Silver Streams and Muddy Dreams E-Book

Tony Bailey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A joyful drift through an angling life. Poignant meanders with plenty of hooks to snare any angler looking for literary immersion.' – Kevin Parr, author of The Quiet Moon: Pathways to an Ancient Way of Being and Rivers Run: An Angler's Journey From Source to Sea Tony Bailey has been obsessed with fish his whole life (or, at least, what he can remember of it). As he reached his preteen years, this turned into a love for angling, which has stayed with him throughout his life and ensured he would spend the next seventy-odd years gladly indulging in his passion. In Silver Streams and Muddy Dreams, he looks back over a life spent fishing and considers what lights the spark that turns a human being into an angler – circumstance, social contact or genetics? Packed with memories and peppered with useful tips and observations, Tony explores the full gamut of angling possibilities, from the wildest stream to the most enigmatic of farm ponds, each tied to their histories and legends and each capable of providing the thrill of a lifetime or the peace and tranquillity to connect with nature and soothe the mind.

Leseprobe

Cover illustrations: Beautiful landscape (iStock/LEOcrafts); Fisherman (iStock/ Siarhei Kalesnikau)

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Tony Bailey, 2025

The right of Tony Bailey to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 862 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

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Contents

Foreword

1 In the Beginning

2 The Hike to Heaven

3 My First Attempt at Making a Rod

4 The Next Move

5 Wyre Wheels

6 Messing Around in Boats

7 Fantasy Fishing

8 Carp Fishing

9 Pike on the Fly

10 The Secret Beetle and Cow Green Reservoir

11 Salar the Salmon

12 The Lake District and the Lure of Throng Moss

13 A Big Perch

14 El Dorado

15 Wall-to-Wall Chub

16 Dog Days

17 Removing the Monkey from my Back

18 The Grayling and a Purple Patch

19 The Tench

20 8.20 a.m.

21 Super Flies for North-West Rivers

22 A Tale of Three Flies and Two Streams

23 The Road to the Isles

24 Largemouth Bass in South Africa

25 A Day in the Sun

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Fly Tying

Appendix 2: Safety in Boats

Acknowledgements

Foreword

It is 2024, the eightieth year of my existence on planet Earth, and I am left wondering how my life will be remembered in some small degree. For some time, I have been aware of my ability to transmit my experiences in written or spoken form to an audience not necessarily given to listening. An example of this occurred many years ago in a sixth form General Studies class that I attended in 1960. The unfortunate teacher involved was far too nice for the motley crew that made up my class. Eventually he gave up and suggested that one of us might like to take the class. Feeling sorry for him, and knowing that we had at least two interests in common, fly fishing and classical guitar, I volunteered. My deep love of fly fishing obviously shone through as I recounted my experiences with the help of that good old visual aid, the blackboard, and answered questions for a good half hour. The teacher thanked me with ‘You should be a teacher’.

More recently I have written articles for angling society magazines, including a short biography of a local angler. The most received information from my audience is ‘You should write a book’. So here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

Tony Bailey

1

In the Beginning

The 11-year-old boy sat on a low wall by the side of the Tromode Road near Douglas on the Isle of Man. The River Tromode flowed past, swift and crystal clear, making it easy to spot trout rising tantalisingly out of reach for a fly fisherman with only a length of old cuttyhunk to use as a fly line. His mother and sister were sat next to him, unsurprisingly unaware of the goings on under the water. A large fish, a very large fish, cruised by. He nudged his sister and pointed. Even she became excited. ‘That,’ said the boy, ‘is a salmon.’

He had to find a place where he could get down into the water and cast out his dry fly with just a nylon line and a bit of help from the breeze, but every time he reached a suitable spot the fish saw him and headed in numbers for other parts of the river. He didn’t catch any.

That night it rained, and the river turned brown. The owner of the boarding house suggested he might do better with worms and produced a can full, so off to the river. Catching trout on worms proved very easy but the fish were small and went back in the water until, inevitably, his rod bent over, and the fight was on. ‘That’s a good trout,’ said a voice from behind as the boy played it on to the gravel, knocked the fish on the head and folded it into the army surplus knapsack, de rigueur for the times. The boy asked the man if he was going to have a go, but he replied that he was after salmon and carried on to a deep pool just downstream, where he began spinning. Suddenly his rod slammed over and a powerful force began a frantic dash around the river, before being unceremoniously gaffed and lifted on to the bank, a bar of silver that would haunt that boy’s memory for the rest of his life. How do I know? That boy was me and the year was 1955.

This is a book primarily about fishing in Lancashire over the past seventy-odd years, but also looking at where the motivation lies in the beginning. What lights the spark that turns a human being into an angler? Is it circumstance, social contact or genetics? From my story of a lifetime obsession, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions but don’t worry, I hope it will prove to be a mine of information, some of which you might find useful.

* * *

In August 1943 Flying Officer W.E. Bailey lost his life in a bombing raid over the German city of Dresden. He left a wife and daughter and an unborn child – me. When I finally arrived in January 1944, times were hard and my mother and two of her sisters moved into a small semi-detached house on Bury Road, Breightmet, Bolton. Mother was an intelligent young woman who saw the necessity of planning her future in a way that would take care of her children and provide her with a decent income. She decided to train as a teacher under the Emergency Teacher Training Scheme and was given a place at Washington Hall near Chorley.

To take up this offer it was essential to send my sister and me to boarding schools and the suggested ones were in Southport. After an exploratory visit, two schools were chosen that were a few hundred yards from each other and that is how I ended up at Winterdyne Preparatory School and Kindergarten at the age of 4, courtesy of the Royal Air Force.

I was the youngest child they’d had as a boarder or even a day pupil and things in general were a bit too big for me. The school building, built for a sugar magnate in the early 1800s, was about as close as it gets to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Parts of the school were preserved in their original, luxurious style with an impressive entrance hall and a wide, sweeping staircase with magnificent balustrades and a fat, highly polished, wooden handrail curving up and to the left. My first thought was that it would make a brilliant slide, but on closer inspection the metal studs placed at intervals would have made it rather painful. The other side of the school was a somewhat spartan, scrubbed-wood environment that provided a number of classrooms and hidden staircases that were obviously there for the use of servants in an Upstairs, Downstairs world, or for little boys keen to explore the hidden floors within floors and the extensive cellars.

Right from the start I had to polish my shoes and tie my own laces every morning, brush my teeth and get dressed. After breakfast was Scripture Union, where I had to follow the text of the day and so I learned to read without the help of Mac and Tosh (primary school readers of the 1940s). The first text that I remember was: ‘In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth …’ I learned to count with the help of an older pupil as we walked to the church on a Sunday morning, counting the steps. In my first year I moved up three age groups. This ability opened up a whole new world of books for me to read: classical fairy tales, the Siege of Troy, Robinson Crusoe, A Christmas Carol, but my favourites were adult books on animals, which I still enjoy glancing through to this day.

There was, however, something missing: there were no books on fish. I had to make my own. I drew pictures everywhere, even in my schoolbooks, and made models with plasticine, the only medium available to me.

Every year the school held a modelling competition linked to the Crusaders’ Union. One time I noticed a model Noah’s Ark with a plasticine model ark floating on a sea of mirror glass and an idea was born. I made a boat and figures and tested it on the puddles that often lay on the ash playground. A boat wide in the beam sailed beautifully and, from that day on, every time it rained my boat sailed on a sea inhabited by plasticine fish.

I really don’t know who or what inspired this interest. Nobody at school was vaguely interested, and neither was my mother, nor the aunts who I lived with, nor my dear sister. But it grew and has been at the heart of my existence ever since.

Unlike many, I grew and prospered at boarding school; for me it was an ideal learning environment and I didn’t really need a teacher with the wealth of reading material available. Similarly with sport, I didn’t play with my own age group, always with older boys. The headteacher had been a Cambridge Blue in his youth, so sport was highly valued. Participation was sometimes hazardous, especially at cricket where the only protection was one leg pad, and the ball was very hard! I won the high jump on sports day and was the school swimming champion and, more importantly, learned how to survive against bullies.

Things began to change during school holidays. I loved walking around the country lanes between Breightmet and Ainsworth with my Aunt Jean. On our travels I noticed several ponds inhabited by fish, mostly sticklebacks, and became the proud owner of a fishing net. Now on every walk I carried a jar to take my catch back home in. Aquariums were set up in larger jars and even in an old bathtub (although the tub was galvanised, so all the fish died – after that I stuck to glassware). My sister was horrified and refused to come on the walks unless I stopped fishing. No chance.

At the age of 9 I won a prestigious scholarship to Bolton School, and so ended my time at Winterdyne. I had built up quite a collection of wildlife, which was housed on the wide shelf in the classroom: water beetles, caterpillars, etc. I asked the headteacher if he would look after them after I left, and he agreed to. I wonder how long they lasted?

My life was about to change drastically: my mother had a new man in her life, who I was to call Uncle Ray.

Ray Shippey had served in the Navy during the war and when he was discharged, he took a place on the Emergency Teacher Training Scheme, which is where he met my mother. He was a good-looking man whose outstanding feature was his muscular arms. He was easy to get on with at first, but later he became more domineering, which caused a lot of tension with the sisters.

Meanwhile, Aunt Jean was going out with a man called Vince Green and they decided to get married. They agreed to buy the house in Breightmet and, in 1954, we moved to a new house on the Bury to Bolton Road at the junction with Starling Road. At this time my fishing was limited to the use of a small net but I was already an avid reader of books by the likes of Bernard Venables and The Boys’ Book of Angling by Major General R.N. Stewart – books that I still possess and read to this day – and longed for the day when I might own my own rod and reel. Every spare moment was spent exploring in the stream and catching some of the many small creatures to be found under stones and swimming free. Of these, the most important were the shoals of sticklebacks found most abundantly downstream of a culvert, an overflow from an, as then, unknown pond. I didn’t want to catch them in a net; I needed a rod and line, and nature provided. The rod was a rush plucked from the stream edge and the line comprised three or four long, blond hairs plucked from my head and tied together. There was no need for a hook as these ferocious little predators would grab a morsel of worm and not let go. How they fought and bent the rod.

Here is the culvert today, before it wends its way down towards the River Irwell. No longer in a field, it is in a small strip of parkland on the edge of an estate.

Sometimes I would explore further upstream until I was stopped by a long, dark tunnel under the main road. Occasionally, after heavy rain when the stream rose to great heights, I would find a few fish here and wonder where they came from. The only way to find out was to follow the stream upwards, through the dark tunnel (which was easier than I expected) only to find myself in a garden! Keeping very low, I carried on upstream, under a high fence and into a wood, which I now know as Starling Wood, the last remaining vestige of the ancient woodland that once covered this area. I reached the confluence of two streams and followed the left, which led me to Starling Road. The stream crossed under the road and up into a rough, boggy grassland with a pond in the middle of it. The pond was very shallow and split in two with a kind of Red Sea crossing across the middle of it but with no immediate signs of fish (how wrong could I be!). This pond was the site of many a boyhood adventure; always fairly shallow, with a firm, sandy bottom, it was relatively safe to swim in and float rafts made from planks and empty metal drums. This was also the place where I was destined to catch my first fish on float tackle. It happened like this.

I had mentioned to my favourite uncle, Vince Green, that I wanted a proper rod and reel while listening to his tales of giant pike in Wigan Flash. Sure enough, he bought me one made of greenheart or some similar wood, with a Bakelite reel, some line and a bob float. At the earliest opportunity, I set off with two of my friends, Michael Crompton and Rodney Buckley, to the aforementioned pond. Being keen anglers, they showed me how to set up the tackle with a fat worm on the hook and the float bobbing on the surface. A large tabby cat came to sit next to us and watch procedures. The float bobbed and disappeared as a fine little perch struggled for freedom before being swung on to the bank. Big mistake! The cat was on it in a flash and my first fish ended up inside it. I soon learned that this was how it made its living, and it became a constant companion when I fished the ponds off Starling Road. A short distance further up the road was another pond known locally as the Two Inch. It was shallow but very dangerous, as the bottom was thick mud. It did have grassy banks to sit on and large shoals of roach constantly swimming by. There were also some surprisingly big roach and perch to be caught as well as an almost legendary carp, which cruised around with its back out of the water when it wasn’t hiding in a thick bed of rushes. I never did catch that fish, but I saw an adult catch it and put it back. It seemed an absolute monster but probably weighed 4 or 5lb. I visited these ponds every single day of the school holidays, as did many of the local boys who I made friends with. We fished, played chasing games in Starling Wood, swam and rafted on the bottom pond, and watched the abundant wildlife all around us. Magical times.

Uncle Ray seemed to be an expert at everything, and the house needed a lot of work doing to it. He would carry out the work and I was his 11-year-old labourer. I learned a lot about creating a raised garden on a slope, which involved Uncle Ray digging the foundations for the next three houses down the slope and me barrowing it all up the slope and riddling it on to a base layer of basic slag from the gas works. It still exists nearly seventy years later.

After the garden and the interior decoration were finished, Uncle Ray got his hands on a seemingly endless supply of old railway sleepers and my next job was sawing them up into blocks for the fire.

This was the worst job ever, as the saw was blunt and not suitable for the job in hand, but on the bright side, I had to keep changing arms and became more or less ambidextrous. I didn’t realise until later that this would be very useful for a budding fly caster.

On the downside, I could not sleep at night because of the growing pains in my arms. But again, this had a silver lining.

2

The Hike to Heaven

It was the summer of 1956 when Michael Crompton and I decided to go out for a day’s hike and to explore the local countryside. We took sandwiches and stopped at a long-gone shop near the top of Starling Road, which sold a new flavour of pop called cherryade. Like all new flavours, we drank too much of it and it rapidly lost number one spot, but at the time it was new and exciting.

Continuing up Starling Road, I found myself in new territory. At the top of the road, we crossed a main road and, turning left at the pub, continued down the road and turned left on to a steep, downhill, woodland path. At the bottom a stream ran into a shallow lake on the right while the path continued uphill to the top of a dam wall and before us spread a larger and deeper stretch of water. We skirted the right bank, disturbing numerous fish (mostly small perch) that shot out into deeper water. The path continued uphill towards another large dam holding back yet another mass of water with a modern concrete bridge spanning the far end. The water was clear and fish were rising in the still water. These were the three Whitehead lodges that had fishing run by the Radcliffe Angling Society, and contained all the fish you could want to provide a treasure trove of fishing all the year round. The rising fish were brown trout.

We sat in the sunshine eating sandwiches and listening to the drumming flight of the snipe. This was fishing heaven and I vowed to return with fishing tackle. As we crossed the bridge, I looked over into the water just in time to see a fair-sized brown trout rise from deep water and intercept a fly that had landed on the surface. I tucked this knowledge, along with many other observations, into my grey matter. This first-hand information is so much more relevant than reading it in books. So much information is carried over from book to book and magazine to magazine and can be so misleading (and often downright wrong), but seeing is believing. So many times, an accidental error can lead to another trick in the book. But I digress.

Around this time, 1956, there was a minor revolution in fishing rods. The tank aerial had arrived, along with some cheap and rather nasty fixed spool reels. Everybody of a similar age to myself who I have spoken to seems to have had one – my friend Michael ‘Jammy’ Hartley, who really was one of the jammiest anglers I have met, had one and an Omnia le Super fixed spool reel. We went up to the middle lodge, where we had heard there were pike, and he had a spin with a blue and silver Devon Minnow. This was metal, about ¾in long and is still one of the deadliest spinners for trout, perch and surprisingly big pike.

Jammy started spinning and very quickly hooked into a jack of about 3lb, which seemed like a big fish to us. Unfortunately we hadn’t got a landing net, so I had to land it by hand, which wasn’t easy as the modern approach to using the fingers under the chin hadn’t been invented at that time – we mostly used gaff hooks. Luckily there was only a small treble to be removed.