Harold Cutts was a ruddy faced, beaming swagger of a man. Despite the fraying army surplus jumper and faded corduroys, he puffed up his chest and theatrically leaned towards my somewhat bemused adolescent face. “Sithee,” he whispered conspiratorially, revealing a single slice of pork luncheon meat laid across his outstretched palm. “That’s all I’ll need to win this match today!”
The venue was the Yorkshire Ouse at Lower Dunsforth above the city of York and this was my first ever open competition. Indeed, it was my first competition of any kind and to say I was overawed would have been an understatement. I had arrived in the back of a red ‘Marley Tiles’ Ford Transit van courtesy of Derek Smith, a prominent matchman and regular rogue who lived in the far corner of my Seacroft cul-de-sac. Derek and I had frequently acknowledged each other as fellow anglers as we had seen each other setting off on our regular fishing expeditions, but I had become so shy and insular in my middle teens that the acknowledgement rarely extended beyond a nod and a “hello.” Nevertheless, Derek had taken it upon himself to seek me out one day and invite me to accompany him and his mate, Baz, to a Leeds and District Amalgamated Society of Anglers Open match at the aforementioned Dunsforth.
In those days, the Ouse roach population had been decimated by disease, and so, historically, these Dunsforth matches were won with one very large chub, barbel or, on occasions, if the right man drew the right peg, a big weight of bream. It was Harold Cutts’s plan to ledger with a large piece of meat in mid river to attract the chub. To my surprise, after a couple of hours of the match, Harold appeared behind me to ask how I was doing.
“How are you getting on,” I retorted, innocently.
“Aye, I’ve got one about 5lb” was the reply.
“Fantastic!” said I. “You might win this if you can get another.”
“Nah,” said Harold, “Nobody’s ever caught two. Just have to wait now and see if it’s big enough.”
I think he came third in the match, beaten by a net of bream and someone who had a chub of over 6lb.
Following my experience, I dedicated myself to the art of match fishing, albeit not fishing any matches. I discovered a book called ‘Match Fishing’ by Frank Oates, which it became my bible.
I slavishly followed every little tip and idea held within those pages and, without a doubt, my catches and my confidence increased significantly. Fortunately for me, Oates was a Yorkshireman, and so the ideas and experiences that he related in the book were totally relevant and wholly applicable to the situations that I was finding myself in. Also, as I was growing older, although still dependent on the West Yorkshire Bus Company, I was venturing to other accessible venues such as Wetherby, Collingham and Tadcaster on the River Wharfe; Knaersborough on the River Nidd, and the town centre waters in York on the River Ouse. My fishing was becoming an obsession, with tackle and techniques and the perfection of both under all circumstances at the epicentre. I befriended Derek Smith, who began to take me on occasional trips to venues further afield such as the Swale at Helperby and the Ouse at Acaster.
On one absolutely magical day, we loaded the ‘Marley’ van well before dawn to travel the interminable journey to Evesham on the infamous Warwickshire Avon. It was the final of a national competition organised by, I think, ‘The People’ newspaper, and Derek, together with a few other guys from Leeds, had qualified to fish. I was going along to watch and learn. It was my first ever opportunity to really watch a top class fishing event, and, with anglers from all over the country competing, it was an eye opening education of different approaches to similar situations. It was also my first ever encounter with the legendary Ivan Marks, who fished and communicated brilliantly and charismatically as he won the match from a mediocre peg to a rapt audience.
A school chum, Graham Lister, was also becoming an avidly competitive angler through his own very different route and experiences. Graham’s dad was a leading light with the ‘Tommy Wass’ angling club, a pub club that hired a coach each hungover Sunday morning to ride the raucous working class journeys to a variety of Yorkshire match venues.
Graham had been steeped, schooled and coached in this culture by his dad and the other club regulars for years, but, when invited to start accompanying them from time to time on their smoke filled, beer swilling early morning jaunts, I was completely out of my depth. In truth, I took the whole thing far too seriously at the time, but my social discomfort and relative lack of fishing success made an indelible impression of club fishing on me that still haunts to this day. Graham, however, was a good friend and an extremely able angler, and so, when not riding the Sunday morning charabanc together, we resorted once again to the West Yorkshire Bus Company to maintain our exploration of the art of teasing fish from Yorkshire rivers.
Another school friend, Ian Dobson, was just becoming interested in fishing at the time, and, as he was in the same class as me, we began to spend more and more time together. A good deal of our time was spent in my teaching and mentoring him to catch fish, although it has also to be confessed that we spent an equal amount of time in the South Leeds Conservative Club drinking ‘Black Velvets’ and playing snooker very badly.
My involvement with and membership of the club, however, gave me my first opportunity to fish matches, not as a guest, but as a legitimate member. Living in north Leeds at the time, participation in these events meant a pre-dawn journey on two buses across the city just to meet the coach, and so it was not really an opportunity that I embraced too frequently. However, the South Leeds Conservative Club did provide me with the opportunity to achieve my first real success and breakthrough in the world of match angling.
Each year, the Association of Conservative Clubs’ angling division held a large contest on the River Wharfe just below Tadcaster at a tiny village called Ulleskelf. At that time, Ulleskelf was the Mecca of Yorkshire match fishing; the venue where most of the really important contests were staged. It was a comparatively bleak venue to my eyes, with few trees on the bank and a relatively deep, narrow uninteresting section of the river sliding viscously through it. Nonetheless, there was a very healthy dace population, with occasional pockets of roach or bream, and some notorious barbel ‘holes’ which, inevitably, influenced the outcome of most of the matches.
Being very slightly tidal, there was also a realistic tactic of legering for flounders, or flatties as they were called, which was something of a last resort but had been known to top up a mediocre catch to a sufficient degree to offer a small financial return. The other somewhat unconventional tactic that was allowed under Leeds DASA rules, was the re-hooking of a legitimately caught dace on a single hook wire trace to catch one of the multitude of marauding pike that infested the venue. Invariably, this would prove to be the winning tactic. First, you needed to be sufficiently skilled to attract and accumulate nine or ten pounds of dace. Having achieved this, however, you would invariably find that you had also attracted the attentions of the local pike population, eager not to waste the opportunities presented by your gathering together of a crowd.
A double figure net of dace would certainly be enough to win money at most events, but in order to win, you then needed to be sufficiently ruthless to sacrifice one of those silver soldiers for the greater glory of an additional eight or ten pounds of angry enemy pike. It was a tactic that I personally was never comfortable with, but fortunately, it was also a tactic that was rendered completely redundant when I finally did make my breakthrough.
When we arrived at the Ulleskelf Village Hall for the 1970 Conservative Clubs Event, it had been raining heavily throughout Yorkshire for several days. Much doom and gloom pervaded the air as we extricated ourselves and our tackle from Ian’s Dad’s Hillman Imp to be told the river was bank high and running like chocolate. This was bad news indeed, especially at Ulleskelf, where there were no trees and very few bends to offer distraction to the current and consequent more fishable spots. As they say in Yorkshire, it promised to be a ‘grueller.’
With my extremely limited knowledge and experience I had absolutely no preconceptions of where I wanted to draw or how I would elect to fish and so my selected peg, number eight, simply meant a lengthy walk with virtually all the tackle I possessed to the upper end of the fishery. It was a most intimidating walk as the whole river had become an angry boiling churning monster. I had no idea what number eight would ultimately look like but my one consolation, as I trudged apprehensively upstream, was that there were no other pegs that looked in any way attractive, or even fishable, en route.
Peg eight was a nondescript raging torrent. The chocolate coloured waters lapped persistently around the top of the grassy bank as I surveyed in horror the prospect that would face me for the next five hours. Sitting on my basket by the water’s edge, I took out my flask of coffee and anticipated the angling equivalent of oblivion. Had I had independent transport, I would have most certainly gone home! But this was not an option, and so I committed to a plan to set up well back from the water and try to utilise the muddy steps down to where an angler would stand to fish when the river was at normal level. Maybe, by trying to lodge a bait in some nook or cranny within the bank-side vegetation I could find an eel or a couple of ruffe or something.
I sat so far back from the water’s edge that the tip of my rod still did not extend over the water. With a lightly shotted porcupine quill fished well over depth, I drew my tackle back so that the float was literally touching the bank beneath my rod top. The size of a cigarette packet, this was the only peaceful pocket of water I could find.
After an hour of desultory patience to my delight, and amazement, the float twitched a couple of times and then slid meaningfully beneath the surface from the attentions of a most beautiful vermilion finned roach of about a pound. The landing of such a fish was a heart stopping adventure in itself on my size 20 maggot-baited barbless hook, with its tenuous hold in the powerful current.
However, the delight at my capture very quickly turned to consternation. The roach instantly bestowed me with a very brief celebrity status from those fishless anglers around me who, seeing an excuse to stretch stagnant limbs, came along for a chat and to stand conspicuously and unhelpfully almost on the very spot that I had lured the fish from. Of course, I was far too young and inexperienced to say anything, even when one wise soul actually flicked a cigarette butt into the very same spot where my float had been! Once my novelty value had worn off and I was once more alone with my thoughts, a further consternation dawned in the realisation that, having caught a decent fish, I was now compelled to persist with my efforts for a further four hours. The disembodied voice of Harold Cutts and his, “nobody’s ever caught two,” drifted through my mind.
The fishing dragged on. I realise now, of course, that angling and nature are a harmonious marriage, that there is so much more to fishing than catching fish, that the sensitive angler blends seamlessly into life’s perfect tapestry, and time and the universe embrace as one. But as a callow twenty-year-old with a mind like a racing car, I shuffled and fiddled on my basket and with my tackle in a futile attempt to move time more quickly so that I could weigh my roach and go home.
For three and a half hours I was caught by this tug of war between patience and time. With fifteen minutes of the allotted time remaining, my float was actually lying on the bank amongst the grass, with the maggot beneath it drifting somewhere below the surface amongst the undergrowth. I was draining my plastic cup of the last tepid dregs of stewed thermos coffee when, in what seemed incredible and surreal slow motion, the small slim float slid through the grass, into the water and instantly beneath the waves.
I was almost too stunned to react but, having done so, and with a little more surprised force that necessary, it seemed I had unleashed a hidden fury. Whatever it was I had disturbed from its gentle bankside snack, now felt the power of the current on its back and had launched itself out into the river with me backwinding gingerly and trembling fearfully. To make matters worse I very quickly accumulated another audience of fishless anglers delivering a disconcerting commentary of advice, judgement and opinion on both my skills as an angler and my chances of successfully completing the job I had started.
It was a war of attrition. It was quickly apparent, to me anyway, that this was no monster to which I had become attached. It was a decent fish that had the added benefits of a powerful current and a very nervous opponent to work with. We dallied back and forth, to and fro in mutual ignorance, neither having caught sight of the other. I remember hearing the rest of the match call “time,” which meant that I now had a maximum of fifteen more minutes to land the fish if it were to be counted in with my roach.
Trying to shut my ears to the massed advice of the gallery, I focused hard on playing the fish. It had abandoned its former reckless runs across the river and had now settled for sulkily wallowing amongst the near bankside undergrowth ten yards below me. Tentatively coaxing the fish upstream, I was simultaneously inching myself and my landing net downstream in the hope of a rendezvous at some compromise location in-between. Somehow, and from somewhere, it seemed that I found an unexpected injection of courage at exactly the same time as the fish was overwhelmed by the tension of it all. A little extra pressure from me perhaps, but the fish suddenly capitulated and allowed itself to be drawn up to the surface, where it was rapidly engulfed in the landing net to a chorus of congratulation and abuse from the onlookers. The hook fell out in the net!
My bonus chub, for chub it was, of around 3lb boosted my overall weight to 4lb 2oz, which, on the day and in the prevailing conditions, proved enough to give me my first ever competition win. As we drove home happily in the Hillman Imp, all of the boredom, the frustration, the anticipation and the despair of the previous six or seven hours was completely subsumed by the relief and sheer satisfaction of having, at last, stepped over the line of success. There was luck aplenty, and precious little angling skill; but at that moment in time, I didn’t care a jot.
