Kindling the fire of enthusiam

We may never replicate the achievements of the fishing greats but their elegant prose has inspired generations to pick up a rod

- TOM FORT

IN December 1945, nine months after the end of the war in Europe, a little book was published that represented an answer to the prayer from Allcocks of Redditch for the doctrine of force to be discredited and the best and most innocent of recreations to be enjoyed again. The Fisherman’s Bedside Book was an anthology of writing about angling. Apart from some Walton and one extract from Scrope, it was drawn from the period between 1850 and the conflict that had just finished. It could have been subtitled ‘An Antidote to the Horror of War’ in the way it presented the sport of fishing as an alternative to the belligerence of the modern era.

Much of it was filleted from the books of the acknowledged masters: HT Sheringham, JW Hills, Lord Grey of Fallodon, Arthur Ransome, Patrick Chalmers, Negley Farson, Halford, Skues, William Senior and others. It also extensively referenced a wider range of nature writers – principally Henry Thoreau, Richard Jefferies and WH Hudson – whose quests to find meaning and consolation in the natural world took them to the waterside and caused them to meditate on still and moving water.