When the last veils were whipped aside, we found ourselves ogling The Big Two. Top Bait No 1 was maggots, Top Bait No 2 was bread. It was the lack of detail on Top Bait No 3 that was surprising. Top Bait No 3 was that anaconda of the lawn and vegetable patch, the lobworm. What was missing was an appreciation of the sporting opportunities the lobworm offers in its own wriggly right. It is an omission I want to make good, now.
Only a masochist digs for worms. Every angler knows that lobworms aplenty will be found lying right out in the open, on top of the lawn at night. All that is required to catch them is a torch, a tin, the stalking skills of a Kalahari bushman and the fastest forefinger and thumb in the west.
I don’t know why lobworms come up at night, but I can guess. Some say it’s because they are attracted by the cool night air. Others say they want to drink the dew from the grass. More likely, I suspect, is the prospect of getting up to what nature expects all of us to get up to on the grass under the cover of darkness at some time or other – only faster and more cheaply.
When it comes to courtship, remember, lobworms have little use for chat. When pursuing their wriggly ends, they have no need to splash out on drinks and dinner, quite possibly wasted. There are no clothes to be fumbled off. All they have to do is lie out there in the buff, waiting for a touch from another pointy nose and they’re away. So lobworms are on the top because they’re on the pull.
Which appears to leave them vulnerable. To the uninitiated, it looks the simplest thing in the world to bend down and pick them up. But the lobworm has lots of tiny little hooks in the sides of its tail and while its body is in the open, it usually leaves its tail in its tunnel. The challenge is to spot the worm, grab it and whip it into the can before it can set the hooks into the earth and pull itself down to safety – which it can do at reflex-defying speed. Obviously, easier said than done.
Also, because lobworms are light-sensitive, the torch beam cannot be shone directly onto one for more than a moment or it will be gone. One solution is to point the beam into the grass and to look for your quarry in the periphery of the light it throws. The other is to soften the beam’s glare.
A friend told me about his preferred way of doing the latter, long ago. He recommended – you can see why no-one digs for lobworms any more – covering the torch end with several layers cut from a woman’s silk or sheer nylon stocking, ideally still warm (‘they’re more stretchy, then’) and taken from the thigh end, which for some reason was ‘better’. Tights, I remember him saying fervently, ‘just aren’t the same’.
There is no doubt that the thicker, thigh end of a sheer nylon stocking doubled and redoubled over the end of a torch, diffuses the beam nicely. The problem is that the time taken to negotiate one from the wearer’s legs can sometimes leave little time for fishing itself. Which, my friend said, was okay by him.
But let us say that these preliminary challenges have been risen to. Let us say you have your stocking-tops, that your worm has been sighted, that it does not bolt and that you have managed, with a lightning stab down of forefinger and thumb, to grab it. Now what?
Usually, not much. The worm will have its hooks firmly set into the sides of its tunnel. You will be pulling with the aim of extracting it. But you cannot pull too hard in case the worm snaps – and you want the whole worm. So you find yourself in a protracted battle of finely judged strength and wills.
What is required is a steady pull that does not slacken for an instant. If the pull does slacken, the worm will sense weakness and take heart. If the pull can be sustained, the worm will over time begin to give up hope and little by little its grip will ease. Eventually, if you judge things aright, the lobworm will release its grip all of a sudden and the prize will be yours.
So yes, though the Top 50 Baits supplement did not mention it, there is more challenge in getting your hands on a lobworm than in acquiring the 49 other baits put together. It can take ages. That is the down-side. The upside is that in getting the requisite gear together – the stocking-tops especially – you can end up with more than one kind of result. Which, as my old friend would say, has always been okay by me.
ANYONE who reads the angling press regularly sees the same writers featured, time after time. If they go on long enough and have enough to say, such writers can acquire a kind of fame – though it is fame only within the closed world of fishing. Then, sooner or later, they disappear: either they lose interest, or they are displaced by younger, fresher writers or else, naturally, the man with the scythe intervenes. And that is that.
Every now and then, though, a fishing writer reaches a wider audience and is remembered by the national press when he dies. Arthur Oglesby was one of them. Oglesby was not a mover of mountains in angling, like a Falkus or a Walker, but he was a skilled writer and teacher who featured in the game fishing magazines for over three decades. He also lived in an exotic way. Oglesby had Brylcreemed good looks, money and social connections. Together with his fishing and writing skills, they took him to places, and into company, of which most anglers could only read. And he caught fish. Boy, did he catch fish. It was because of all this that I obituarised him in The Times.
WHEN Arthur Oglesby died on December 2, 2000 – the same day as his long-time friend Jack Hemingway (son of Ernest) – British angling lost a legendary salmon fisher: a man who repaid the privilege of a private income and the ability to fish pretty well when and where he pleased, by passing his encyclopaedic knowledge on to thousands of others through four decades of teaching and writing.
Oglesby was able to enjoy the cream of Atlantic salmon fishing on the international circuit in the days before disease, loss of habitat and pollution took its toll of this heroic fish, reducing it in many places to the point of extinction. He amassed a tally – it was over 2,000 fish in Britain alone – sufficient to take an ordinary mortal’s breath clean away. He counted among his friends many glittering names inside and outside the sport.
Indeed, Oglesby had been due to fish with Hemingway in Alaska earlier that year, but looming heart surgery prevented him from going. Then Hemingway himself underwent heart surgery and it was complications following their operations that claimed both men’s lives.
Arthur Victor Oglesby was born into comfortable family circumstances in December, 1923 and lived the early part of his life in York, close to the family business of Harvey Scruton Ltd., a firm of manufacturing chemists. He started to train as an industrial chemist immediately on leaving school, enlisted with the Black Watch at the age of 18, led his men into battle in the D-Day landings as a young officer – and was wounded in both chest and leg.
Oglesby left the Army as a captain and went into the family firm, which had been built on a widely known product of the time, Nurse Harvey’s Gripe Water, the first gripe water to come onto the market. In 1955 his father came into the younger Oglesby’s office – and collapsed and died in his arms. Arthur was catapulted into the managing director’s chair, struggled to overcome the burden of heavy death duties – and built the business up. By the mid-1960s he was able to hand over the reins to his brother David so that he could do what he had always wanted to do: devote his life to angling. Soon after he moved to Harrogate, where he settled.
Oglesby had been a passionate angler since childhood. In the 1950s he took to fishing the Yorkshire Esk, in those days an excellent salmon and sea trout river – and it was there that he met the man who was to prove, he was later to write, the greatest single influence on his fishing life: Eric Horsfall Turner.
Horsfall Turner, then Town Clerk of Scarborough, made an international name for himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s as captor of a string of giant blue-fin tunny – fish weighing 500lbs and 600lbs apiece – that put in a brief appearance along the north-east coast: but he was also a brilliant salmon angler, knew everyone in the business – and introduced Oglesby around.
In 1957 Oglesby went to Scotland with Horsfall Turner and there found himself introduced to Captain Tommy Edwards. Edwards was, by common consent, the finest fly-casting instructor