Walker - never met, but did exchange letters and speak on the phone several times when I was in my teens.
F.J.T. - missed him.
Peter Stone - met him at a Meet the Writers "do" thrown by Angling Magazine in Oxford in the mid-late 1970s. Lovely chap.
Bernard Venables - met him at the Bowood Game Fair in 1979, when he appeared out of a grassy nowhere in front of the Angling Mag. stand and promptly exclaimed "Mahseer! I've always wished to catch one..." on seeing some big "blow-up"s of some of my India slides that the magazine had had made for the Game Fair. I had Bernard to myself for a good ten minutes before the Editor and Deputy Editor of the magazine appeared from the marquee "room" behind the front desk, promptly did a double take and respectfully asked him and the lovely young woman who was with him in for a drink. They came in, Bernard having a half pint of light ale, the girl a soft drink. All present - the staff of both Angling Magazine and Shooting Times - we were a little in awe of the charming, articulate man.
Met many of the coarse and game fishing heroes (two of the latter being Frank Sawyer and, much later, the American Mel Krieger, fishing with them both, with Sawyer putting up with teaching a mad-keen ten- or eleven-year-old wonderfully and getting his wife to do afternoon "tea" (early supper), too. Most of those "heroes" didn't disappoint (both as anglers and as people), only a very very few, but then there are a few bad apples in every basket.
