Thomas Turner
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A GOOD PLAN
Roy Westwood was the editor of Angler’s Mail, and I had already been writing weekly features for several years, when he came up with the great idea of a cartoon strip. He had discovered Tony Whieldon, a brilliant watercolour artist, and to this day I still don’t know how Roy found him down in deepest Devon.
I had art school training, so I could put half decent drawings together of anything Roy couldn’t photograph. Little did we know how the double spread of cartoons was going to take off. The concept was to visit different fisheries every week and to relate exactly how each session developed, at the same time being as educational as possible. The idea was a follow-on from Mr Crabtree, which most anglers at the time had read and enjoyed.
BIG MATCH ERA
The comic strip instantly took off and I quickly became known as the cartoon character. Anglers used to bet on what was going to happen with two-parters, even ringing me up late at night after a few beers down their local, pleading to let them know what came next.
I had been doing well on my local River Lea competitions, living in North London at the time. Pete Clapperton and Bob Nudd came to a match I won with a cracking weight and invited me to join the highly successful Van Den Eynde Essex County team. That was an honour, suddenly finding myself fishing alongside a world champion and the likes of Kim Milsom, Jan Porter and Wayne Swinscoe.
FISHING WITH BORIS
Frank Barlow was a fellow columnist on the ‘Mail. His witty remarks and nicknames for famous anglers had a huge following. Frank became known as Boris for some reason and I always had a great time in his company. At one stage he used to deliver famous Doorman’s Donkeys to my London tackle shop, which were the best maggots you could buy in the UK back then.
I will never forget the time I bumped into Frank on an Oxford Canal match in the depths of winter. The waterway was frozen solid and there was the big man with a huge metal dumbbell attached to a rope, breaking out a swim in the thick ice. He had a fag in the corner of his mouth and turned towards me with a bit of a sweat on. “Ay up me duck, just getting my morning exercise in”, he said.
NO LONGER HERE
Sadly, quite a few big names who appeared in my comic strip features are no longer with us. That includes Jan Porter, Frank Barlow and Fred Crouch, the renowned barbel angler, seen here. I had the pleasure to fish with Fred on the Hampshire Avon at Christchurch. Fred put me in good spot and was always free with lots of top advice. He had just developed an interesting and unusual bait dropper, which I ended up selling in my tackle shop. It had extension pins, to keep the main body well away from the bottom, so as not to spook fish when feeding loadings of maggots or hemp. Like many of the top anglers I had the privilege to fish with, Fred didn’t do things by the book. In this instance, poking his rod through a barbed wire fence, in pursuit of his favourite species.
RAIN OR SHINE
I remember a passing angler once saying to me that I had a great job, out fishing every week, putting the cartoons together. It didn’t always seem like that, particularly the day I spent with Fred on a low, gin clear river. It was windy and wet, quite miserable in fact. But somehow every week I managed to make something happen and retain reader interest, just like on this occasion when I finally winkled out a good barbel and a brace of decent chub.
Angler’s Mail asked me to do a book based on the weekly cartoons, called Coarse Fishing Year. It covered all four seasons, fishing all over the place and turned into a best-seller. I put some miles in back then and visited an amazing array of different venues, both in the UK and Ireland.
FAR AND WIDE
It was a particularly long journey to fish the Exeter Canal, but I really wanted to go and see Geoff Salisbury’s busy tackle shop and his famous Carbotec rods. Longer Carbotec 13ft feeder rods had become first choice for many anglers who fished for bream over in Ireland. There was a waiting list for them and they were changing hands for big money, something they have continued to do. Having fished the Exeter Canal previously and bagging up big time on bream I was highly confident, but on this occasion, I struggled for a pound of bits. I still reported everything exacting how it turned out, which was something many anglers told me they loved about the cartoon series. Real life experiences, good or bad days, just like they experienced.
DIFFERENT VIEWS
I think it was the rig drawings and fish action frames that made the cartoon strip so popular, really firing peoples imaginations. Tony Whieldon had a magic touch when it came to painting fish of all species, injecting extra life into them. Pike often invaded my swims, whether fishing lakes, reservoirs, canals, rivers or Irish Loughs. Other strange things that turned up on my various trips was a seal on the Great Ouse, along with a gang of topless page three models working on a photo shoot for a newspaper. That happened when I dabbled with some sea fishing on the Dorset coastline.
ANOTHER ANGLE
The beauty of recording all my weekly sessions with artwork was it allowed the chance to view things in an unusual manner, especially from an underwater scenario. This approach was well ahead of its time, but I really can’t remember why on this occasion I was fishing standing up underneath an umbrella! Must have been a tricky bank I suspect, plus we didn’t have such amazing seat box systems back then, which could be positioned out in the water like miniature oil rigs. Going back through all the comic features, I don’t recognise any of the gear I used back then in the late eighties and early nineties. It’s quite astonishing how items of tackle metamorphosize over the years, until everything has completely moved on.
GETTING NOTICED
The great thing about the cartoon series was it grabbed attention far and wide. It wasn’t long before the Irish Tourist Board came calling and I was on a ferry to the Emerald Isle. It was crazy back then with every other car and van kitted out with roof racks, laden with bulging rod holdalls. Apart from obvious angling hotspots, Paul Harris, the Tourism Ireland representative, took me to promote some out of the way places. I was one of the first from the UK to properly explore the Galway area and once I showed it’s potential, previously empty hotels quickly filled up with anglers. They returned year after year and I used to meet up with many of them. Those were great times and I was totally hooked on the place.
BEING THERE
I don’t know how artist Tony did it, but somehow by using a mixture of photographs taken on the bank, with drawings and text added my myself later, he captured the atmosphere of each venue perfectly. It was like he was sitting looking over my shoulder. On a few occasions when Roy couldn’t be there to take photos, where I only supplied rough sketches with the dialogue, Tony still made it look exactly like the place in question.
Little did I know all those years ago, when popping into Davis Fishing Tackle in Hampshire, that one day they would end up retailing the Hardy Marksman rods I ended up designing. They were the top shop in the country for sales of the award-winning range.
MEMORABLE DAYS
At one stage during my cartoon character years, my parents were living in Norfolk. I used to visit them and fish the tidal River Yare matches, run by Keith Ford. Keith is sadly no longer with us, but I will never forget the cold winter’s day when he took me to the River Wensum, right in the centre of Norwich, behind the famous football stadium. The place was strange, like the back end of nowhere, but we caught fish all day, including some cracking hybrids. I have been so privileged to fish with top personalities like Keith, who loved the River Yare and did so much to put his favourite stretches at Beauchamp Arms on the map for anglers far and wide.
FAMOUS COMPANY Passion For Angling hit our TV screens big time and suddenly I found myself out on the banks of the Hampshire Avon with Chris Yates and Bob James. This was real life and I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I’m not sure Chris liked me very much, possibly thinking I was corrupting his mate Bob with my match fishing ideas, which Bob was always asking me about. I’m actually a big fan of Chris and his traditional way of fishing. I think his book called How to Fish is wonderfully written. Along with Hugh Miles who filmed Passion, we all enjoyed an action packed day on the river, yet another cartoon session I will never forget.
The post WHEN I WAS A CARTOON CHARACTER appeared first on Thomas Turner Fishing Antiques.
Continue reading...
Roy Westwood was the editor of Angler’s Mail, and I had already been writing weekly features for several years, when he came up with the great idea of a cartoon strip. He had discovered Tony Whieldon, a brilliant watercolour artist, and to this day I still don’t know how Roy found him down in deepest Devon.
I had art school training, so I could put half decent drawings together of anything Roy couldn’t photograph. Little did we know how the double spread of cartoons was going to take off. The concept was to visit different fisheries every week and to relate exactly how each session developed, at the same time being as educational as possible. The idea was a follow-on from Mr Crabtree, which most anglers at the time had read and enjoyed.
BIG MATCH ERA
The comic strip instantly took off and I quickly became known as the cartoon character. Anglers used to bet on what was going to happen with two-parters, even ringing me up late at night after a few beers down their local, pleading to let them know what came next.
I had been doing well on my local River Lea competitions, living in North London at the time. Pete Clapperton and Bob Nudd came to a match I won with a cracking weight and invited me to join the highly successful Van Den Eynde Essex County team. That was an honour, suddenly finding myself fishing alongside a world champion and the likes of Kim Milsom, Jan Porter and Wayne Swinscoe.
FISHING WITH BORIS
Frank Barlow was a fellow columnist on the ‘Mail. His witty remarks and nicknames for famous anglers had a huge following. Frank became known as Boris for some reason and I always had a great time in his company. At one stage he used to deliver famous Doorman’s Donkeys to my London tackle shop, which were the best maggots you could buy in the UK back then.
I will never forget the time I bumped into Frank on an Oxford Canal match in the depths of winter. The waterway was frozen solid and there was the big man with a huge metal dumbbell attached to a rope, breaking out a swim in the thick ice. He had a fag in the corner of his mouth and turned towards me with a bit of a sweat on. “Ay up me duck, just getting my morning exercise in”, he said.
NO LONGER HERE
Sadly, quite a few big names who appeared in my comic strip features are no longer with us. That includes Jan Porter, Frank Barlow and Fred Crouch, the renowned barbel angler, seen here. I had the pleasure to fish with Fred on the Hampshire Avon at Christchurch. Fred put me in good spot and was always free with lots of top advice. He had just developed an interesting and unusual bait dropper, which I ended up selling in my tackle shop. It had extension pins, to keep the main body well away from the bottom, so as not to spook fish when feeding loadings of maggots or hemp. Like many of the top anglers I had the privilege to fish with, Fred didn’t do things by the book. In this instance, poking his rod through a barbed wire fence, in pursuit of his favourite species.
RAIN OR SHINE
I remember a passing angler once saying to me that I had a great job, out fishing every week, putting the cartoons together. It didn’t always seem like that, particularly the day I spent with Fred on a low, gin clear river. It was windy and wet, quite miserable in fact. But somehow every week I managed to make something happen and retain reader interest, just like on this occasion when I finally winkled out a good barbel and a brace of decent chub.
Angler’s Mail asked me to do a book based on the weekly cartoons, called Coarse Fishing Year. It covered all four seasons, fishing all over the place and turned into a best-seller. I put some miles in back then and visited an amazing array of different venues, both in the UK and Ireland.
FAR AND WIDE
It was a particularly long journey to fish the Exeter Canal, but I really wanted to go and see Geoff Salisbury’s busy tackle shop and his famous Carbotec rods. Longer Carbotec 13ft feeder rods had become first choice for many anglers who fished for bream over in Ireland. There was a waiting list for them and they were changing hands for big money, something they have continued to do. Having fished the Exeter Canal previously and bagging up big time on bream I was highly confident, but on this occasion, I struggled for a pound of bits. I still reported everything exacting how it turned out, which was something many anglers told me they loved about the cartoon series. Real life experiences, good or bad days, just like they experienced.
DIFFERENT VIEWS
I think it was the rig drawings and fish action frames that made the cartoon strip so popular, really firing peoples imaginations. Tony Whieldon had a magic touch when it came to painting fish of all species, injecting extra life into them. Pike often invaded my swims, whether fishing lakes, reservoirs, canals, rivers or Irish Loughs. Other strange things that turned up on my various trips was a seal on the Great Ouse, along with a gang of topless page three models working on a photo shoot for a newspaper. That happened when I dabbled with some sea fishing on the Dorset coastline.
ANOTHER ANGLE
The beauty of recording all my weekly sessions with artwork was it allowed the chance to view things in an unusual manner, especially from an underwater scenario. This approach was well ahead of its time, but I really can’t remember why on this occasion I was fishing standing up underneath an umbrella! Must have been a tricky bank I suspect, plus we didn’t have such amazing seat box systems back then, which could be positioned out in the water like miniature oil rigs. Going back through all the comic features, I don’t recognise any of the gear I used back then in the late eighties and early nineties. It’s quite astonishing how items of tackle metamorphosize over the years, until everything has completely moved on.
GETTING NOTICED
The great thing about the cartoon series was it grabbed attention far and wide. It wasn’t long before the Irish Tourist Board came calling and I was on a ferry to the Emerald Isle. It was crazy back then with every other car and van kitted out with roof racks, laden with bulging rod holdalls. Apart from obvious angling hotspots, Paul Harris, the Tourism Ireland representative, took me to promote some out of the way places. I was one of the first from the UK to properly explore the Galway area and once I showed it’s potential, previously empty hotels quickly filled up with anglers. They returned year after year and I used to meet up with many of them. Those were great times and I was totally hooked on the place.
BEING THERE
I don’t know how artist Tony did it, but somehow by using a mixture of photographs taken on the bank, with drawings and text added my myself later, he captured the atmosphere of each venue perfectly. It was like he was sitting looking over my shoulder. On a few occasions when Roy couldn’t be there to take photos, where I only supplied rough sketches with the dialogue, Tony still made it look exactly like the place in question.
Little did I know all those years ago, when popping into Davis Fishing Tackle in Hampshire, that one day they would end up retailing the Hardy Marksman rods I ended up designing. They were the top shop in the country for sales of the award-winning range.
MEMORABLE DAYS
At one stage during my cartoon character years, my parents were living in Norfolk. I used to visit them and fish the tidal River Yare matches, run by Keith Ford. Keith is sadly no longer with us, but I will never forget the cold winter’s day when he took me to the River Wensum, right in the centre of Norwich, behind the famous football stadium. The place was strange, like the back end of nowhere, but we caught fish all day, including some cracking hybrids. I have been so privileged to fish with top personalities like Keith, who loved the River Yare and did so much to put his favourite stretches at Beauchamp Arms on the map for anglers far and wide.
FAMOUS COMPANY Passion For Angling hit our TV screens big time and suddenly I found myself out on the banks of the Hampshire Avon with Chris Yates and Bob James. This was real life and I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I’m not sure Chris liked me very much, possibly thinking I was corrupting his mate Bob with my match fishing ideas, which Bob was always asking me about. I’m actually a big fan of Chris and his traditional way of fishing. I think his book called How to Fish is wonderfully written. Along with Hugh Miles who filmed Passion, we all enjoyed an action packed day on the river, yet another cartoon session I will never forget.
The post WHEN I WAS A CARTOON CHARACTER appeared first on Thomas Turner Fishing Antiques.
Continue reading...
