In 1969, for a sumptuous 18 shillings, anglers could lay their hands on a copy of ‘The World of Angling’, in hardback.
An anthology of angling works, this 130-page book meanders from sea fishing via coarse angling to fly fishing with some half-baked ‘humour’ along the way. To be honest, had you bought it in 1969 you’d have wasted 18/-. But in 2011, it is a fascinating snapshot of the way things were.
The star names who contributed leap from the page: John Goddard, Bill Keal, Frank Guttfield, Jack Hilton, Billy Lane, and Peter Wheat – it’s an impressive list. The content is rather less impressive, with every feature bearing the hallmarks of a commissioning letter from the editor which may have begun: “Could you hash together 1,000 words and some pictures for a book I’ve got a fortnight to assemble? Anything will do….”
Despite this, Bill Keal and others acquitted themselves reasonably well and there is some useful advice, leavened with black and white pictures. And I do mean black and white; the printing quality didn’t seem to be able to deliver grey.
But what makes this book fascinating for me is its shameless attempt to corner a male-dominated market by gratuitous mentions of women, all so far outside of the modern boundaries of what’s considered ‘PC’ as to be funny. Take Editor Richard Wills’ account of Susan Campbell a ‘slip of a girl’ from Wembley who hooked who caught a 25lb plus pike (‘Scarface’) from a London AA water: ‘Susan is no fair-weather angling-picnic companion,’ Wills patronisingly points out. He’s trying to avoid the feminist backlash but it all goes horribly wrong in the final sentence: ‘And the young reporter who interviewed shapely Susan returned to declare: ‘She’s the dishiest pike angler I’ve ever seen!”
The photographer did a sterling job of trying to conjoin the oil-and-water notion of ‘woman AND angler’ by snapping Susan with a tackle box on her knee and a rod over her shoulder. Note, however, that the reel has no handle and the tackle box has a copy of Angler’s Mail tucked into it, acknowledging the snapper’s employer.
My old mate Bill Goddard would have been proud of page 67. It features (opposite a picture of gnarly old Jack Hargreaves) a woman from New Zealand wearing immaculately-ironed shorts and turned-down thigh waders, her blotchy legs testament to how cold it was when she was persuaded to step into the water. She’s uselessly holding a fly rod above her head like Excalibur. Pointing out that the setting is in NZ’s North Island, the caption concludes ‘A nice catch in any island, we say.’
Angler’s Mail editor John Ingham – who sadly died just last year – trumps everyone in the sexism stakes, with a huge fictional diatribe about Angela, a ‘humorous’ character he created for AM readers: ‘Within a few months, Angela’s send-ups had become a weekly chuckle for thousands of faithful followers.’ Good old Cholmondeley-Warner…
Women are, in essence, stupid according to Ingham. To test the water temperature, fictional Angela’s chums in the All-Girls Group hurl their friend Julia into the lake and count the goose bumps. To test river current, women launch half walnut shells into the water. To mark carp seen rising, they throw in bricks attached to plastic bottles.
At the annual Fur and Feather, Angela proves how dim women are, confusing the phrase ‘weigh in’ with ‘way in’ when asked to be scalesman, or maybe scalesperson: ‘Well, I couldn’t find the way in, any more than I could find the way out. But I did come across several nets suspended in the water with lots of poor fish trapped inside. So I did my good deed for the day and released them and hurried over to the coach with the news.’
A massively cringe-worthy bit about her tackle bag reveals that she’s a real girly, taking a spare dress, shoes and ‘Emergency battle kit’ of lippy and nail varnish. To get anglers’ blood pumping, Ingham then goes over the top and has her taking a nurse’s outfit including ‘pretty frilly starched apron’ down the river bank. He works the phrase ‘bra and frilly panties’ into another section.
We’ve moved on, and I’m sure John Ingham did, too. It was an era when Alf Garnett provided the irony while ‘On the Buses’ still clung to the 1950s.
And very few women went fishing…
