HT SHERINGHAM: 'The angler might travel very much farther and fare very much worse'

Tracing the footsteps of fishing writer and Field angling editor HT Sheringham, whose works capture the moments of sunshine and shadow in a fisherman's life

- HT Sheringham

I TRAVELLED much farther than planned and fared worse than I hoped. The romantic notion to trace the footsteps of angler and writer HT Sheringham, taken more than a century before along the Thames at Isleworth, came to me several years ago. My original idea, set aside along with so many other things, was to take the train to Richmond as he'd done, cross the former deer park and walk down the east bank towards the old ferry, perhaps through the trees that sheltered the lovers he observed as he strolled homeward in the peace that follows a happy fishing trip. On a recent visit to Kew Gardens, I looked upstream from the boundary viewpoint to the shingle banks where Sheringham fished for dace, and there made up my mind to go on the pilgrimage, with a fly-rod, to see whether dace are still to be caught on black gnats from this reach of the tidal Thames.

My first reading of Sheringham came from the compilation with a foreword by Tom Fort, in which he declared him to be the finest of all the fishing authors. At the time I was not so sure: Ransome had an equal claim, I felt, certainly on the grounds of prose style. Yet now I've read much of Sheringham's best work, I am inclined to agree. A good writer is an artist, and the object of art is to capture the essence of life; through his recognition of the darker as well as the celebratory moments of a fisherman, Sheringham raised his writing well above the normal fare. Among writers whose main oeuvre was fishing, I can think of no other who achieved this. Nor has anyone matched his lugubrious wit.