARCHIVES
Dick Walker catches a carp live on the BBC in 1953
“Dick Walker only went and did it, landing a 16lb fish”
THESE days, if a TV company said to a carp angler: “We need you to catch a fish live for our cameras” it would seem nigh-on impossible to fail.
Go back 60 or more years and it would be a very different tale. Then, carp were unbelievably scarce and considered by the average angler to be virtually uncatchable anyway.
None of that deterred the great Richard (Dick) Walker when the BBC said that they wanted to broadcast a carp being caught on the first night of the 1953 season… live for the radio! No such thing as portable equipment was available then. Instead, it was a ‘radio car’ with microphones hard-wired to the swim, along with a presenter and Bernard Venables – one of the co-founders of Angling Times – as commentator.
Carp bait in those days was normally a chunk of boiled potato, which was considered too big for anything else to eat. And do you know what? Walker only went and did it, landing a 16lb fish – which would have been the equivalent of at least a mid-thirty now.
This was June 1953, the year after Walker had smashed the carp record with the 44lb fish that became known as Clarissa.
Dick Walker, as an engineer, developed rods for carp fishing; there were none before his time. Split cane salmon rods were about all the carper could hope for, but Walker developed specific (compound) tapers for the job in hand.
He also invented the test curve principle, measuring the amount of force needed to bend the rod through 90 degrees. From that, the correct breaking strain of line could be calculated. Nowadays this is all done by computer-aided design technology.
Similarly, the recording of the broadcast could all be done these days on a mobile phone... only with video, too. As for catching a 16lb carp...no serious carper worth his salt would bother with fish so small. You’d be better off asking a match angler to catch one on his pole!