Michael Daunt
Fisherman and raconteur who taught casting to Chris Tarrant, Jeremy Paxman and Ronnie Corbett
MICHAEL DAUNT, who has died aged 81, was a leading fisherman and instructor, author and journalist, in the league of Negley Farson, Hugh Falkus and Conrad Voss Bark. In his time, he taught Spey salmon and brown-trout casting to Chris Tarrant, Eric Clapton, Jeremy Paxman, Guy Ritchie, Max Hastings, Ronnie Corbett and Debo Duchess of Devonshire.
A convivial figure and a raconteur, he was known to family and friends as “The Bounder”, a soubriquet in which he revelled. “In another life I think he would have been imprisoned,” was the verdict of his friend Paxman, author of Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life. “I could never believe someone like that could still exist.”
Daunt’s own website boasted: “He has caught salmon in Russia’s bleak Kola Peninsula, marlin off the coast of Kenya, bone fish in the Bahamas, clap in Malaya, crabs in London.”
Daunt’s thwarted ambitions to become an actor were compensated for by a nine-year affair with the actress, Jill Melford, and his friendships with Lee Marvin, Dirk Bogarde and above all Richard Burton, with whom he had long lunches.
“I would begin with fragments of poetry and he would finish off the lines,” Daunt recalled. “I would do it just to hear his beautiful Welsh voice. Could I keep up with him on the drinking front? Not a chance.”
Daunt’s kindly and devil-may-care attitude, peppered with expletives, and his eternal optimism, as well as his considerable piscatorial skill, endeared him to a wide circle of friends. “It has been said I have never done a day’s work in my life,” he once said. “And it’s true because I have loved every minute of it.”
Chris Tarrant described “Daunty” as “the most foul-mouthed man I have ever met” as well as “the most sweetly descriptive, articulate and intelligent man on earth”, adding: “We once caught 28 large pike in two days among just three of us all on the fly and he was like a little boy at the end of it, shaking with emotion.”
Michael Seton Daunt was born in Cheltenham on March 10 1942. His father Niall Michael Daunt, from an old Co Cork family, was chief test pilot for the Gloster Aircraft Company and flew the Meteor on its first flight on July 24 1943. He was, according to his son, a “philistine” who practised the trumpet while sitting on the loo every morning, and was clearly ill-suited to his artistic wife, Elspeth (née Lloyd), a Bloomsbury Group acolyte and scion of the Quaker Lloyds banking dynasty.
The parents divorced, and Michael was brought up by his father, who had rented a farm in south Oxfordshire. Presented with his first air rifle at the age of six, he shot his nanny in the bottom from 40 yards.
Michael attended Hurst Court preparatory school in Hastings and Rugby, where he kept a ferret in his study and an owl called Wol, and drilled holes in the wall to watch “a beautiful under-matron” undress. He was fortunate to have as his art master the noted country writer and illustrator, Denys “BB” Watkins-pitchford.
During this time he was reunited with his mother, and worked for her and her new husband, the novelist Alan Dipper, on their farm in Warwickshire.
Daunt won a scholarship to Rada, but his father determined that he should instead go to Sandhurst, and he was commissioned into the Royal Green Jackets as a second lieutenant. His seven years’ decorated military service saw him guarding Rudolf Hess (who “mumbled continually to himself and occasionally raised his voice in apparent anger like a meths drinker under the arches at Waterloo”) and engaging in jungle warfare in Borneo during the Indonesian Confrontation. He called it “the last dying embers of the empire and tremendous fun”.
He emerged a competent cook of Malay dishes, and was fluent in “kitchen” Malay.
By the 1970s, Daunt was combining his passions – fishing and writing – for The and the Daily Mail.
He operated a fish and game company out of the City of London, which at one time had 20 delivery vans in the fleet, to supply directors’ boardroom lunches. At weekends, he sold salmon, sea-trout and crustacea from the back of a van outside fashionable watering holes like The Surprise in Chelsea.
Daunt’s love of fishing had blossomed under the tutelage of his father’s friend, Hugh Falkus, author of the standard works on salmon and trout fishing. They spent many happy days together at Falkus’s fishing school in Ravenglass, Cumberland, teaching, drinking and quoting poetry.
When Falkus died, Daunt inherited all his fishing paraphernalia, as well as permission to use the Falkus name to continue the school. Daunt then started his own school, near Winchester, where he taught flyfishing with a highly unconventional approach, bellowing profanities at students (however famous) in an attempt to slow down their casting. He had an unerring ability to spot and catch fish.
Although he fished the world, from Kenya to Russia, it was to the Kennet, Test and Itchen that his heart returned. He thought the mayfly – “such a short life and the season is so brief ” – the finest form of fishing.
In 2006 the BBC broadcast The Bart and the Bounder, with Daunt’s childhood friend and cousin Sir Richard Heygate, in which the pair drank their way around the British Isles, imparting old-fashioned wisdom. From this came two books, Endangered Species in 2007, about rural life’s vanishing characters such as ratcatchers, poachers, gipsies and gamekeepers, and The Bounder (2016); both offered unvarnished accounts of Mike Daunt’s charmed if peripatetic life.
He died having dined at one of his favourite places, the Chelsea Arts Club.
Daunt was thrice married and divorced – first, to Rosamund Hall, with whom he had a son; secondly, to Marian Kekwick, née Eason, with whom he had a son; and, thirdly, to Caroline Macintosh, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He is survived by his four children.