Reflections on the Past
publication date: Dec 4, 2007
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author/source: John Bailey
by John Bailey
I’ve realised for some time that I’ve become a boring old fart. I haven’t quite taken to a fireside rocking chair with pipe and slippers, but almost. Perhaps the best example of this is my continuing lament for better fishing magazines here in the UK. For some years, I’ve tended to lambaste them for being too repetitive, too commercially focused and, above all, for being too narrowly defined. I’ve deplored the way that the brotherhood of anglers has become segregated into different camps – salmon anglers, stillwater trout anglers, river trout anglers, predator anglers, carp anglers, match anglers, commercial fishery anglers, and so on and so on. I’m continually looking back to a golden age where anglers were anglers and when they’d pick up a pike rod in the winter, a river trout rod in the spring, a reservoir rod in the summer, a salmon rod in the autumn with perhaps, a bit of roach, tench and codling fishing interspersed. I’ve mourned the passing of magazines setting out to cater for the all-round angler. I’m thinking particularly of Creel magazine at its peak in the early sixties and then, later, Angling magazine took us through the later sixties into the seventies. I used to have plentiful copies of both but, in one of my divorces, they got thrown away! Time has cast its patina over them. Memory imbues their pages with gloss and romance. Those were the days. Those were the heroes – Buller, Venables, Moncrieff, Righyni, Gammon and many, many more.
And then, a bombshell! For reasons we had better not go into now, a dozen copies of both Creel and Angling magazines landed on my doorstep just two days ago and I’ve spent virtually all the time since immersed in them. And I have to say I’ve come out a considerably chastened person.
Well, first of all, let’s dwell on the good news. Both these magazines, in all the issues I’ve read, do portray fishing in its entirety, in exactly the way I remembered. For example, I’ve picked up the April 1969 issue of Angling, the contents page advertises articles on reservoir trout, tackle for barbel, big dace, using the early season floater, the sea column, bass fishing and a look at anglers’ leads. Writers include maestros like Bernard Venables, Fred J. Taylor, Peter Wheat, Bob Church, Tom Ivens, Reg Righyni, Clive Gammon and Ian Gillespie. Wow! What a line up!
The magazines are also chock-a-block with nostalgia. Almost exclusively black and white photographs. Advertisements charming in their naivety. Prices still in shillings and pence and, of course, shockingly low. Photographs of heroes long gone but not forgotten. Perhaps, above all other delights, is the prose of Bernard Venables. I suppose forty years ago he was at his peak. His sentences were shorter, more lyrical and certainly more precise than in his twilight years. And everything he writes has a point. There was a huge moral slant to what he talked about in those days. He was at pains to get to the very heart, the very essence of what fishing is about. And that’s something we tend to forget today. He could find beauty in all things aquatic. Even his description of a sluice-gate is beautiful, “Water pours through a hatch, feeding a side stream. The timbers are green and seeping, the stones grown with moss and plants that clutch root holds. A man-made structure, but one to fascinate everlastingly such men as anglers are. They must conjecture as to the fish that nudge the current, lie in the eddies. There is profound tranquillity, itching excitement, in such a place.” Wow!
But. Dig a bit deeper and perhaps not all is as it seemed. First, perhaps it’s just me, but there seems to be a whole shift in the tone of the writing. A lot of it is incredibly preachy. It’s like one article after another is written from the pulpit. A lot of these guys appear pretty profoundly convinced that they are right about all things piscatorial. Whenever I catch a fish it’s like magic has happened but you don’t get that impression from these blokes. There’s also an understandable starchiness to most of the language used. I suppose most of these guys had been educated before the war when standards of literacy were quite different to today. Much of the language used is straight out of Brief Encounter!
But what’s changed most, beyond all shadow of a doubt, is our attitude today towards the fish we catch. It’s difficult to pick any magazine out of the score or so I received without seeing photographs to make you totally wince. Pollock skewered onto gaffs. Bin loads of dead fish bearing a glassy-eye to the lens. Live baits thrashing everywhere. Pike, deep-hooked and bleeding to death. Heaps of bleeding roach and bream in keep nets with mesh as fish-friendly as a cheese grater.
So, despite my tirades in the past, perhaps our modern magazines have come a long way in the past thirty years. They are certainly more elegant, more engaging and very definitely more on the side of conservation. And perhaps my rant about modern-day exclusivity isn’t that fair either. Pick up many a game mag today and you are likely to find a whole range of fish species covered. That’s the nice thing about Fish and Fly. Notice the emphasis on FISH. Not salmonids on the fly. Not trout on the fly. But fish. All fish and that’s good.
I’m off to interview my old mate, John Wilson, next week. I guess in an average year he will probably fish for trout, grayling, salmon, mahseer, tiger fish, roach, barbel, chub, catfish, bass, bonefish and another score of species I haven’t even thought about and there’s a growing number like him. I’ve got no doubt Bernard Venables would be happy about all this. And perhaps, little by little, we’re learning to keep the best from that era and throwing away the worst.
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