Former Chairman of Myddleton Angling Club, John Davison, looks back at the readings he made to the club at the start of each season.
I have fished now for over 50 years, starting as boy of 14, and for me a large part of fishing is the philosophy of fishing and indeed the question of why we go fishing at all. In that context, I thought that members may be interested in some quotes from my favourite books. The quotes formed readings which were given to the Myddleton Angling Club between 2001 and 2013.
The matter of the readings came about in this way. In 2000, HB, who was the then President of the Club, quoted from an old and very elegant letter of thanks from a Mrs Senior for the funeral expenses for her husband Thomas which the Club had provided, and he also quoted from President George W Bush’s inauguration speech to “Show to each…goodwill and respect.” This was a nice thought to take to the new season.
2002
In 2002 I was elected the President of the Club and being something of a collector of fishing books I decided to read to the club some of my favourite quotes as thoughts to take them into the new season. At the end of the meeting the first quote was from The Way of a Man with a Trout by Donald Overfield, which is a collection of GEM Skues’ writings and an evaluation of the man who started chalkstream nymph fishing.
The quote had first come to my attention when members of the Grayling Society went on a fishing holiday to Sweden hosted by Lars Olsen. On that holiday we camped out overnight on the river and on the way back we were caught in a large thunderstorm. We also ran out of petrol and had a long row home!
Conversation in the boat turned to our favourite fishing quotes. Lars Olsen said his favourite quote came from the last few paragraphs of the book written by Donald Overfield. I thought this was a great epitaph and so at the next annual general meeting it became the first reading.
"And so the final act is carried out, there is no more to be said. The old gentleman lies beside his beloved Itchen placed there by a friend and angling companion of many a long summer’s day. To rest where trout sip down the spinners of the late evening and the early night wind rustles the waterside grasses.
That all fly fishers should end their days beside well loved streams would no doubt be George Edward Mackenzie Skues’ final wish, while to him we say “resquiescat in pace” beside your quiet Itchen for your immortality is assured while anglers cast their fly to chalkstream trout.”
2003
In 2003 I purchased Randall Kaufmann's book Bonefishing with a Fly. Having fished saltwater in Cuba and elsewhere, the introduction touched a chord in me and the reading to the club was as follows:
“When fishing salt water flats you become aware that everything is on fast forward and there is a heightened awareness of yourself and your surroundings. The vastness and power of nature forces you to contemplate your insignificance in startling situations and angling opportunities appear, disappear and reappear. Before you comprehend what is happening a ball of perhaps 100,000 or perhaps a half a million baitfish explode in the air like a time-lapse hallucination reflecting a million iridescent sunbeams. You are mesmerised by the blinding aerial display. Before you can toss a fly to their frantic mist the petrified little fish have somersaulted out of sight and raced on into invisibility. What was the cause such panic? Was it a school of rampaging yellowfin tuna, marauding jacks or a pair of 80lb tarpon? You will never know.”
2004
2004 saw me fishing the chalkstreams and a reading from John Waller Hills’ A Summer on the Test, written in 1924, seemed to give the essence of fishing. His words then are as true as they are today.
“Fishing old and famous rivers which great men in the past have studied and frequented has always had a peculiar charm for me. I care not for your reservoirs, your newly stocked waters, your made trout streams however mighty their inhabitants. No. There are two classes of water which make the highest appeal to the imaginations and the emotion. There are those which are unknown and unfished, whose mysterious depths may contain anything and those which you are first to explore. Everyone who has fished such knows with what expectation and awe as you draw near. But an emotion equally as strong, though different is given by rivers which have been fished for centuries. As I walk its banks, I like to think of those who have walked before me, who have seen the same sights as I see, been faced by the same problems, met with the same disasters and rejoiced in the same triumphs. I like to think they have been there, those men of the long rod and horsehair line slow and watchful, crafty men of their hand, quietly studying some great trout as I am studying him, and plotting his defeat as I am plotting it.”
2005
In 2005 I visited Canada and fished the Campbell river on Vancouver Island made famous by Roderick Haig-Brown who was one of the leading writers on fishing in North America. The reading to the 2005 AGM came from his book To Know a River.
“A river is water in its loveliest form; rivers have a life and sound and movement and infinity of variation, rivers are the veins of the earth through which lifeblood returns to the heart.”
2006
2006 saw the publication of The Longest Cast by Alexander Taylor, a beautifully illustrated book on fishing around the world. I liked a quote from the chapter on The Bahamas, which is as follows:
“Greek Myths tell of sirens who appear from the sea. These beautiful seductresses would stun their victims with their beauty and passion before luring them into the dark water never to return…. [T]he pull of the ocean can be incredibly great. Turning in the sand and facing the world behind you reveals so many things you already know –your home, your life, the complexities and hopes that surround you. But returning to the sea …. The horizon is so vast as to be almost infinite and the water so deep and dark it would hold the answers to all things. Standing so close to a world this limitless is like standing on the threshold of existence, delicately skating on the boundary between creator and creation. What is out there?
2007
In 2007 the reading was my favourite quote of all, which comes from T.E. Pritt’s Yorkshire Trout Flies (1886, p.63):
“It is not alone the sport of catching fish that constitutes the charm of angling: there is in every one of us an innate love of nature in her purest and her simplest phases; the meanest child will stop instinctively to pull the wayside flower. As of old, angling is still the Contemplative Man’s Recreation: the soothing influence of one bright day will linger with us through many a thoughtful hour, and the mind will wander off to the valleys and hills, to the clear skies and flying clouds and memory babbles almost unconsciously of green fields, made musical by the murmuring of the river and the songs of many birds.”
2008
In 2008 we had a quote from John C Moore, Fine Angling for Coarse Fish:
“Your pathway will be of thorns and you will have surmounted your first obstacle if you refuse to be deterred by fearful and terrifying reports concerning one Mr Smith. There is a Mr Smith in every little town though sometimes his name is Jones or Brown or even Robinson. He, folks say, is the very best fisherman for miles around and even he cannot catch much these days. So if Mr Smith can’t get ‘em and he has been on the river since he was a boy how can you hope to make a decent bag now and again? It is not really worth your trying.
You must not be discouraged. ‘Learn to fish better than Mr Smith’ is a proposition which is not quite as difficult as it sounds.”
2009
Sir Edward Grey’s book Fly Fishing is regarded as one of the classics of angling literature. Grey was Foreign Secretary at the time of the First World War. In 2009 the reading was:
“There is an age at which nearly everyone who is keen must be competitive, but as long as this lasts an angler has not yet attained the greatest enjoyment of his sport. He is missing more pleasure than he gains: and he is preventing himself from having that detachment of mind and freedom and independence of spirit, which are amongst the charms of angling. An angler who is keen will work hard, but he should do it without the sense of strain which comes from trying to beat his own records, or those of others. By all means let us find satisfaction to the end in having a heavy basket or the heaviest basket, but do not let us make it the prime object of the day. Rather let each day’s enjoyment stand upon its own merits without being made comparative.”
2010
In February 2010 I was absent from the AGM due to illness but the chosen reading was from John Waller Hills’ A Summer on the Test (1924):
“But beside the past it is well to look to the future. We too shall grow out of date. Fishers of 100 years hence will cast an easy smile on ourselves and on our methods which we think so delicate and so final.
Our tackle and our dress are practice and our appearance will seem to belong to the dark ages. In the Chronicles of the Houghton Fishing Club is an old photograph of members of the club taken outside the Grosvenor Arms at Stockbridge less than a century ago. Look at their immense top hats, white and black, their clumsy square-tailed coats, their whiskers, their 14 foot rods, their heavy sea boots. And yet they were great fishers, those old members of the club and great men too, picked men, the best of their time. Is it possible that we shall ever be like that? Not only shall we be, but we are, we are to the eye of Futurity a century hence. We are just as antique, as obsolete and as far away. A hundred years from now you and your Leonard rod and your fashionable coat and smart wading boots will look as old as that old photograph looks. Everything will be changed: the rods, the nets, the clothes, the faces the very figures, only the Test will be the same and its trout and the sport of fishing and possibly the Grosvenor Arms. The river will remain as long as a growing town population does not abstract all its pure springs.”
2011
In 2011 as we had not had any fishing poems I read the following poem from Richard Holding’s book Dawn along Temeside:
“When the cold gray windy days of March
Give way to April sun,
And Blossom on the Cherry Tree
Proclaims the winters gone.
When primrose shines on the river bank,
And the plaintive curlew cries –
Then the March Brown hatch goes sailing by,
And the fish take up their lies;
It’s time for the angler’s early outing,
The time the early writers called “spring trouting”
When the scent of Blossom fills the air
And earth revives from winter rains
When buttercups powder the waders with gold
And cow parsley laces the leafy lanes
Then the foam flecked river sparkles and boils
Alive with eagerly rising trout
And still as daylight fades in the west
One may fish ‘til the evening star shines out
For these are the heady days of June
The day when the May-fly calls the tune.
Late summer brings family holidays
Thyme scented walks in the August Sun
Lazy hours on the sandy beach
Endless night where the sea trout run
Then beneath golden September skies
Jealous summer lingers on
Though trout still rise to the grayling’s flies
The angler knows the season’s done
And cold mist rises in gathering gloom
As reluctant headlight turns for home.
2012
Many years ago Taff Price stayed at my house in connection with a talk which he gave to the Yorkshire Gamefishers Society. He gave me a book, Within the Streams, by John Hillaby (1949). It is all about fishing in Yorkshire and on page 61 there is mention of The Myddleton Angling Club. Here’s the reading:
“The Myddleton length on the Wharfe offered nearly everything I required. It is good streamy water where the dark olives of spring sailed down like little galleons and perished in thousands in the tails of fast stickles. Later on came the misnamed March Browns of April and May, majestic flies, overrated as an artificial lure but bearing such a majestic pair of wings over their warm brown bodies that the delighted fisherman feels that the quick life rhythms of summer are fast approaching and gives them more than their due measure of regard. June was the month of delight.”
Last year I was not well and unable to make the meeting but the Secretary gave the following reading from Robert Hughes’ A Jerk on One End:
“Salar finally reaches his biological spawning beds or “redds” There, a hen salmon named “Gralaks” –“ripe and ready to drop her eggs”- is scooping a trough in the gravel to spawn.------For a few moments Salar lay in ecstasy on the redd.” And then lucky devil he keeps just going.
As the days went on Salar became heavy with weariness. Most of his milt was shed; in slow pulse after slow pulse his life’s sweetness had been drawn from him leaving with each emptiness a greater inflaming desire, which during the day lapped about the wasted body with dreams of an everlasting sea of rest; but when darkness came, and the water was ashine with stars, he felt himself running bright with the river, and sweetness returned to him on the red beside Gralaks.”
I have told the Club I shall resign at the AGM in 2013 to make way for “fresh blood” in the chair.
My final reading will be from the 15th century Treatise of Fyshinge with an Angle by Dame Juliana Berners and runs as follows:
“You shall not use this foresaid crafty disport for the increasing and sparing of your money only, but principally for your solace, and to cause the health of your body and specially, of your soul.”
“Healing the soul” is to my mind the essence of fishing. Enjoy it, as I have, for many years.
John Davison