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IMPORTANT
SITE UPDATE:
Visit the relaunched
Fish & Fly at fishandfly.com
Itchen
Memories - G.E.M. Skues
Reviewed by Terry Lawton
Shortly
after I had finished reading 'Itchen Memories' by GEM Skues, The Times
published an article titled "Anglers barred from 'home' of trout
fishing". The article started "A stretch of the Itchen River
in Hampshire, revered as the spiritual home of trout fishing, is going
to be closed - to the fury of anglers.
"George Edward Mackenzie Skues pioneered the use of nymphs - artificial
immature insects - to hook trout at Abbots Barton, a network of chalk
streams and water meadows north of Winchester. It has since been a shrine
to trout fishing, but now Hampshire Wildlife Trust, which owns the land,
has told the Abbotts Barton angling club that it is no longer welcome."
The Trust wants to allow the river to revert to its "natural or semi-natural"
state as well as allowing greater access to the land for members of the
Trust. The site manager claims that the river is over managed for the
benefit of trout, weed is cut excessively and there are not enough water
voles. Could the proximity of the M3 have something to do with that? Professor
Norman Maclean of the School of Biological Sciences at Southampton University
and a member of both the Trust and the Kingsworthy Fly Fishing Club, says
that a survey of the wealth of wildlife at Abbotts Barton dwarfs that
of the Trust's nearby Winnall Moor Reserve. This raises the question of
which organisation is the better manager of wildlife and the environment.
In his interesting and passionate introduction to this new edition of
Skues' book which was published originally in 1951, Roy Darlington writes
of the work that he and his friends did on the Abbotts Barton waters to
"wrest this place from the ravages of neglect and insensitivity.".
Is there going to be a repeat performance, this time by a so-called conservation
and wildlife body? He also wrote: "There is much that still needs
improvement. Ours, like most other chalk streams, suffers progressively
from the abstractor's pumps, changing agricultural policies and climate.
We can only hope that, in future, wise counsels prevails and that Abbots
Barton can be protected against the negative elements of a changing world."
Itchen Memories, to quote from the back cover, "is not a general
collection of fishing memories... It concerns just one, specific, length
of this lovely chalk stream... It is a final and cherished selection of
memories and meanderings of fifty-seven long seasons..."
As I wrote in my review of Silk, Fur and Feather,
Skues was a clever old so-and-so and this book reinforces that - not particularly
original - opinion. Take the chapter 'The Germ of an Idea' in which he
wrote, in 1938, about going through his angling correspondence of the
last 50 years and experiences of fishing in 1888 on a Saturday and a Monday
on the Itchen. The germ of an idea was the start of his pursuit of the
development of nymph fishing. He had caught a trout with a mouthful of
"tiny pea-green creatures, which I later learnt were nymphs.".
Later
he tied some "weird-looking nymphs" which he used to tempt some
trout when drifting his artificals along the edge of rafts of weed left
by the weed cutters further upstream. "This (experience) led me to
believe that when there was no floating fly coming down the trout were
still cruising along the weeds on the look-out for emerging nymphs which
might have been of many species. But on those days I had not hit on the
value of the marrow scoop and had no means of finding out, though in Minor
Tactics of the Chalk Stream, I wrote of the imitation of nymphs."
So there you have it, the start of nymph fishing as we know it today.
This is a book that every angler who is the slightest bit interested in
the history and development of our sport should have in his or her library.
And this is a particularly pleasing edition - with the original illustrations
of Alex Jardine - whose understated covers will grace any book shelf.
Let us hope that some members of the Hampshire Wildlife Trust read it
and help prevent another attempt at destroying this historic section of
the river Itchen. Will we ever learn?
Itchen Memories by GEM Skues, with illustrations by Alex Jardine. Published
in a limited edition of 750 copies by Robert Hale at 25. Hardback, 176
pages.
