Kindling the fire of enthusiam
We may never replicate the achievements of the fishing greats but their elegant prose has inspired generations to pick up a rod
IN December 1945, nine months after the end of the war in Europe, a little book was published that represented an answer to the prayer from Allcocks of Redditch for the doctrine of force to be discredited and the best and most innocent of recreations to be enjoyed again. The Fisherman’s Bedside Book was an anthology of writing about angling. Apart from some Walton and one extract from Scrope, it was drawn from the period between 1850 and the conflict that had just finished. It could have been subtitled ‘An Antidote to the Horror of War’ in the way it presented the sport of fishing as an alternative to the belligerence of the modern era.
Much of it was filleted from the books of the acknowledged masters: HT Sheringham, JW Hills, Lord Grey of Fallodon, Arthur Ransome, Patrick Chalmers, Negley Farson, Halford, Skues, William Senior and others. It also extensively referenced a wider range of nature writers – principally Henry Thoreau, Richard Jefferies and WH Hudson – whose quests to find meaning and consolation in the natural world took them to the waterside and caused them to meditate on still and moving water.
When The Fisherman’s Bedside Book was published, its illustrator and compiler, Denys Watkins-pitchford, was an art master at Rugby School. He was born in 1905 and his father was the rector of Lamport, a small village in the gentle green countryside between Market Harborough and Northampton. The family lived in the fine Georgian rectory opposite the even finer and older Lamport Hall, the ancestral home of the Ishams. The Watkins-pitchfords belonged firmly in the upper social bracket but Denys – one of twins – was considered too delicate to be subjected to the rigours of the normal boarding-school education. He was schooled at home and left to wander the fields and woods and to teach himself the ways and rhythms of the natural world.
This was fox-hunting and shooting country, and he became a devotee of both (though quite quickly lost his enthusiasm for the hunt). But it was emphatically not trout-fishing country. The rivers and brooks, exemplified by the Nene, were generally sluggish and murky. They were complemented by an abundance of ponds and lakes whose character suited only the coarse fish. By default, the lad became a coarse fisherman. Thus he had a natural affinity with “the ‘poor man’ fisher”, far apart though they were in class and circumstances.
The Fisherman’s Bedside Book covered a great range of coarse and game angling at home and abroad (plus a nod at sea fishing at the end). To distinguish between his writing and illustrating roles, Watkins-pitchford had adopted the pseudonym ‘BB’ – the size of shot he used for geese – for his writing. As ‘BB’ he wrote 50-odd books, many of them for children, two of which – The Little Grey Men and Brendon Chase – can be regarded as classics.
By his own account and that of others, ‘BB’ was something of a bungler as a fisherman. His stories regularly recount self-inflicted disasters – fish lost through incompetence, nets left behind, tackle not checked properly and so on. His influence came not from his expertise, which was limited, but from the manner in which his fishing books fired the imaginations of a generation that had come through the war and was now ready to embrace the old sport of angling in a new way.
A few months after its publication, a copy of The Fisherman’s Bedside Book was given as a present to a younger man with a very different approach to the passion he shared with ‘BB’. Richard Walker was an engineer, Cambridge-educated, with an outstandingly keen, analytical mind. Born and brought up in Hertfordshire, he, like ‘BB’, had haunted streams and stillwaters as a boy. But quite unlike ‘BB’, Walker had the kind of mind that rejoiced in the solving of problems – and the problem that preoccupied him was how to outwit large, wary fish.
He and his boyhood friend Peter Thomas concentrated particular attention on carp. At that time only a handful of carp of more than 20lb had ever been landed, and the received wisdom among the coarse-fishing community was that they were too big and powerful and cunning to be worth targeting specifically. ‘BB’ indulged his own fascination with the species at length in The Fisherman’s Bedside Book, and in 1947 Walker and Thomas invited him to come and fish with them.
“From this joint operation,” Walker wrote many years later, “grew what we call specimen-hunting today.” Carp enthusiasts from various parts of the country became aware of each other and exchanged letters about experiences and tactics. “While we were fishing at Mapperley,” Walker recalled, “someone came up with the idea of forming a club with a regular rotary letter. I said, ‘Let’s call it the Carpfishers’ Club.’ BB said, ‘We’re doing more than fishing for carp, we’re catching ’em. Call it The Carpcatchers’ Club.’ We did.”
CARP RECORD
In that year, 1951, one of the founding members, Bob Richards, broke the carp record with a fish of 31lb 4oz from a three-acre pond hidden deep in the Herefordshire countryside. It was close to a fine old manor house, Bernithan Court, but was called Redmire to disguise its whereabouts. Twenty years earlier, it had been stocked with a mixture of mirror and common carp from strains originating from a fish farm in Holland and imported by a man called Don Leney, who worked for the Surrey Trout Farm in Haslemere. Leney was responsible for providing his so-called ‘Galician’ carp for stocking into hundreds of ponds, lakes, rivers and canals all over southern England. Where the conditions were favourable – as at Redmire – they grew steadily to a great size and age.
Walker studied the Redmire carp closely. He knew there were specimens there bigger than the record fish caught by Bob Richards. He designed a 10ft split-cane rod specifically for big carp – the prototype of what became the Mark IV model – and a reel to go with it. In the early morning of 13 September 1952 he caught a common carp – one of the few commons from the original stocking of Redmire – which reshaped the emerging world of specimen hunting. Highly conscious of the value of publicity, Walker arranged for the fish to be collected and taken to London Zoo, where it was weighed by an Inspector of Weights and Measures and brought the scales down to exactly 44lb. The carp, by then named Clarissa, was placed in a tank that became a place of pilgrimage for countless anglers, including my youthful self, until she died in 1971 at a considerably reduced weight.
UPSURGE IN COARSE FISHING
The capture of Clarissa was one of the triggers for a tremendous upsurge in the popularity of coarse fishing. In 1953, a new weekly publication, Angling Times, was launched with Walker as star columnist. It rapidly surpassed the fading Fishing Gazette (which quietly expired a few years later) and established itself as essential reading for anyone who aspired to catch a fish worth taking a picture of.
I aspired. So did my two fishing brothers. We had saved up for and bought our Mark IV Avon rods (a lighter and more versatile version of the carp rod). We had Intrepid Elite fixed-spool reels, later graduating to the Mitchell 300 or Young’s Ambidex.
We studied Richard Walker’s column as if it were a weekly revelation of divine truth.
The man was all-knowing. He had caught the record carp. He had fished head-to-head against the captain of England’s champion match-fishing team and trounced him by catching an 11lb barbel. Name a species – carp, chub, barbel, perch, roach, rudd – and Walker had landed a specimen. And he told you how to do it. He had no secrets, except
Richard Walker’s style was simple, direct, no frills, no nonsense
the location of the waters he fished, which was fair enough. His style was simple, direct, no frills, no nonsense. He was like the best kind of schoolmaster, because he took the trouble to talk your language and got his hands dirty.
My brothers and I tried to follow the Word of Walker. We discovered that in fishing, as in all walks of life, there is a gap between the expert and the average practitioner that no amount of youthful keenness can bridge. We tended to see our problem as being the waters we had access to. Our carp water, a moat in the grounds of a big house owned by family friends, had no carp in it bigger than 7lb or so – we knew that because it was only 3ft deep and you could see all the fish clearly. Our tench pond never produced anything bigger than 3lb. We caught plenty of chub and perch on the local river, but they never exceeded a size that the great Walker would have curled his lip at.
We went after the fabled trout of the Thames on weirpools near and far and never caught one. We spent hours on the millstream at Sonning. On one memorably awful occasion one brother and I borrowed a punt and paddled and poled it down our river to its confluence with the Thames and then up to Sonning so we could emulate the great JL ‘Wormy’ Webb by fishing through the night. One very small silver bream between us was the result.
The truth was that we were average, and Walker and his fellow experts were exceptional. Walker would never have bothered with our carp moat, nor with our tench pond; he would have located other waters with bigger fish in them, which we never had the wit to do. He would have caught the Thames trout, the 5lb chub and 10lb barbel that we could only dream of. What actually mattered was that he kindled the fire of enthusiasm that drew us repeatedly to the waterside, where we learned about nature and beauty and the inexhaustible fascination of still and moving water. He fed those flames, week in, week out. He was the spokesman for a movement that recruited legions like us, that nurtured a burgeoning fishing-tackle industry, that promoted an awareness of the preciousness of the aquatic environment and a corresponding fervour in defending it against polluters and government-licensed vandals.
It is no coincidence that over the 30 years that Richard Walker produced his columns for Angling Times – all of them written in longhand, with never a word crossed out – fishing for pleasure became, after gardening, the nation’s favourite pastime. His style was didactic and severely practical; he rarely wrote in lyrical fashion about the spiritual side of the sport, although he was far from immune to it. He was content to leave that to his friend ‘BB’, who never caught a real specimen but with his pen and scraperboard blade captured the inner dimension more faithfully than anyone else of his generation.
In 1958 he published a very short book clumsily entitled A Carp Water (Wood Pool) and How to Fish It, best shortened to The Wood Pool. My copy has a quavery signature inside the front cover – DJ Watkins-pitchford MBE ‘BB’ – with a line underneath. I went to visit him not long before his death in 1990 to write something about him for the Financial Times, and I had the presence of mind to take my copies of his books to sign. He had lived for many years in a curious old round tollhouse in the garden of which he had dug three small ponds whose tench would take worms from his fingers.
By then he had suffered kidney failure and was on dialysis, but he was still hoping to make a last wildfowling foray to Scotland if someone would lend him a Land Rover and if he could arrange treatment for his kidney at a hospital in Aberdeen. Just before I left, he showed me a rod and reel propped up against a wall. They had been made for him by Dick Walker, who had died two years before ‘BB’, in 1988. This is an edited extract from Tom Fort’s new book Casting Shadows:
Fish and Fishing in Britain, published by William
Collins, price £20