Viscount Grey of Fallodon was Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916 and the man who, shortly before the First World War, famously saw the lights going out across Europe. Grey published his sensitive insight to his fishing life, times and philosophies in 1899 and it has been much sought-after ever since. A nice first edition of Fly-Fishing would, at turn-of-millennium prices, have fetched £200-plus. The 1928 reprint I have just acquired cost less than a tenth of that.
It seemed, as I reached it down from its tucked-away niche in the tucked-away little shop, just the kind of thing that would make a present for a friend. Then I noticed that it had a couple of dents on the cover and, on ends of the pages when the book was closed, a couple of faint red stains where water, presumably at some time splashed onto the cover, had run.
I was on the point of rejecting it when the edge of something inside the back cover caught my eye. It was a cracked, yellow-and brown cutting from the Liverpool Daily Post dated Tuesday, August 29, 1933. The headline read ‘Sinking Yacht Rescue’ and then ‘Liverpool Men’s Thrilling Escape’.
Beside the cutting there was an inscription, written in handwriting that was scarcely bigger than the print used in the book itself. I started to decipher it but my eye was drawn relentlessly back to the cutting and I began to read.
It told how Mr A. McKie Reid, clearly a prominent Liverpool medical man, had set off on a sailing holiday with his friend Mr Leo Gradwell, a barrister. They had left Mostyn, in Wales, on the hired ketch Lalage, with two professional deckhands aboard. The plan was to sail up the west coast to Scotland but, in high winds and heavy seas in Caernarvon Bay, they found themselves in trouble. They used the engine for a time, then it broke down. Eventually finding themselves being driven towards the Skerries and with the seas running higher and higher, they made out to open water to run before the wind.
McKie Reid told the Daily Post how, as darkness fell, the boat began to take in water and they had to bail continuously. Finally, after what must have been a terrifying night, a trawler was sighted. Someone on the Lalage managed to flash a lamp briefly and the vessel – itself far off its own intended course – turned towards them.
Once alongside one another, the two boats rearing and plunging on the waves, McKie Reid made what he called ‘the biggest jump of my life. The two deckhands jumped next and Mr Gradwell made fast a towing line before he jumped. By this time the vessels had drifted apart and he nearly fell between them. About an hour after the trawler had taken the yacht in tow, it foundered. But for the trawler’s arrival, we should have been lost.’
Dramatic stuff, all right – but why was the cutting here, in this fishing book? I flicked to the front and looked again at the name and address I had noticed written inside it: ‘A. McKie Reid, 86 Rodney Street, Liverpool.’ I turned back to the inscription alongside the cutting. Deciphered, it read: ‘This book was with me on the Lalage. I threw it inside a rucksack, on board the trawler, before the boats were near enough for me to jump.’ And then the initials ‘A. McKie R.’
What I was holding in that shop – and what will now stay in my own collection instead of being passed on to someone else – was a book of little cash value yet one containing a text that generations of anglers have prized; a volume clearly so loved by its fly-fishing owner that in that dire, life-and-death situation, he took the time to grab it and hurl it to safety before jumping himself, even as the boat beneath his feet was making ready to go down.
I closed the book, went to the counter and handed over the £15 that was being asked for it. It was a bargain to me, if not to anyone else: this collector’s whopper literally in the bag. I’d have been happy to pay twice the price for a book with that kind of history – and for the tell-tale water stains, extra.
THE affection that many of us hold for our rods can border on the irrational. There is something about a rod that, once owned, can make it highly personal whether mass-produced or not. I don’t mean carbon fibre rods, marvellously functional though they are. I mean cane rods. Once cut and tapered, glued and varnished, cane comes to life again in the hand. Or, at least, we fancy it does. We fancy we can feel the throb and pulse of it clean through the corks.
With carbon fibre, all this wonderful subjectivity is lost. Carbon fibre performs better. It can be manufactured to produce any action required of it. We can abuse it constantly without impairing its performance. Carbon fibre has replaced cane for very good reasons. But still it is synthetic stuff, inert and characterless. It cannot tap into the emotions the way split cane used to do.
To lose a cherished split cane rod – worse still, to break one – can be a shattering experience in every sense. I know it only too well.
I HAVE many fishing rods, but I have only ever loved three. All were made of cane. One is a Wallis Wizard, the brilliant wholecane butt, split cane middle-and-top design by F.W.K. Wallis, the legendary Avon barbel specialist. I bought it as a lad by doing a newspaper round. I have it still. It is still in good heart and, more to the point, still in its original number of pieces.
The second rod is a Fario Club, one of the great creations of Charles Ritz, the famous hotelier who, in fly-fishing circles, is infinitely more famous as a designer of trout rods. I bought this 8ft 5in piece of honey-coloured delight with the first royalty cheque from my first book, half a lifetime ago.
I did most of my dry fly and nymph fishing with the Fario Club for ten years after that. Eventually, I broke its back – literally – when trying to keep low on a treeless bank while casting to a fish in distant mid-river. Down on one knee, while concentrating hard on the fish and reaching for distance, the line fell too low on the back cast, snagged a meadow buttercup – and did not come forward.
The third rod, a 6ft 9in aftm-4 brook rod built by Constable, was as light and delicate as a fairy’s wand and it cast spells as well as lines. It was as crisp and precise as a rapier – and as deadly. My wife gave it to me on one of my Big Zero birthdays, and I was thrilled to have it.
Cliff Constable was one of the finest builders of split cane this country has produced and his staggered-ferrule brook rod was his finest achievement. I asked my friend Stewart Canham, master fly-tyer and furnisher of cane rods so exquisite that they would not have looked out of place in a Bond Street window, to finish the cane for me.
Now Stewart is an extraordinary man, a big, multi-talented man with hands the size of bin lids. For all that he has an exquisite delicacy of touch and specialises in creating delicate things. One of his one-time interests, for example, was icing cakes and he iced the wedding cake he made for one of my daughters. It was so wonderfully done, so decorated about with sprays of flowers he had made from icing that guests were peering at them this way and that, wondering if they were real. His fly-tying was, a doctor friend of mine said, more delicate than brain surgery. At one time, interested in butterflies, he bred them by the hundred and produced cases of them so delicately spread and pinned that they could have been exhibits in the Natural History Museum. Everything that Stewart Canham decides to do, he does to perfection.
When it came to my rod, he never produced a more personalised thing. All the usual restrained touches were there, from the subtlety of the matt varnish instead of gloss to the near-transparent whippings, tipped with black. But it was the rest, the attention to so much tiny detail, that made the rod truly unique.
When he delivered it, I found that Stewart had got Constable to autograph the cane. A tiny ephermerid nymph, beautifully drawn in Indian ink, was crawling up the butt amid the details of rod length and line weight and the like. The 20-inch stopper that extended the butt section to the length of the top section for carrying purposes was wound about with ivy, drawn in Indian ink, in-filled with white. And so on and so on. He had produced less a rod, more an artwork and it carried a freight of sentiment for me.
Mayfly time in Dorset. A friend invited me down. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny but with – note it – a downstream breeze. The hawthorn blossom was out. The ranunculus was in flower. Swifts curved and sculpted the air. From time to time, wagtails