Home Features Diaries Blast from the Past – 3

Blast from the Past – 3

November 14, 2003

NOSTALGIA

I got the idea about running an occasional series like this when I had an email from a FISHINGmagic member who said he’d come across an old article of mine in a magazine published in 1971, and would I like it. Of course I would! It would be interesting to see what I’d written and how it compared to what I would write today about the same subject. And then I thought it would be interesting if we could publish more articles that were written more than, say, 20 years ago. If you did some angling writing that far back and you can let us have a copy without infringing copyright laws then please send them to me at graham@fishingmagic.com and we’ll publish them on an occasional basis.

GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY
Coarse Fisherman, January 1987

That dreadful fellow Richard Walker recently had the effrontery to suggest that officials of angling clubs were too old for the job – or, rather, that many more youngsters ought to be involved on the committees. I remember saying much the same thing a goodly number of years ago. I was speaking to the NASG at the time and was urging them to get involved with club committees. There is a number of reasons why Walker is right, why too many men over the age of 55 are a bad thing for the angling club, and a bad thing for angling as a whole.

Just recently a very serious angling administrator said to one of the PAC officials that recent NASG representation on the British Record Fish Committee had been a dead loss: they just sat there and said nothing, wearing expressions which betrayed their feelings; that they were sitting in committee with a bunch of old fogies and has-beens. One can have some sympathy with both viewpoints and I’ll explain why.

Obviously it is disappointing if a youngster says nothing and contributes nothing. On the other hand do the older hands have much justification for their oft repeated claim that they are the experienced ones?

Let me answer that question with a number of stories, and then work around to what I think the true situation is today, what we should do about it, and why. What we do could be vital to our sport.

Many moons ago, as a youngster living in the village of Hook on the borders of the East and West Ridings I belonged to what was a junior specimen group (the Hook SAG no less). Now this was before the NASG was formed, and if I remember rightly there was only one other specimen group in existence at the time, except the original Carp Catchers which was in a sense defunct.

We caught a lot of fish: roach to 2 lb 5 oz, with several dozen over 1lb; upwards of 200 perch between 12 oz and 1