You will know all about Frederick M Halford, of course.
Now this may seem blindingly obvious 130 odd years later, but at the time it was pretty revolutionary stuff and he caused a terrible stir with his theories; friends refused to speak to one another, gentlemen’s magazines (bottom shelf) devoted volumes
to the pros and cons of wet fly and dry fly fishing and Halford, a Victorian, who had made a fortune early in life, devoted his time to producing at least seven books on the subject and endless articles under the pseudonym "Detached Badge". Emphasis on the detached.
Now I would not have been remotely interested in Halford, who practised his theories relentlessly on the Hampshire chalk streams, were it not for two coincidences that fell in close succession. For the first time in years I gave up trying to catch a salmon and took to the Deveron an antiquated little split cane rod made by Sharpes of Aberdeen and went dry flying with a Greenwell (I think) for brownies. Now I have to say the Deveron is hardly a Hampshire chalk stream, even when it settles - it’s been up and down like a yo-yo recently. Neither am I FM Halford. But flicking away upstream at rising brownies on the edge, it worked. It probably would have worked fishing a wet fly under the surface, but we’ll not quibble: one brownie just under 1lb and a lot of whitebait - success.
So that was the first coincidence: my first attempt at dry fly fishing since a day on the Test pretending to be Isaac Walton (although Walton was, perforce, a wet fly man), creeping about and trying to drop flies on the noses of very bored trout. Fun though. And a very good lunch. The second coincidence was the arrival, a day after the Deveron success, of Angling Auctions catalogue: "To be sold, The FM Halford collection". It was the first time I had ever heard of the man who, I fear, is really known only to fishing anoraks. But that doesn’t make him a nasty person. Essentially, it was Halford who first codified dry fly fishing. And it was more or less what Halford set out that I had been successfully practising, with variations, the previous day.
Funnily enough, Halford wasn’t that good a fisherman. He tended to think he knew best and blamed the fish rather than himself when his various experiments failed to produce the expected bag. And he upset everyone with his dogmatic theories (he declared fishing with nymphs was a waste of time), according to The Dry-Fly Revolution by Tony Hayter. But he certainly seems to have recorded the first known reference to repetitive strain injury, today caused by computers but back then by the extreme weight of wooden rods. And Halford recommended up to 30 false casts to dry the fly before making a cast in anger.
For all that, his collection of fishing ephemera, of stuffed Chubb, penknives, japanned fly boxes, and Hardy rods and reels, is expected to make more than £30,000. I can live without his "very interesting HL Leonard three-piece cane trout rod" at £1,300. The silver William IV salmon reel presented by subalterns of the Borderers as a "mark of their esteem" to their c/o, Major Robertson, seems a better bet. An "esteemed" name like that is worth is every penny of £7,000.
