Many years ago, I became irritated by an article that claimed an invention yet just rehashed an old idea that had been around 30 years. I wrote a bad-tempered letter to the editor of the publication pointing out that his young journalist could do with a few angling history lessons, and he wrote an equally bad-tempered letter back, saying that the old angling heroes ‘you cling to’ – the likes of Peter Stone, Richard Walker and Bob Church – were ‘increasingly an irrelevance.’ Possibly I deserved that reply, but Stoney and Walker didn’t deserve the comment, not least because they are no longer here to speak for themselves. You see, even as a 20-year-old cub reporter on Angling Times, I was a sucker for angling history. One by one, I browsed the books in the AT ‘library’ – classics which, one by one, disappeared from the shelves until they were all gone. It was the 1980s, and the start of the cult of the new, the beginning of Maggie Thatcher’s new Britain of greed and selfishness. We came to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. I have my suspicions that some of the older former AT staffers had recognised that the old library was unloved, and kidnapped the books to safety. Now, as I scan my own collection, I wish I had done the same. BB, Cholmondeley Pennell, Falkus, Ransome, Sheringham, Skues – all names which, gold-blocked on the spine, once looked down upon me from the old bookcase. But there was one contemporary book which I remember fondly. It was compiled by Sheffield angling journalist Colin Graham, and published by, of all unlikely organisations, the AA. It was a guide to Great Britain’s angling. I remember in particular thumbing through its pages of lists imagining myself enjoying the ‘ticket fishing’ (it was a guide to public waters) on the Dorset Stour at, perhaps, ‘Little Canford, Dorset. Coarse and Trout.  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which supports our community.
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