No! No! Gentlemen. Please read the title again. It says a life IN the game, not on the game! The recent remarks about me by Jim Baxter in a recent Angling Star, coupled with the tragic death of my old angling buddy, Tim Cole, have made me sit back and review almost half a century of fishing. I would never use the word ‘career’, because I am not a professional angler (I have a piece in preparation on professional anglers); angling has been, since the age of 12, a time-consuming hobby. Before that, from the age of 5 or six, I was into sticklebacks, bulheads and stone loach! But real angling only happened for me when my maternal grandmother bequeathed me her fishing tackle – a three-piece rod of whole cane and lancewood (top) with solid wooden handle and a small Nottingham star-back reel.
By profession I am a geologist, specialising in fossils (palaeontology) and evolution, on a world-wide basis, of ancient, extinct animals. And I lecture in these and related fields at the University of Cambridge. This is not irrelevant to angling! For a start it has meant that I have nearly always missed the start of the old season (June 16th) because it was in the middle of our exams, and until early July I had field classes to deal with – then my own research fieldwork in many parts of the world. As a result my summers were usually hit-and-miss fishing efforts, and I concentrated on winter fishing, when I had time, hence pike. However, my favourite species is the tench, not the pike, contrary to widespread opinion. Despite these problems I did manage to get in plenty of fishing and still do. Those last three words are important…
For many ordinarily intelligent people just to sit there at the waterside, catching or not, is not enough. It is necessary to be involved (administration) or be competitive (match fishing) or simply study to improve one’s catches (specialist angling). I became ‘involved’ from the beginning, both in administration and in specimen hunting (as specialist angling was then called). And I still do both. I think the fact that I still seriously fish, a lot, improves all my work, administrative chores, related science, conservation and so on. To understand today’s angling problems you have to be an experienced angler: not necessarily long in the tooth, but experienced as a result of a lot of fishing. To have once fished is not enough.
So what about the beginnings? It makes me smile a little to think back, I spent the first six months with my grandmother’s tackle failing to get a bite, let alone a fish! I’d read a bit of Bernard Venables, but he didn’t seem to help. What did help was meeting an old gaffer by the bankside (he removed from the seat of my trousers a snap tackle that I had sat on!) He convinced me that I’d catch very few roach, (or even perch) with the 15lbs monofil tied to an eyed hook! He set me up with a bit of line, a decent float, some shot and a hook-to-nylon – and I got a perch on the next trip. I gave him the snap tackle I’d ‘found’!Quite a few boys in the village fished, so we formed a specimen group (of 10-15 year-olds!). Because the village was Hook, in that big bend, or hook, of the Yorkshire Ouse, it became the Hook Specimen Group. Couldn’t get a better name, could you? All our fishing was by bicycle to parts of East Yorkshire – the (now) Motorway Pond at Newport, Newport canal, Carlton Towers in West Yorkshire and the rivers Derwent and Ouse, as well as numerous small ponds. It’s worth noting that this specimen group was formed before the Northern Specimen Group (based in Sheffield, and which has none other than Dick Clegg as a member). It is also worth noting that we were quite successful, with roach to 2lbs 5oz, several double-figure pike. Eels averaging 2lbs, some big bream, and tench averaging 2.5 lbs. On one of our roach waters (at Gilberdyke) our roach actually averaged 1.5lbs.
Of course this group broke up when we moved away, to jobs, to university and so on.But I did my first stint as club secretary as this time, as well as a spell as chairman, and a shorter one as treasurer. In all the years since then I have held office of one kind or another in some angling body or other, often several posts at once. I also did my first job in fishery management, aged 16, when, with the help of the other members of the group, I converted a derelict moat with no fish, to one with a varied fish biomass. It survives today, although today anglers have no idea where the fish came from, or when.
I met Ray Webb, the Sheffield big fish man, when I was an undergraduate. We met at Carlton Towers, tench fishing. Shortly after the Northern Specimen Group was formed, and I became an associate member – it was otherwise anglers from the Sheffield areas, including one Ron Clay (Star correspondent) as well as Eric Hodgson. A little later another Northern Specimen Group was formed, by Charles Turnier, if I recall: this was a rotary letter body and I acted as secretary (I still have the files). Then Eric Hodgson founded the National Association of Specimen Hunters (now NASA, of which I became the president).
We did do some match fishing in those days, at least some of us did. I even won a few (once with a big bag of dace I recall). But the matches were an opportunity to travel by charabanc to exotic locations unreachable by bike. When I was a post-grad student I worked in the Lake District, and I began trout fishing and fly fishing (Ray and John Neville were already adept). And I began sea fishing off the Yorkshire coast for cod in 1961, sharing a friend’s dinghy. I actually learned to beach cast with a 12 foot Burma pole. I doubt if I could lift one today!
A great deal of tackle was homemade then and many of the items we take for granted today were invented in the 1960s and then developed commercially by others. I also began consulting in 1964, testing and reporting on tackle for Intrepid (Ken Morritt). It came about in a strange way. One of my reels, an intrepid Supreme that I used for piking, snapped in two! I was heart-broken I recall. So I rang Intrepid to see if they had any left (it was actually out of production). By chance I got Ken himself and, typical of the man, he said that although he couldn’t replace my reel, he’d send me an Intrepid Elite, their new flagship reel. Would I test and report back on it? I certainly did! Within weeks he’d asked me to test fly rods, sea rods and coarse rods, as well as to write the leaflets to go out with the rods at sale points. I’ve continued tackle testing and consulting to this day; after Morritts finished I joined East Anglian Rod, then Ryobi and finally, for well over a decade, Shakespeare.
There is a difference by the way, between being sponsored and being a consultant. For the latter you work; for the former you may not. I have always been a consultant, feeding in ideas, testing: most of the gear I fish with tends to be prototype, rather than finished, marketed product.
Reviewing, whether tackle or books, began just after I began to assist Ken Morritt, and this too I have continued until this day. By the mid-1960s, then, the blueprint of Rickards as you see him was in place! Except for one thing….
Although I had written quite a few articles in the press, the first being on eels for the Angling Times in, if I recall correctly, 1959, I hadn’t done a book. All that changed when Ray Webb and I began to worry about the written word on pike fishing. We really were unhappy about many of the ideas on pike published in books. So we decided to write our own. This became “Fishing For Big Pike” and finally saw the light of day in 1971. It sold well, going to three editions and was (and is) well received by pike anglers. Since then I’ve done many more books, one of them outselling the first one (this was “Angling: Fundamental Principles”) and well over 600 articles.
It has been a life involvement in all aspects of the sport, primarily of fishing, which comes first, but also of admin., of lecturing, of writing, of consulting and so on. If I have one regret is that I didn’t start foreign angling many years earlier – serious foreign fishing, in remote places, is what I mean. Quiet, peaceful fishing in the UK is now becoming rather a scarce commodity a shiny jewel in a somewhat tarnished crown. No wonder we guard it jealously when we find it. Angling is still the king of sports deserves its crown, but I’d love to see it less tarnished before I join Tim Cole.
