A mixture of expertise and clap trap

Our fishing correspondent considers how angling-from monkey climbers to how to tie a helicopter rig-has developed in the past 125 years

- David Profumo

THE weather that May was cold and dry, 'dust being everywhere, in street, road, and fallow Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee when ruling over some 450 million people in her Empire and Dominions. The Sultan of Zanzibar abolished slavery. Aspirin first appeared on the market. The Klondike Gold Rush began. Those low temperatures meant the 1897 mayfly hatches were late.

By the year of COUNTRY LIFE's founding, angling had become hugely popular throughout Britain. The sport had been formally subdivided into 'coarse' and 'game' in the 1884 Freshwater Fisheries Act; a year earlier, more than two million enthusiasts had visited the capital's Great International Fisheries Exhibition. Thousands of miles of railway track were opening up the countryside. Prominent pundits included Harry Cholmondeley-Pennell, William Senior and R. B. Marston (redoubtable editor of the influential Fishing Gazette, tuppence each Saturday). Within a few years, COUNTRY LIFE would publish a two-volume compendium, Fishing (1904) covering everything from trout to tarpon and running to 1,000 pages. Those were the days!