BV and Walker

I remember that Venables once said about Walker that he was the only person he had ever met who could bore him by talking about angling!

Anyway Barrie, I am looking very much to your Walker biography. Hope it's not going to be too long.

Venables was a man that most under 40's would fail to connect with at all, his philosophy is something that a lot of people would treat as 'old fashioned' yet people of my age think of as the proper way to go about life. He had values that seem quite alien in this modern world, he was both a gentle man and a gentleman and I think the world is a better place for him having been here.

Venables derived great pleasure from simply catching a fish and size mattered not at all and if ever there were to be a saint of fishing then I can think of no finer person to fill that roll, he was quite simply "A fisherman". I just hope 'The stream of life does him the justice he deserves.

I think I must order this book. It does seem like a good read.

Funnily enough Graham, many anglers of my generation used to laugh at the writings of Venables and his obsession with the wanderings of the purple loosestrife. I never met him but I have met many who have.

He was indeed a gentleman but on odd occasions he could be a bit ascerbic. He once told an old friend of mine whilst boat fishing out on Grafham water to f..k off out the way, he was in the line of his drift.

Personally I think he was very much a human with faults like the rest of us. His most descriptive article in my opinion, and I have a copy here, is entitled: "High Noon or the cheese that turned".

Ron,
I met BV when he was 93; left it a bit late. He was charming but at that great age it was clear that the sharpness of thought had gone. From BV's writings in the fifties it would appear he was an admirer of Walker. BV was a member of the Carp Catchers, as of course was Walker.

To me, BV's acid remarks on RW were the result of seeing the modern angling scene from the 90s on (I don't think he had coarse fished much for many years until he was persuaded to have a go again in the last 10 years of his life). The shock of how it had changed was so bad that he blamed it on the way that Walker had revolutionised angling many years before. Yet Walker himself, writing in the early 80's thought that angling was at least partly headed in the wrong direction.

There is no evidence that Walker derided Venable's approach to angling; conversely Walker could see that angling was a braod church where you can take it how you wish to make it. i.e. as serious or relaxed as you want.

Interesting comments Mark.

Have you ever read Walker's preface to the 1975 issue of Still Water Angling?

In it Walker tells of his extreme concern about the way angling, especially specimen hunting has developed. Certainly it was Venables that went to a lot of trouble to make Walker as famous as possible. But there was a good financial reason for this. Angling Times in 1953 started on a wing and a prayer. Someone was required to make the paper sell and both Ken Sutton, Bernard Venables and Colin Willock knew they had to get Walker to do a weekly column. They offered Walker an enormous amount of money for this - ?10.00 a week which I can assure you in 1953 is about ?450 a week in today's money.

Walker could have virtually packed up his job with Lloyds of Letchworth and become a full time writer.

But he didn't.

However it was Venables, in my opinion, who really put Walker into the spotlight.

In those days Walker was - Angling Times!

I have an equally high regard for both of these men. Both I met and corresponded with, very briefly; both, in their very different ways, were my childhood heroes.

Yet, I reckon, that there was an 'edge', which harked back to a meeting of old and new on the banks of the lower Hampshire Avon sometime in the late 1940s / early '50s. We are back here, I believe, to the centre-pin / trotting / Gentleman / FWK / thing versus fixed-spool / Altex & others / legering / Players / Bill Warren (fixed-spool, new-wave, lower social caste, devastatingly successful legerer from West Drayton, Middx; I met him, plus brother Sonny, quite accidentally, at his Cooper-case-filled retirement bungalow beside western A4 Reading in the late 1970s)...

Two worlds / philosophies / backgrounds / whatever. I heard about the differences from my friend Gordon: Walker bowled up to the old-style Royalty, and was hated -- the long-term regulars even took exception as to just how you tied a 5-turn bloodknot: turn the loose end around the main line, or twist th whole schmozzle then put the tab end in...

Old and new. The battle still continues.

B.V. and R.W. ? Who cares. Major respect. Both. Between them, unwittingly, they got us to where we are now (though both would HATE IT, I reckon).

Ps to my 'unwittingly' above.

No.In my eagerness to communicate, I was wrong.

Both men, in their different ways, knew exactly what they were doing.

Heavens, here's a PPS which won't be liked by some, but which is as true as my own memory (excellent) and much-valued personal connection with some late-term players of that remarkable era can make it.

B.V. was NOT liked by the old Old School, either.

'VD' and 'Venereaballs' was what I heard a highly educated Royalty regular (my pal, Gordon Edwards - a GREAT angler, for ANYTHING, coarse, game and estuary) call him (and by Ken Guy, an even better fisher, by egocentric (and then some) Gordon's admission, too).

It was a case, maybe, even back then, of well-ensconced 'do-ers' resenting suddenly arrived, me-too media-men -- people who would take their long experience, their many failures, their eventual considerable successes, then sell them.

That was then, this is now...

NOT!

And Paul if you remember, Walker was banned from the Royalty during the 60s.

He was extremely critical on how the fishery was run. Peter Stone once told me about how Walker was banned but quite honestly I have forgotten what happened. It may have been something to do with the maggot ban and the discovery that Hampshire Avon chub were infested with a parasitic hookworm called Pomphoryncus laevis.

I do remember Walker writing an article about the fact that Royaly barbel did not fight and came in like wet sacks. Certainly this was true of the few Royaly barbel I caught at that time.

Bill Warren was one of the most succesful Avon Anglers. He ran a little guest house in Christchurch. Pete Stone and several of his frinds stayed with Bill quite often.

As you say Paul Bill, was a leger man and one of the first people of that time to use a fibreglass rod, much to the disgust of many of his contemporaries.

Ron, above:

"Bill Warren was one of the most succesful Avon Anglers. He ran a little guest house in Christchurch. Pete Stone and several of his frinds stayed with Bill quite often.

As you say Paul Bill, was a leger man and one of the first people of that time to use a fibreglass rod, much to the disgust of many of his contemporaries."

Yes. He was quite something, Ron. The man who taught me much of my coarse-fishing when I was a five- to twelve-year-old tiddler was another West Drayton man, Jimmy Hoare (81 if still with us -- he was last Christmas), who worked in the 1950 and '60s in the parks and gardens department of WD Urban District Council (now part of the London Boro' of Hillingdon), whereas my Dad did summat in its offices.

Jimmy was one heck of a fisher -- in the Walker-mould I believeed as a kid. But then, in a conversation that we had in the 'Load of Hay' pub in Hillingdon nearly a decade ago (I saw this old fella looking at me chatting and catching up with a former girlfriend of mine ... then he suddenly introduced himself...), I learned that his real heroes were Bill and Sonny ... who took barbel from the Colne at Yiewsley and West Drayton (Thorney Weir) in the 1930s (?) that were the talk of the river... But that these brothers were a mere shade of the two greats who went before them -- 'Bendigo' a retired Victorian bare-knuckle prizefighter, and a local man, Harry Barnett...

Harry Barnett...

Clunk!

When I reached my 18th birthday, thirty years ago, my local tackle-dealer since I was 5- or 6-years-old, Jack Harrigan (respectful 'Salaams' to you, Jack, great fisher -- how I wish you had not struck out of that near-20-pound barbel on the Avon below Salisbury as I looked on in the summer of 1971), a man who had also taught me much, had been persuaded by my Dad and a mutual friend, **** Smith, to part with one of his Cooper-cased fish -- "for the lad's birthday". He did, a 'mere' "snotty" of around 6 pounds...

That Cooper case is beside me as I write. On its bow-front is written the following:


-BREAM-

Caught by Harry Barnett in the Colne at Uxbridge Point, Aug' 21st 1906


Bendigo, Barnett, the Warrens, Jimmy Hoare, Walker, outer London rivers, other rivers...

History, innit?