Woody's Angle – The Origins of the Closed Season

THE ORIGINS OF THE CLOSED SEASON

Last night I spent the last three hours of the season sat by a river that had given me so many blanks throughout the year, so much so that the result I got was exactly what I had come to expect. A blank yet again.

It has been a dreadful season for me, somewhere along the way I must have upset the gods of angling. Okay, I caught two personal bests, but other than those individual fish I felt most of the time was being wasted. Sitting behind lifeless rods is becoming a habit with me now, especially on the rivers.

In two weeks time we put the clocks forward again, an activity that will bring sunshine into many people’s lives, but fishing on rivers will still be out of the question for a few more months, unless you fly fish. Ah well, I have also quit arguing for the abolition of the closed season, it will happen one day and when it does, good shuttens!

What I’d like to share with you is some of the information that has come about by listening to talks by angling historian John Essex, together with my own thoughts and research. John has a tremendous collection of old booklets, club cards, newspaper clippings, photographs as well as tackle. I don’t know what John’s stance would be on the closed season, he’s never mentioned it in his talks, but some of this is what I have gleaned from him about coarse fishing at the time around the Mundella Act and maybe explains the reasons for the closed season.

Back in the 1870s coarse angling was obviously growing in popularity as a sport, but back in those days there were no ‘specialist anglers’ no ‘carp syndicates’ and pleasure anglers that were seen on the banks were probably practising for the next match or catching something to feed the family (read on please). Angling at that time was all about match fishing and getting into a team at the local pub.

They went off in droves on stagecoaches, no buses or fancy cars then, to fish against other pub teams all dressed in their best suits or tweeds (for the rich) or sports jacket and flannels. Everyone wore headgear whether a cap or even a bowler hat and most probably a waistcoat, but definitely a tie and wing collar to his shirt. You definitely wasn’t dressed without the obligatory collar and tie and none of this Realtree stuff was around in those days.

Another thing they didn’t have was keepnets, not of any size at least. A keepnet in those days was around two feet long and consisted of two or three rings and was mostly used to keep livebaits for the pike fishing. Longer keepnets of 4 – 6 feet long, didn’t become popular until well into the 20th century, 1920s and 30s.

So how do you hold a match without keepnets? You simply kill all the fish you catch and then carry them to the weigh-in point. After the ceremonial weigh-in the dead fish might have been shared out amongst friends who didn’t have quite as much luck, but the remainder and those undersize fish would simply be discarded by throwing them back in.

Imagine nowadays, passing an angler with 120lbs of dead fish around him? I guess the bunny-huggers would have something to say about that!

Well, at least the fish these old-timers caught didn’t go to waste, they went for that night’s supper. I hear you say, “Oh, but you can’t eat a chub and even bream are dreadful.” It didn’t matter what they tasted like, a 4lb chub or bream contains roughly the same amount of nutrition as a cod or haddock and when you have 6 or 7 children it provides a meal. So the anglers may have collected a little dill, water cress, or fennel on their travels and used it to add some flavour to their catch.

With all of this mass killing of coarse fish going on you can well understand the reasons amongst caring anglers for wanting to bring in the closed season. The London Anglers Association even brought in size limits, under which catches could not be weighed and those limits are supposed to exist to this day in matches. It was the London anglers and the Sheffield anglers who jointly agreed on fixing a fence around the breeding seasons to save gravid fish from being killed thus at least saving the eggs.

The Sheffield anglers, about 7,000 of them, wanted no dace to be taken in the months of March and April, no gudgeon, ruff, pope, pike or perch taken during March, April or May, and no barbel, carp, bream, roach, tench, rudd or bleak taken during May and June. Which was complicated to say the least. The London anglers, headed by the Piscatorial Society, simply wanted the months of April, May and June to be fenced off. Ultimately, the Londoners struck a deal with the Sheffielders and split the months of March and June, hence we have a closed season from 15th March to 15th June inclusive.

Eventually the Freshwater Fisheries Act came into being in 1878 and the very first case of fishing during a closed season was brought at Newark in 1879. The two defendants were fined five shillings (25p) each upon payment of which they were discharged. The London anglers again wanted a fish size limit to be introduced into the act, but this was opposed by the Sheffield anglers saying it was an issue that should be decided locally.

Without going into the why’s and wherefore’s of it all, that’s how we arrived at the present closed season. Questions to be asked:

Is it all still relevant with today’s attitudes of catch, weigh and return?Is there a better way to time the fence we keep around the various breeding periods (as was originally suggested by Sheffielders)? Should it be decided more locally rather than on a straightforward national basis?

And finally, what makes a ‘traditional’ angler? Is it one who accepts the 1878 Act on the closed season, or one who takes his seasons from the original teachings of the great Izaac Walton when no such seasons existed? Over to you.