My Greatest Angler
All these posts give me great delight. I’m not too well at the moment, and if you can’t fish much, reading about it is a super substitute!
Greats? I think many of us would agree that our own personal greats are those who actually taught us in the early days of our angling careers. A lot of posts are indicating this, and rightly. Unlike many of you, I did not really have a fishing family, but my heroes were Manchester mill workers like Ron Bennet, whose name I remember with gratitude to this day. Why men like Ron took me under their wing I’ll never know, but they did and in so doing so, completely mapped out the course of my life. What a tragedy that society would now regard such altruism with suspicion.
However, it is still interesting, even instructive, to brood on those who have changed angling from the bottom up in one way or another. Many “names” did not initiate but perhaps they inspired. Of those who did initiate, it seems to me that many operated in groups, and had an angling circle around them that often magnified their impact. Peter Stone has been mentioned as a candidate for the Hall Of Fame, and rightly so (if we can forgive his later-life forays into appalling taxidermy, which I think we can as he was just so nice!). Yet, Peter surely did not operate in a vacuum? He was on the fringes of the Walker Group, knew Peter Drennan well, and I think corresponded with Frank Guttfield. Frank himself was at the centre of angling creativity, and his book In Search Of Big Fish is full of his adventures, along with those of Peter Frost and Jack Hilton.
I know that Walker and the younger Guttfield both had nice things to say about each other, and Frank always told me he had good relations with the Taylor Brothers, Pete Thomas and Maurice Ingham as a result. I met up with Pete Thomas on occasions, and what a great brain he possessed, surely an influence on the more famous Walker?
But talking about Walker reminds us that he was part of a fly-fishing circle of expertise that included visionaries like Fred Buller, Hugh Falkus (whether you liked him or not), Arthur Oglesby, the Hardy Brothers, the Miller family and my old patron, Norfolk’s Jim Deterding. Fred had a lot of time too for Brian Clarke, and his relationship with John Goddard gave us The Trout and The Fly. And surely, Bob Church overlaps with many of these anglers too, or so he told me on a trip to Scotland where I managed to break his salmon rod?
I am sure the same applies wherever we might look. Match men contributing to this thread talk about Clive Smith and Ken Giles, who were at the heart of so much excellence in the 70s and 80s. I fished with Norwich tackle dealer Tommy Boulton for many years, and he was a star of the Essex County team that included “greats” like Dennis Salmon, Bob Cheeseman, Kenny Rolfe, Pete Clapperton, Mick Thill and Jimmy Randall, who like Tom, relocated to Norfolk.
I hope this concept is not too geeky, but it is not rocket science and I suppose fairly obvious. Anglers we revere were a product of their age, and benefited from the influence of their immediate peers. In some cases, instead of just looking at an angler alone, we should consider those who fished alongside them?
