Conrad Voss Bark - A History of Flyfishing

(in order of appearance within colour section)

R esearch into the history of flyfishing produces surprises. Many modern ideas have to be revised. One discovers that dry fly fishing did not start with Halford in the 1880s on the Test, that nymph fishing did not begin with the inventions of Skues and that Frank Sawyer was not the first to use weighted flies. Leaded pupae imitations were being tied by anglers 350 years ago, about the time that Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall.

In fact fly designs and the presentation of the fly have been little changed for hundreds of years. The Romans used streamer flies, called plumes, to fish Tyne and Thames during the Roman occupation of Britain. Beads were used to make bug-eyed flies for reservoir trout fishing in the 1960s, but the idea of doing so was first mooted some 200 years previously.

Upside-down flies, the ones with the hook point that floats uppermost which were recommended for taking difficult trout in the 1980s were first tied by a soldier of Cromwells army in the 1660s. One could go on almost endlessly with examples of flies invented by one generation, then forgotten by the next and reinvented as something new, years and sometimes centuries later.

These variations on early themes determined to some extent, how much I am still not certain, the need to select from approximately 2,000 years of flyfishing history the significant xiv stages of its development, the move from the Greeks to the Normans, to the first book in English on angling and the brilliant inventiveness of the 17th and 18th centuries which spurred and invigorated the thoughts and practices of the 19th.

There are certain times when the human spirit seems to burst with the enthusiasm and exhilaration of discovery and invention, when the whole atmosphere of the time is charged with the excitement of creation.

Such a time was in the 17th century when more books on angling were published than ever before, among them the wonderful picture of happy England in Isaak Waltons Compleat Angler which was written during the turmoil and horrors of civil war and religious persecution. At least three men - Venables, Cotton and Barker - represent the progress in flyfishing development of that time.

By the next century, the 18th, we are almost in sight of modern times with men like Stewart on the Borders fishing his spiders aloft upstream and the Bowlkers setting an example of skill and fly design on the Teme which lasted at least a hundred or more years. Of these two Stewart was a character of enormous charm and skill.

By the mid-1800s we are in reach of the first complete definition of how to fish the dry fly given by David Foster of Ashbourne in Derbyshire which for some curious reason was almost completely ignored by those who later became disciples of the great and autocratic Halford on the Test.

Halford laid down the principles of dry fly fishing which had been pioneered by Foster and others before him and was helped in the presentation of the fly by two great American inventions: the heavy, braided and oiled silk line and the split cane rod. These allowed for the first time a greater accuracy in the presentation of the fly to rising fish than had ever been possible with the light silk lines that had been in common use before. xv

It is right that at this stage, after a hundred years of apparent uncertainty, that the credit for inventing the true dry fly of the Test, the split-wing floater, should go to the Clifton school master, H. S. Hall, whose natural reticence contributed to a belief at the time that it was the invention of Marryat or Halford. The evidence for Hall which is given in full in the Appendix on page is, I believe, conclusive.

The split-wing floater, however, had its day and is now largely overtaken in use and popularity by other fly designs which are based not on Halfords principle of exact imitation but on creating the illusion of an insect rather than a copy of it. Fly design has a fashionable as well as an ephemeral life which, to most flyfishers, is part of its fascination and attraction.

All the same it was rather sad that most of Halfords disciples, with a few honourable exceptions believed, in their sudden blinding conversion and enthusiasm for the dry fly, that this had happened exclusively and entirely on the chalkstreams of Hampshire and that throughout the rest of the country everyone naturally fished the wet fly, the sunk fly, and mostly downstream.

If only someone had experimented with a horse-hair line at that time they would have had to modify their beliefs to a very great extent. Most of the progress in fly design and presentation had been made not on the chalkstreams but on the limestone and spate rivers of the midlands and the north of England and the Scottish Borders.

But now, perhaps with a sideways glance at the curious history of Kelson and the salmon fly and the birth of angling on the reservoirs, we come to the revolutionary inventions of the Americans which allowed flyfishing to burst through its previous limited frontiers to explore deep-water territories which hitherto could only have been reached by bait and spinner. xvi

This was the space age revolution of plastic lines and graphite rods which began in the 1950s and is set to continue to provide flyfishers with tackle and flies of a sophistication that not even our fathers could have imagined possible.

Yet with all our progress in fly design, in presentation of the fly and in rivercraft, the basic principles of flyfishing remain as they were two thousand years ago. It is still to present to the fish a flicker of life in the water which gives the impression of something they may be tempted to eat, a kind of conjuring trick, the creation of an illusion.

There are no rules, no certainties. One relies on:

that craft of the wilderness, that facility of appreciating the ways of bird and beast and fish and insect, the acquirement of which was, through countless centuries, the one great primary interest of primitive man.

(J. W. Dunne, Sunshine and the Dry Fly, 1924)

Conrad Voss Bark
Lifton, Devon

F lyfishing began at least two thousand years ago. Possibly more. It began because it was the best way of catching fish that were feeding on the surface on winged insects, the caddis or sedge flies, mayflies, olives, upwinged flies, black gnats, whatever names they had for them. The names would have been different. The flies were the same. So were the trout.

With the big flies whose bodies were more than an inch long there would have been no problem. They could be caught and impaled on a hook then dapped amid the rising fish. The big stone fly would have been admirable for dapping.

But there were other flies, smaller, more delicate, whose bodies would break if they were pierced by a hook. There would have been times in those far off days as there are now when trout would feed selectively on particular kinds of small surface insects and ignore subaqueous food while they were doing so. It would have infuriated an angler to see trout feeding avidly on small flies hatching on the surface while ignoring his worm.

We know from the writings of Homer and others that anglers were skilled in the ways of nature and the habits of fish. They were used to creating artificial lures such as plumes - we would call them streamer flies - and had fished them for thousands of years. They made them from feathers of the sea mew (seagull) tied to a hook that had been wrapped in wool of a Laconian red. We are not certain what colour Laconian red would have been but the likelihood is a bright scarlet. The Romans used these plumes to take salmon from the rivers of Gaul and also from the Thames and Tyne when they came to England. Making artificial lures to catch fish was nothing new. Indeed there are suggestions that they go back three or four thousand years or more to the ancient Egyptian dynasties. The Chinese are said to have used a kingfishers feather as a hook bait several thousand years BC but we know no more than that. Possibly that too would have been a plume, a streamer.