We get to know each other on the forum to a great extent, and sometimes we meet at fish-ins, but how much do we really know about each other?
We have members from across the world, ranging from manual workers, office workers, solicitors, policemen, writers, editors, photographers, soldiers, actors, film producers, angling guides, technicians, medical people – you name it and we’ve got ’em in our ‘family’. Yet most often we don’t really know who it is we’re debating with or having a laugh with on the forum.
So now’s your chance to put that right. This is where FM members can tell the FishingMagic community all about themselves. Tell us who you are, what you do, what your fishing is all about and what it means to you, tell us what makes you tick, warts and all.
Stories can be anything from 1000 to 5000 words long, preferably, but not necessarily, with a selection of pictures. Email the words and pictures to me at graham@fishingmagic.com and I’ll do the rest.
Jeff ‘Woody’ Woodhouse
Jeff doesn’t know this but the first I heard about him was, what, 8 or 10 years ago, when one of the regular writers in Coarse Fisherman magazine phoned me and said, “Graham, have you any idea who this bloody Jeff Woodhouse is, only he’s always having a go at me in the letter’s pages and I suspect it’s ***** ******* using the name?”
Course, I had no idea then but now I know Jeff quite well and one thing I do know is that he doesn’t need to hide behind a false name in order to voice an opinion. Regulars on the forum will know that and not many would have stuck their necks out and come out in favour of the loop rig in spite of majority opinion being against it.
I have a lot of respect for Jeff, both as an angler and a friend. Jeff has organised the National Fishing Week kid’s day for FishingMagic for the last two years and I don’t know anyone who could have done a better job. Organisation is not my forte and I don’t know what I would have done without him. It wasn’t just the hard work he put into it but the attention to detail. The kids don’t know how lucky they are that Jeff is the organiser for FM. Like many anglers who can catch fish he puts himself down, but don’t you believe it, he can put them on the bank when he puts his mind to it. He is also a very talented artist.
Jeff, now retired from his business interests, spends his time (when he’s not fishing) working as an extra for TV – the last time I saw him, just a few weeks ago, he was involved in a bar room brawl in ‘Foyle’s War’. A bit of a change was that for a 61 year old Lancashire lad who moved south and learned how to talk posh.
Like all those who have contributed to ‘My Story’ so far, Jeff is one of the cornerstones of FM. Any club committee member who hasn’t read his ‘Running a Club as a Business’ series is missing something special.
My Life, What a Shlemiel!
Having downed the umpteenth pint at the street party, father must have said to my mother something to the effect “C’mon lass, t’war’s over now.” and shortly afterwards I was conceived.
Well, it was VE night and the celebrations continued well on until almost the next morning, not that I would have known of course. This excerpt I got from my sister, 18 years my senior, several years later. She said it was only possible on that night, by her reckoning, because dad was normally on nights and she slept alongside mum as usual, except that on this night she had gone to Aunty Mary’s celebrating and Dad had the night off. Not the only thing he had off by all accounts then!
 Jeff, spinning in’t cut in 1968 |
Whatever the story, it’s nice to think that I was (possibly) conceived in a brand new and free Europe and likely gives a reason to the fact that I have been a committed European ever since. Over 60 years of peace now in all the states that have become members of the now European Union and I am grateful for that. Shortly after I was born the European Federalists Union was first created which led to the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and so on through the Common Market until here we are with the EU and some are still fighting against it.
It all started on a mackerel boat
Politics aside, I have done my share of that in the 80s, you want to know about fishing. It all started on a mackerel boat out of Paignton in 1951. We were simply handlining some feathers when dad said there was something on the end. Slowly he lifted the line through the water and in the clear sea I could see a silvery shape wriggling about. He let me feel the line and take the weight and that was it, from that moment I fell in love with fishing.
We ended up with only two fish which he took back to the digs (origins of this word please) where the landlady cooked them for us. They weren’t that big as I remember and she served them before the main meal just so’s we wouldn’t miss out on something more nourishing. Come to think of it, I can’t remember eating any of it once it was on my plate, but I do remember walking on Paignton beach and dad feeding the bits to the seagulls.
The Grand Union Canal
I had a fascination with water after that, forever peering in, hoping to see those silvery shapes again, twisting and turning, frolicking around in an environment that we wouldn’t survive in (we hadn’t got TV then, no Hans and Lotte Haas, no Lloyd Bridges in ‘Sea Hunt‘). The next attempt at fishing (dad wasn’t an angler at all) was at Brighton some years later when I remember we caught a small dab. It was very small indeed, but it all helped to reinforce this desire to wet a line and bring something of immense beauty to the surface where I could look at it close up.
Fish weren’t high on my diet sheet unless they were fully filleted and coated in batter so there was never any real desire to kill them, just look, examine and return. That wasn’t always possible with sea fish; I was told at a very early age by a skipper, something about swim bladders and gas. It was about this time though that I discovered a) that I was an uncle even though I thought I was too young, and b) that my sister was living not 400 yards from this pretty canal, the Grand Union.
After that I tried to spend every school holiday going down to her place at Stoke Hammond and eventually trying for the monster perch that were in there at the time. Clubs cards? Licences? I knew nothing of these and never came across anyone who explained them to me, which is why even today I wonder why anglers get so uptight about the odd kid doing a bit of fishing. I made a few friends down there too and at one point my mum nearly left me to attend a local school, but something scuppered that idea: my brother-in-law got cancer.
He survived alright and I believe he may still be alive nearly 50 years later, although my sister died some 8 years ago now. He wasn’t an angler either so what I learned I did the hard way. Trial and error and lots of wasted hours on the bank, but when I did catch, even a gudgeon, wow, it was Paignton all over again!
Garden canes and plastic reels
A lot of earlier fishing was on a bit of cane and yes, I do mean a garden cane with an old plastic reel adapted with a screw that dad rigged up for me. He didn’t like spending any money at all and even the glasses I wore were a band of wide meshed chicken wire wrapped around my head with jam jars screwed into holes at the front. For years I thought the world was made by Robertsons and that I was being stalked everywhere by Gollies.
Eventually I got some money together (I think from my auntie) and mum allowed me to buy a solid fibre glass rod – swish eh? It was all of 5 foot long and an American baitcaster of all things, I could never work out what the sticky-up bit was for on the top.
Despite that I had some good fishing days with it and eventually learned to cast all of 10 feet or more. It was only just before I started work that I got hold of a half-decent cane and fibre glass rod that cost me all of about £ 1/12/6 (about £ 1.62½ to you youngsters). I didn’t have it long though before I sold it to a mate for 15 bob (75p) because I’d started work at the CWS and in their sport’s department they had some really nice built cane rods, but for the life of me I can’t remember what make the one I bought was.
I know it was 11 foot, with a solid cane butt and top two sections of built cane with those little rubber plugs you used to stick into the gunmetalled-brass ferules. Oh boy, was I chuffed to have a decent rod at last and a half decent Gilfin reel to go with it. The Japanese were just starting to export reels to us at that time and I remember a workmate getting a Daiwa around the same time. Still didn’t have anything to sit on properly, mind, just put everything in my old ex-army bag and sat on the cold concrete or dirt.
Blokes with lumps on their chests
Then something went wrong in my life. I began to notice that some blokes who used to come into the cafe had these two lumps on their chests, large ones in some cases and they smelled differently, not of maggots and mud. Well, I soon found out that these were “girls” and they were nice to be around and so that’s where the next few years were spent.
I eventually came back into fishing about the time that a certain Mr Graham Marsden was hitting the headlines in the angling press for catching monster bream of over ten pounds, that was very big in those days, from “a Cheshire mere”, it said. At that time I was fishing with two Als, big Al who was the oldest and smallest and little Al who was the youngest and largest. (Don’t worry, it confused me then and still does now.) We’d borrow big Al’s dad’s Standard 8 and head off for the Cheshire plains trying to find these places where these monster bream were coming from.
Petty Pool in the early morning mist.
It was usual to find the ticket man and ask “Has a guy called Graham Marsden been catching some big bream here recently?” “Oh, Yes, just the other day. Ten bob, please?” And that would be that, we’d pay our money believing that we were in with a chance of connecting with a ten pounder, but all in vain. We’d been had, sucked in and spit out with just our bones, all the guy wanted was his ten bob. We did fish some nice spots along the way though, places like Petty Pool and New Pool. Also further towards Chapel-en-le-Frith (Derbyshire) where none other than Ians Heaps and his dad used to fish too, long before Ian became World Champion.
That was how we spent every Sunday right up until I got married. Even then the plan was to get married on the 13th of June, get down to the Norfolk Broads and hire a boat, enjoy the first couple of days doing “honeymoon” stuff, by which time it would be June 16th and the opening of another new fishing season! Well, “the best laid plans of mice and men” as they say, she didn’t like the idea of marrying on the 13th so we postponed it by two weeks and then expenses got in the way of hiring a boat. So, we ended up spending a week at my mate’s dad’s holiday bungalow in Llanfairfechan, North Wales.
It was going well until she got sunstroke on the Tuesday so I spent the rest of the week alone, with my rods – sea fishing! Whooppee! I didn’t catch much that week, but for the next 8 years it set me on a different course, that of sea fishing. More of that to come.
