ARTHUR’S ARCHIVE
Historian Keith asks: was Walker right about the future of the species in running water?
“In some cases Richard Walker seems like angling’s Nostradamus”
IT SHOULDN’T really come as any surprise that Richard ‘Dick’ Walker should feature so often in the archives.
He wrote prolifically with, of course, a long-running column in Angling Times. His writing was often, in fact usually, thoughtprovoking. He certainly held nothing back and didn’t mind courting a bit of controversy.
In some cases he seems like angling’s Nostradamus, predicting things that, for one reason or another, seemed to come about many years on.
Take this article from 48 years ago where he asks if carp could “over-run rivers.” Now, while that hasn’t happened, there aren’t many rivers, at least those medium to large, that don’t have a thriving population of carp and anglers setting out to deliberately catch them.
Walker mentions four rivers with incidences of carp – the Trent, Severn, Exe and Thames. Of those four, the Trent, while still hosting plenty of bivvybound anglers, now probably sees many more targeting barbel than carp, with the latter often a welcome by-catch.
Similarly the Severn, although it still holds a fair head of carp, definitely sees more rod-hours spent on the pursuit of barbel – and, these days, possibly even zander – than carp.
Devon’s River Exe is less lauded nationally than the other rivers but, along with the Exeter Canal, is still a highly-rated carp fishery by those in the know, with the possibility of a ‘thirty’ or even bigger. The deep canal has certainly produced at least one ‘forty’, and not far from Exeter city centre.
As for the Thames, well, since my pal John Gard broke the river record in the 1980s with a near-40-pounder, some very big carp have been caught from the lower and middle river, with Nick Helleur’s ‘fifty’ the (officially reported) icing on the cake… but there are a few ‘Secret Squirrels’ out there.
But Dick Walker’s suggestion was based on carp spawning in rivers and, of course, while some are natural fish, thousands more are escapees or, sadly, ‘liberated’ from stillwaters — fish such as the Yorkshire river record of nearly 50lb that previously had dwelt in Eric’s Willows Lakes but went swim-about during a flood.
Now I have to keep digging to see if Walker predicted lakes full of carp and having to book sometimes weeks in advance just to get a swim!