A History of Flyfishing

By Conrad Voss Bark and Peter Gathercole

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781910723166

Conrad Voss Bark

Conrad Voss Bark had a distinguished career as a national newspaper journalist and parliamentary correspondent for the BBC.Following his retirement as a political commentator, he was for many years angling correspondent for The Times. He wrote a number of fishing books, including The Dry Fly: Progress since Halford, A Fly on the Water, The Encyclopaedia of Flyfishing, Conrad voss Bark on Flyfishing and A History of Flyfishing. He was fascinated by the theories and experiments that lie behind developments in angling practice and fly design. Conrad Voss Bark was a keen fisherman, enjoying his sport from his home waters of the West Country (where his wife Anne ran the famous angling hotel, The Arundell Arms) to the stately Hampshire Test, to Ireland's enchanting Erriff, and to the wide expanses of the spring creeks of Montana. He died in November 2000.

Book preview

A History of

FLYFISHING

Conrad Voss Bark

TO ANNE

the best of fishing companions

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Illustrations

Colour Plates

Introduction

1 The Macedonian Method

2 Wyngis of the Pertryche

3 Cromwell’s General

4 Cotton, Walton and Barker

5 The Ludlow Doctor

6 Points of Departure

7 The Arrival of Ronalds

8 Butterflies for Salmon

9 Springs and Origins

10 The Dry Fly

11 Halford

12 Branche Line

13 Reservoirs of Poison

14 The Nymph Men

15 Bell’s Bugs

16 The Legitimate Method

17 The American Influence

18 The Return of the Plume

19 A Change of Flies

20 The Time of Our Lives

Plates

Appendix

The Roman Plume

The Treatyse

The Venables Text

Charles Cotton’s Flies

Scotcher of Chepstow

Alfred Ronalds

George Pulman and the Dry Fly

The Upstream Wet Fly

Kelson’s Salmon Flies

The Dry and the Floating Fly

G.E.M. Skues

H.S. Hall and the Dry Fly

Dr H. Bell

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

About this Book

About the Author

Also published by Merlin Unwin Books

Copyright

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

The 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