The Wye and its slippery customers
Renowned for its salmon, the river once teemed with eel, too. No longer. So what is behind this poorly reported wildlife crime?
The disappearance of the river’s once plentiful eels is a poorly reported wildlife crime. By Marsha O’mahony
The eel has always suffered from an image problem: snake-like, slippery, slimy, they are at the opposite end of the social spectrum to the more ‘sophisticated’ salmon. Yet the human relationship with this mysterious fish reaches beyond the Egyptian dynasties – they even appear in the Domesday Book as a form of tax payment. But in the 21st century, trafficking of the species is at unprecedented levels and threatens the eel’s very existence. It wasn’t always thus.
On the River Wye, and on all water courses, the eel was once an important and cheap winter food source. Today, it is rarely eaten in the UK, other than by jellied-eel aficionados in the south-east. That might be because of taste or because they are just not as abundant any more. Their numbers have been in a serious state of decline for decades. Alarm at the shrinking salmon
population pales in comparison with the plight of the eel. Once upon a time on the Wye, a catch was weighed in kilos. Today, it’s far more likely to be grammes. But the eel has a champion in the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG), a Europe-wide conservation and scienceled organisation, working collaboratively with partner bodies to accelerate the eel’s recovery. SEG chair Andrew Kerr puts it into perspective, describing the eel’s perilous state as, “Europe’s greatest wildlife crime”.
The Wye was a renowned and famous salmon river, with all the trappings that involved. And then it had the eel. While catching salmon was limited to those with a disposable income, the eel was for allcomers. No “uniform, fancy rods, or tackle” was required for these slippery creatures. Instead, a bit of bait – offal was good – a hook and a line, and a bite or two was almost guaranteed. There were plenty of them, they were easy to catch, they provided a cheap food source and tasted good.
The eel has a catadromous life cycle. That is, it begins in the Sargasso Sea, spawns in the ocean and the young eel, the elver, migrates to fresh water to grow to adult size. Over the centuries, the netting of millions of elvers down the lower part of the Wye has become the stuff of legend, lore and law-breaking.
In Robert Gibbings’ meander down the Wye in 1942, he enquired about elvers. His neighbour replied: “If you wants to see elvers, cut three inches off the ends of a hayfork, then you can get them proper.”
The promise of gold enticed thousands to the Californian goldfields and in the same frenzied excitement, the lure of the elver and the riches they promised brought hundreds to the banks of the Wye and the Severn. It
was a rough, tough, uncertain and often violent existence. There was big money to be made and bullying, intimidation and even death threats on the riverside to secure it. At one time, a kilo of elvers in China (where they are a much-sought-after delicacy, consumed in vast quantities and the cause of so much trafficking) cost £6,000. That’s more than Beluga caviar.
The stakes were high and competition for prime spots reached fever pitch. Unconventional, and often flirting with the law, one infamous Monmouth fisherman took his elvering operations very seriously, employing some “hard nuts from Newport” with the intention of putting “the fear of God” into fellow elver fishermen. “There was 300 to 600 people fishing there at one time. The best I had down there was probably £380 a kilo.
One night we made £52,000 in less than an hour. All tax free. You could earn enough to buy a house. I know some that did, especially the Gloucester mafia boys.”
An ‘eel dinner’ provided an excellent source of protein for working families. Apocryphal stories abound of scullery sinks at the back of terraced houses in Hereford brimming with freshly-caught and writhing eels, the householder’s method to wash the “earthiness out of them”.
“You’d get a piece of newspaper on the table and you had to chop their heads off pretty quick because they were on the nasty side mind. Then you got some salt just behind the fins, nicked the skin around the neck, and then you pulled the skin right off, chopped the meat up and then fried it. It was nice.”
As they drift across the Atlantic and reach the British shores, these glass-like creatures hitch a free ride on the Severn Bore, bringing them up the Wye and its many tributaries. It was in one of these, the Garron, that a young Adrian Howard experienced a lifetime’s best. “The Garron used to be full of eels and they were a damn nuisance. We went down there once after a thunderstorm and caught 18 in three-quarters of an hour. When we ran out of worms we had to break the last one in half, and we still had an eel each on that. You’re lucky if you see one now.”
Avid salmon fishermen and retired architect Hugo Mason was also a night-time eel fishing fan. “By the time I was 12, I was well into fishing and this increased as I reached my teens. Being good with my hands, I soon learned to make my own fishing rods out of old tank aerials, which were totally unbalanced but all that we could afford.
“The main season was early May to the end of June. Ledgering was the favoured
The Garron used to be full of eels and they were a damn nusiance… You’re lucky if you see one now
method, using worms for bait. Rising water was always good and it was nothing for me to catch a bucketful of eels in a four-hour session. They would wriggle all over the place and took some handling. I fished for eels until 1965 and caught many over 3lb in weight. The big draw of eel fishing was going at night.
“The night I remember best was the day I left school at aged 15, without any idea of what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I cycled down to the river leaving my bike at the farm. I always took a little splitcane fly rod with me in order to catch a few dace and bleak for bait. Then I would settle down with two rods, each illuminated with torches, so that I could see when I had a bite. In the daylight, eels will usually only take worms but when it gets dark, chopped up bleak and dace suit them so much better. The big bonus is that larger eels come on the feed after nightfall and it was nothing for me to take a bucketful home before it got light the next morning. Occasionally, my mother could be tempted to skin them and we would eat them. Better than that, though, a local farmer loved them and would give me as much as 10 shillings [50p] for a bucketful and then he would tip them in his bath.”
The shop front of Hereford fishmonger ‘Fishy’ Gardener was legendary, with counters keeling under the weight of 30lb-plus salmon from the Wye. But eel could also be purchased. Ever ready to spot an opportunity, entrepreneurial rascals of the day were known to put pebbles down the necks of freshly-caught eels and then sell them on to an unsuspecting Fishy. Fishing licences, rods and tackle of the salmon fisherman were beyond their pocket money, but clotting for eels was not and it proved to be an effective technique. An ancient and homespun method (“like using a mop-head threaded with worms”), it was mentioned by the Wye’s most famous salmon fisherman, Robert Pashley, in HA Gilbert’s Tale of a Wye Fisherman. Recalling a 40-pounder in the 1920s, he said: “[It] was killed on Guy’s Hospital water with a £2 season ticket. I had hired a small pleasure boat from Davies at Ross Dock. Alas, Davies was drowned at
night a few years ago when clotting for eels.” An ignominious end if ever there was one.
The traditional fyke net was used by some and, on at least one occasion, a poorman’s imitation worked just as well, as Bruce Palmer remembered. “We got a sheep’s head and stuffed it into the narrow end of a sheaf of corn, where the grain is, and tied it in. Then we put it in with the head of the stook facing downstream and left it overnight. In the morning, we’d have a dozen eels or more. It was that easy.”
FROM WAR TO THE WYE
The Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942 was a watershed in the Western Desert Campaign, with the Allies victorious. Fighting alongside his German troops was the handsome young Luftwaffe paratrooper Guenter Matthes. Born in Berlin, his youth and career were interrupted by the war and he was soon fighting for the Führer. During his army career, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class twice and was captured twice by the Allies, the first time in Europe (managing to escape) and then a second time in North Africa, when he was fighting under Rommel. After he was captured he was shipped to a POW camp in Ross-on-wye.
At the war’s end, he remained in the area and in the mid-1960s his parents and sister visited for the first time from their home in East Germany, and he took them fishing for eel on the banks of the Wye, marking the occasion with photographs of them with their impressive catch. Matthes’ daughter, Mandi, remembers a man who adored country sports. “He told me he was let out of the camp to work with fellow prisoners on local farms. But he felt the war had robbed him of his youth and he didn’t go back. After he retired, he became a gillie on the Wye, and that’s what he loved, shooting and fishing. I have fond memories of him bringing fresh eels home for breakfast. Delicious.”
Will we be recording such stories in the future? One 80-year-old remembers presenting his mother with a hessian sack of writhing eels as a boy and the sense of pride that instilled. “I was helping to feed the family, and I was only 10. I doubt if my grandsons will ever be able to do that.” He is probably right and we should all be concerned. Eel numbers have dropped dramatically, not just on the Wye but across Europe. They face many challenges, the most pernicious of which is trafficking. However, international collaboration led by the SEG and other organisations shows that this decline is beginning to be arrested. There are real reasons to be optimistic.