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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Man has been fishing for trout and salmon with the fly since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Devising ever more ingenious methods of doing so, his rods, reels, lines and flies have evolved in fascinating ways. With a delightful blend of wit and erudition, Conrad Voss Bark tells the story of flyfishing, from the Macedonian 'plumes' of old to the hairwing streamers of today. He spotlights the sport's formative protagonists – Juliana Berners, Robert Venables, Isaak Walton, Charles Cotton, Alfred Ronalds, George Kelson, J.C. Mottram, Dr Bell, and many others, using his journalist's skills to appraise the prevailing dogmas, the breakthroughs in tackle and to re-live the great debates and controversies, including the famous Skues-Halford dispute. Throughout, flyfishing is seen against the broader canvas of changing times in Britain, Ireland and North America. Today there are new forces which are shaping flyfishing history: water pollution, drift netting, over-kill, timeshare, catch-and-release and the explosion of new materials from which tackle and flies are made. Not since Waller Hills' classic History of Flyfishing for Trout of 1921, has a broad survey of this fascinating sport been tackled with such individual style and verve.
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A History of FLYFISHING
Conrad Voss Bark
2
TO ANNE
the best of fishing companions
Contents
Illustrations
Black and White Illustrations
1. Inflated bladder, 7th century BC
2. Manuscript of Dame Juliana Berners’ Treatyse
3. Title page of the Treatyse
4. Robert Venables in armour
5. Title page of The Experienced Angler
6. Charles Cotton (National Portrait Gallery)
7. Isaak Walton’s creel in the library of the Flyfishers’ Club, London (John Tarlton)
8. Title page of Franck’s Memoir
9. Title page of Brookes’ Art of Angling
10. George Kelson, the Victorian angler
11. The Jock Scott
12. Richard Routledge of Carlisle
13. Viscount Grey (BBC Hulton picture library)
14. David Foster, author, The Scientific Angler
15. H. S. Hall (Flyfishers’ Club)
16. Frederic M. Halford (Flyfishers’ Club)
17. G. E. M. Skues (Flyfishers’ Club)
18. Theodore Gordon (Forest & Stream)
19. Frank Sawyer
20. George Younger
21. Assorted ‘flies’
22. Early tube fly (Hardy catalogue, 1957)
Colour Plates
(in order of appearance within colour section)
1. Macedonian ‘plumes’ to Bowlker’s green drake
2. The pioneer reservoir patterns
3. The development of hair-wing salmon flies
4. The feather-wing and dry salmon flies
5. Dry flies, nymphs, spiders and mayflies
6. Plate from George Scotcher’s Fly Fisher’s Legacy, 1800
7. Plate from Alfred Ronalds’ Fly Fisher’s Entomology, 1836
8. Plate from George Kelson’s The Salmon Fly, 1895
Introduction
Research into the history of flyfishing produces surprises. Many modern ideas have to be revised. One discovers that dry fly fishing did not start with Halford in the 1880s on the Test, that nymph fishing did not begin with the inventions of Skues and that Frank Sawyer was not the first to use weighted flies. Leaded pupae imitations were being tied by anglers 350 years ago, about the time that Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall.
In fact fly designs and the presentation of the fly have been little changed for hundreds of years. The Romans used streamer flies, called plumes, to fish Tyne and Thames during the Roman occupation of Britain. Beads were used to make bug-eyed flies for reservoir trout fishing in the 1960s, but the idea of doing so was first mooted some 200 years previously.
Upside-down flies, the ones with the hook point that floats uppermost which were recommended for taking difficult trout in the 1980s were first tied by a soldier of Cromwell’s army in the 1660s. One could go on almost endlessly with examples of flies invented by one generation, then forgotten by the next and reinvented as something new, years and sometimes centuries later.
These variations on early themes determined to some extent, how much I am still not certain, the need to select from approximately 2,000 years of flyfishing history the significant xiv stages of its development, the move from the Greeks to the Normans, to the first book in English on angling and the brilliant inventiveness of the 17th and 18th centuries which spurred and invigorated the thoughts and practices of the 19th.
There are certain times when the human spirit seems to burst with the enthusiasm and exhilaration of discovery and invention, when the whole atmosphere of the time is charged with the excitement of creation.
Such a time was in the 17th century when more books on angling were published than ever before, among them the wonderful picture of happy England in Isaak Walton’s Compleat Angler which was written during the turmoil and horrors of civil war and religious persecution. At least three men - Venables, Cotton and Barker - represent the progress in flyfishing development of that time.
By the next century, the 18th, we are almost in sight of modern times with men like Stewart on the Borders fishing his spiders aloft upstream and the Bowlkers setting an example of skill and fly design on the Teme which lasted at least a hundred or more years. Of these two Stewart was a character of enormous charm and skill.
By the mid-1800s we are in reach of the first complete definition of how to fish the dry fly given by David Foster of Ashbourne in Derbyshire which for some curious reason was almost completely ignored by those who later became disciples of the great and autocratic Halford on the Test.
Halford laid down the principles of dry fly fishing which had been pioneered by Foster and others before him and was helped in the presentation of the fly by two great American inventions: the heavy, braided and oiled silk line and the split cane rod. These allowed for the first time a greater accuracy in the presentation of the fly to rising fish than had ever been possible with the light silk lines that had been in common use before. xv
It is right that at this stage, after a hundred years of apparent uncertainty, that the credit for inventing the true dry fly of the Test, the split-wing floater, should go to the Clifton school master, H. S. Hall, whose natural reticence contributed to a belief at the time that it was the invention of Marryat or Halford. The evidence for Hall which is given in full in the Appendix on page 145 is, I believe, conclusive.
The split-wing floater, however, had its day and is now largely overtaken in use and popularity by other fly designs which are based not on Halford’s principle of exact imitation but on creating the illusion of an insect rather than a copy of it. Fly design has a fashionable as well as an ephemeral life which, to most flyfishers, is part of its fascination and attraction.
All the same it was rather sad that most of Halford’s disciples, with a few honourable exceptions believed, in their sudden blinding conversion and enthusiasm for the dry fly, that this had happened exclusively and entirely on the chalkstreams of Hampshire and that throughout the rest of the country everyone naturally fished the wet fly, the sunk fly, and mostly downstream.
If only someone had experimented with a horse-hair line at that time they would have had to modify their beliefs to a very great extent. Most of the progress in fly design and presentation had been made not on the chalkstreams but on the limestone and spate rivers of the midlands and the north of England and the Scottish Borders.
But now, perhaps with a sideways glance at the curious history of Kelson and the salmon fly and the birth of angling on the reservoirs, we come to the revolutionary inventions of the Americans which allowed flyfishing to burst through its previous limited frontiers to explore deep-water territories which hitherto could only have been reached by bait and spinner. xvi
This was the space age revolution of plastic lines and graphite rods which began in the 1950s and is set to continue to provide flyfishers with tackle and flies of a sophistication that not even our fathers could have imagined possible.
Yet with all our progress in fly design, in presentation of the fly and in rivercraft, the basic principles of flyfishing remain as they were two thousand years ago. It is still to present to the fish a flicker of life in the water which gives the impression of something they may be tempted to eat, a kind of conjuring trick, the creation of an illusion.
There are no rules, no certainties. One relies on:
that craft of the wilderness, that facility of appreciating the ways of bird and beast and fish and insect, the acquirement of which was, through countless centuries, the one great primary interest of primitive man.
(J. W. Dunne, Sunshine and the Dry Fly, 1924)
Conrad Voss Bark Lifton, Devon
CHAPTER ONE
The Macedonian Method
Flyfishing began at least two thousand years ago. Possibly more. It began because it was the best way of catching fish that were feeding on the surface on winged insects, the caddis or sedge flies, mayflies, olives, upwinged flies, black gnats, whatever names they had for them. The names would have been different. The flies were the same. So were the trout.
With the big flies whose bodies were more than an inch long there would have been no problem. They could be caught and impaled on a hook then dapped amid the rising fish. The big stone fly would have been admirable for dapping.
But there were other flies, smaller, more delicate, whose bodies would break if they were pierced by a hook. There would have been times in those far off days as there are now when trout would feed selectively on particular kinds of small surface insects and ignore subaqueous food while they were doing so. It would have infuriated an angler to see trout feeding avidly on small flies hatching on the surface while ignoring his worm.
We know from the writings of Homer and others that anglers were skilled in the ways of nature and the habits of fish. They were used to creating artificial lures such as plumes - we would call them streamer flies - and had fished them for thousands of years. They made them from feathers of the sea mew (seagull) tied to a hook that had been wrapped in wool 2 of a Laconian red. We are not certain what colour Laconian red would have been but the likelihood is a bright scarlet. The Romans used these plumes to take salmon from the rivers of Gaul and also from the Thames and Tyne when they came to England. Making artificial lures to catch fish was nothing new. Indeed there are suggestions that they go back three or four thousand years or more to the ancient Egyptian dynasties. The Chinese are said to have used a kingfisher’s feather as a hook bait several thousand years BC but we know no more than that. Possibly that too would have been a plume, a streamer.
Seventh century BC version of the float tube
But to use feathers to suggest a winged insect was a more complicated matter. So far as we know the ancient Greeks, the people of Macedon, were the first to manage it. They used coloured wools for the body of the fly and for the wings mounted two cock’s feathers on the hook which they took from a cock’s cape, as we do today.
We have a description of the Macedonian method from Aelian, a Spanish writer living in Rome, who seems to have made his living from what we might now call popular journalism. He lived from about 170 to 230 AD and wrote 3 about the marvels of nature, some of which he had heard of from others and not actually seen for himself. Flyfishing was one.
We have the details, such as they are, from his book De Natura Animalium which was probably dated about 200 AD. The reference to flyfishing is brief and is given here as translated by Lambert in Radcliffe’s Fishing from the Earliest Times:
I have heard of a Macedonian way of catching fish and it is this: between Bercea and Thessalonica runs a river called the Aestraeus and in it there are fish with speckled skins; what the natives of the country call them you had better ask the Macedonians. These fish feed on a fly peculiar to the country which hovers on the river. It is not like flies found elsewhere nor does it resemble a wasp in appearance, nor in shape would one justly describe it as a midge or a bee; yet it has something of each of these, it imitates the colour of a wasp and it hums like a bee. The natives generally call it the hippourus.
Aelian flounders when he tries to describe the fly. It does not sound like any fly known to us or for that matter to the Macedonians. However, he then goes on to say the flies are so delicate they cannot be put on the hook to use as bait. So the fishermen’s cunning comes into play:
…they have planned a snare for the fish and get the better of them by their fishermen’s craft. They fasten red wool round a hook and fix on to the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles and which in colour are like wax. Their rod is six feet long and their line of the same length. Then they throw their snare, and the fish, maddened and excited by the colour, come straight at it, thinking by the sight to get a dainty mouthful; when, however, it opens its jaws, it is caught by the hook and enjoys a bitter repast, a captive.
4The flies that were the colour of unrefined wax were probably dun coloured. A six foot rod and line (if Aelian is correct) suggests dapping. The smallest Graeco-Roman hooks would be about 10 or 12 (Redditch scale). Flyfishing does not seem to have survived on the Aestraeus today, at least not in its original form:
The river Aestraeus in Macedon is now known as the Kotichas. It is now a small river passing through the villages of Arkohorio and Monospita. Some rather unimportant species of fish can be found in the flatlands of Monospita…[but] in the mountainous area of Arkohorio there is trout fishing. Two methods of fishing are normally used, casting nets or using rods with either a dummy fish bait or a plume.
(Greek Embassy spokesman)
After Aelian’s description of flyfishing there is a gap. We know little or nothing of flyfishing for over a thousand years. There are hints here and there which might be about the fly but might also be about bait.
Around 900 AD an Abbot Aelfric, in Dorset or Devon, was said to have taught his pupils Latin by having a Latin translation placed underneath each Anglo-Saxon line of a text about fishing.
In France, around 1000 AD, a paper describing what has been said to have been flyfishing was written at the Abbey of St Bertin, near Omer, but it is believed to have been destroyed in one of the many wars which have ravaged that part of the world.
We assume, rightly or wrongly, that the knowledge of flyfishing came to Britain at about the time of the Norman invasion in 1066 but there is no hard evidence of this. The Norman knights were keen on manly sports, hunting and hawking, and one of the main sporting books in France at that time was The Master of Game, but it missed out flyfishing. 5
There is a manuscript version of The Master of Game translated into English probably around 1405 by Edward Duke of York who died in battle at Agincourt some ten years later. Sometime in the mid 1400s an unknown author added a fourth section to The Master of Game which dealt with flyfishing. A copy is in the Yale University Library. This script formed the basis of the first printed book in English about flyfishing which was produced at Caxton’s press in Westminster in 1496 by Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, The Treatyse of Fysshynge Wyth an Angle.
The author of the Treatyse is traditionally supposed to have been a lady, a Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners, a lady of high birth who was prioress of Sopwell Priory near St Albans and the book was said to have been published at St Albans city.
Not so. An antiquarian, Jack Heddon, going through the Westminster Abbey archives some years ago found that the abbey’s own researchers looking for the site of Caxton’s press found that it was close to a house called St Albans. This was in the area now covered by grass to the east of the abbey’s Chapter House where the statue of King George V now stands.
The colophon (printer’s imprint) on the Treatyse - ‘apud villa sancti Albani’ - therefore meant near St Alban’s house and was nothing to do with the city or abbey of St Albans. The confusion had arisen because Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners had been given as the author of the Treatyse on hunting, so it was assumed she had written the fishing treatyse as well.
Wynkyn de Worde didn’t give it any specific by-line and the assumption was simply made that the same author had done both the hunting and the fishing treatises. But that was a hasty assumption as careful reading of both the treatises soon gives reason to suspect. The hunting one is full of admonitions of the order of ‘listen to your dame’ whereas not one word of the 6 fishing treatise makes even oblique reference to the author’s gender. It could just as well have been written by a man.
(Arnold Gingrich, The Fishing in Print, 1974)
Even so it seems rather sad to abandon Berners after she had been regarded as the author of the book on fishing for nearly five hundred years. Waller Hills, in his A History of Fishing for Trout, says he does not like quoting an anonymous writer. I have a fellow feeling for him. Let us keep Berners as a matter of convenience.
So Berners’ therefore is the first printed book in English on fishing, most of it on bait fishing - the majority interest - but it is a good account of flyfishing as well.
Some interpretation is necessary. The title itself, Fysshynge Wyth an Angle, means fishing with a hook, from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘angul’, a hook. Much of the writing is to our way of thinking tedious. Berners writes with fervour about how fishing improves the health of the body and how it is good for the soul, how you can say your prayers by the river, and how you should behave in a way that meets the approval of God and St Peter. The book seems to have been written for a leisured and sophisticated class so possibly Wynkyn de Worde, who might well have been editor as well as publisher was thinking of a readership largely in London.
London was still small, about the size of the walled city and it would not have taken men long to reach clean rivers. The Cray and the Wandle were chalkstreams and until Victorian times held a good stock of trout. There was the Westbourne brook (now underground to feed the Serpentine) and Holburn and Tyburn took their names from streams, and of course there was the Lea and the Fleet, and some of those held salmon as well as the Thames.
Berners gives detailed instructions how to make a rod that would do for both bait and flyfishing. It had a butt made from 7 willow or rowan. The butt was hollow (the pith was burnt out) and inside were carried the two top sections, made from other woods, and these would be taken out at the side of the river and spliced together, making a rod of about twelve to eighteen feet long. Bait fishermen could use such a rod as we use a modern roach pole.
It is quite possible that if a fisherman was not able to make such a rod then a master craftsman might do it for him. Berners went into the detail that a craftsman would need. Waller Hills, in his History of Fishing for Trout, was very impressed by the instructions:
The casual reader, mislead by the archaic English in which the Treatyse is written, and above all by some of the clumsy plates [woodcuts] with which it is embellished, especially the frontispiece and that of the rod, may think that the practical part of the book is worthless. This is quite untrue: the rod, which in the picture looks like an ungainly pole, is really light and flexible: a hollow butt, a springy middle joint of hazel and a light yet tough top make up something which would throw a fly uncommonly well.
A master craftsman perhaps in Cheapside, and a member of a craft guild, with apprentices and journeymen attached to the workshop and living in, might have been prepared to burn out the pith from a rowan branch, ferrule the ends, fit a spike so the rod could be kept upright on the bank rather than laid down for people to walk over, and make all sound for gentlemen who could indulge in country sports.
It is also possible that merchants could supply tapered and twisted horsehair lines, twelve, fourteen or eighteen feet long, with the various links of horsehair - white would be the strongest - joined together by a water knot, tapered from ten hairs at the butt to two at the point. But this is speculation and 8 whether the rod would come with the line attached is doubtful. It might have been outside the scope of the guild.
As an experiment some years ago, I made a Berners-type rod from a roach pole and parts of old cane rods. That was comparatively easy but the difficulty was making a horsehair line. It took several days to find the willing horse and several more to twist or plait a tapered line. Eventually I had a rod about 16-foot long and a line of about the same length tapered from something like twelve or fourteen hairs at the butt to three at the point. The butt was glued to a small leather bootlace which was glued and then whipped to the top of the rod. The master craftsman of Cheapside would have shuddered at the sight but it worked.
I could cast the horsehair line not only across the wind but against it, providing the wind was not too strong, which experts had told me was impossible with hair lines. It wasn’t impossible at all.
Accompanied by two rather mystified dogs I took this enormous pole to a lake and made a cast. I had a small loch fly on the point, about a size 10, and it turned over well, sinking a little below the surface film and there, surprisingly, it stayed. What I had not realised and what the experts had not told me was that a hair line cannot sink. The fly did not have sufficient weight to pull it down. It remained visible in or just under the surface film. In modern parlance it was behaving like an emerger.
I jiggled the line. I tried to make the fly sink but it did not. I went from the lake to the river which was fairly close by and as I walked I did some false casting to dry the fly, which was the obvious thing to do and I suspect what Berners would have done if she had thought of mentioning it.
The river was small, rather well bushed, but with an open space between the branches. I held the rod up, let the line blow 9 out over the water, and let the fly touch the surface. Then I lowered the rod and allowed the fly to drift downstream. It drifted for about four or five feet and for half that distance it floated on the top of the water - it looked like a dry fly - and for the rest of the distance it assumed its natural role as an emerger. As I was doing this I suddenly remembered that this was how Izaak Walton had recommended us to fish. ‘Let your fly only touch the water’ he said, and that was what I had been doing for the first part of the drift. It felt odd in some strange way to think I was fishing as Walton would have told me.
Then I tried long casting, across the current, and this time the speed with which the fly landed put it below the surface of the water at once but again it did not sink any distance below the surface for the line was holding it up. Casting upstream was the same, though if I did one or two false casts - our ancestors called them whipping the line - then the fly would alight on the surface of the water, quite visible, and float for perhaps a foot or so before becoming waterlogged.
I had not expected the elasticity of horsehair. When I tried to break the fly off from three-strands of twisted horsehair it required a considerable pull. The hair link stretched for what seemed like several inches. I could now understand how fishermen could land quite a sizeable trout on a single hair.
But the greatest surprise of all was that the flies would not sink. This explains why our ancestors never bothered to talk about dry fly or wet fly fishing. There was no need. Their flies did both. You could dap them on the surface, as Izaak Walton said, or you could let them float for a short time with the line floating after them until they became waterlogged. You could also cast as far as you could and let the fly sink just below the surface, like an emerger.
In no way could our ancestors have fished the wet fly as we can today, across and down, sinking several inches, perhaps a 10 foot, below the surface. I tried fishing across and down myself and the fly, held up by the horsehair, became a wake fly, making a ruffle across the top of the water as it swung round.
No question about it. Our ancestors were attempting, within the limits of their technology, to fish their artificial flies on the surface of the water where the natural flies were hatching. They were attempting to fish a floating fly, what we would now call a dry fly, and when it sank, as it frequently did, they could fish it as an emerger pattern, or they could lift it off the water, whisk it dry and cast again. No wonder they did not discriminate between wet fly and dry. They could fish either one or the other in the same or in consecutive casts.
CHAPTER TWO
Wyngis of the Pertryche
Berners’ advice to anglers is comparatively modern. In many ways we have not changed a great deal in five hundred years. It is true that every now and then she invokes God and St Peter and tells readers to be good and say their prayers but that was the fashion of the time. Berners was very firm on how to behave:
I charge you that you break no man’s hedges in going about your sports, nor open any man’s gates without shutting them again… Also you must not use this arteful sport for covetousness, merely for the increasing or saving of your money, but mainly for your enjoyment and to procure the health of your body and more especially of your soul.
A direct prohibition on selling your catch is far stronger than modern angling codes which urge that anglers should merely be discouraged from doing so. Moreover, anglers must avoid the killer instinct:
Also, you must not be too greedy in catching your said game [fish] as in taking too much at one time, a thing that can easily happen if you do in every point as this treatyse shows you. That could easily be the occasion of destroying your sport and other men’s also. When you have a sufficient mess [catch] you should covet no more at that time.
12All noble men must be concerned to protect the rivers and the fish:
…you must busy yourself to nourish the game in everything that you can, and to destroy all such things as are the devourers of it. And all these that do according to this rule will have the blessing of God and St Peter. That blessing may he grant who bought us with his precious blood.
All these quotations are from John McDonald’s version of the Treatyse (see p.148) which uses modern words where the early-English might be confusing.
One of the problems about Berners is the dressings of the flies which are given in the text. Consider how clear and detailed are the instructions on rod making. They are quite precise. The master craftsman of Cheapside would know precisely what to do to make a rod, even if he had never or rarely seen a fishing rod before. But nothing of the kind applies to flies, what they represent or how they should be tied. This, for example, is the fly to be used in March:
