On Fishing. Brian Clarke

dropped an old cork float onto Bernard’s creel. Someone else dropped down an artificial mayfly. Yet a third old friend dropped down another artificial fly and a fourth a small slip of wood which, he later said, had long-ago been harvested from the garden of Izaak Walton’s Staffordshire cottage.

      A couple of minutes later a blackbird, gripping its swaying cherry branch tightly, burst into full-throated song. It was as if the clouds had parted and the sun had come out.

      It is impossible to overstate the impact that Bernard Venables had on angling – and on young minds especially – with Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing. Crabtree was not Venables’ first book or his only book – Venables wrote a shelf-full of books, including one on tanks, one on a journey down the Zambesi and one about the open-boat whalers of the Azores. But Crabtree was his masterpiece.

      Crabtree the angler hatched from a highly popular strip cartoon that Venables drew for the Daily Mirror in the years immediately after the war. In 1949 the Mirror decided the strips should be turned into a book. Venables pulled several of the strips together, added some new bits, a few watercolours and some linking text. The resulting marriage – of images so vibrantly crafted to words marvellously honed – proved a soft-backed, 96-page publishing wonder. All it seemed to do was follow a father and son fishing through the year – for pike in winter, for trout in spring, for bream, tench and carp in summer, for perch, roach and rudd in autumn. But it sold in its hundreds, its thousands, its millions, earning its author not an extra penny in the process because the Mirror took the view that he was an employee when he did the work and so all rights were the paper’s own.

      There is no doubt that, in his later years, Venables came to view Crabtree with ambivalence. In a real sense he lived his later life struggling to get out of Crabtree’s shadow but whatever he did, the shadow lengthened and followed. Venables had much to feel frustrated about: not least the fact that his high artistic talents – ‘I live and breath for my art’, he once told me, ‘I am hell-driven by it’ – did not receive the recognition that was their due. Venables was a painter of a high order in oils and watercolours, a wonderful carver of wood and sculptor of stone. His work was hung several times in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. His cottage near Salisbury was crammed with the artillery of these inner conflicts: paintings, busts, easels, paints, brushes and inks jostled for space with rods, reels, bags, boxes, books and wellies.

      The overriding question Venables leaves behind is as much – he would not like this – about Crabtree as it is about himself. Why did that tiny book with its both timeless and dated, working-class yet oddly classless team of father and son fishing and talking, become the publishing wonder that it was?

      Acumen on the part of the Mirror Group obviously played its part. The timing was perfect. After the war, in drab days, long before television or videos or computers, most people were thrown back on their own resources for diversion and the reach and promotional clout of the paper made sure that anyone who might remotely be interested in the book, saw it. Venables’ great skill with brush and pen also played a key role.

      But there has to be more, something that accounts for the book’s success with, above all, young boys.

      A key feature, I believe, is that for the first time Venables took young minds which to that point had been physically marooned on the bank, down into the water and into the world of their quarry. He showed Crabtree and Peter at one end of the rod, fishing to the barrier of the reflecting surface. He showed the fish at the other end reacting to what the pair did and did not do. So Venables, for the first time, completed the circle: he made fishing come alive in the reader’s own mind, in the process giving each action at one end of the rod a visible consequence at the other. Naturally, also, his fish were great fish – and we knew that if we did what Crabtree and Peter did, whoppers would end up in our nets, too.