Life of a Chalkstream: Is it the Environment Agency who should adapt or die?

Greetings!

I’m not old enough to remember the Dick Barton radio detective shows of the 1940’s and 50’s. Nor do I suspect is Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency (EA), but my goodness how she invoked the spirit of Barton as, with one mighty bound, she freed the EA from responsibility for the pollution in our rivers for the next 30 years in her press release last week ahead of COP26 entitled, Adapt or Die.

It a classic of its kind, invoking global problems as an excuse for local failings. Large on Doomsday rhetoric it both says there is much to do whilst saying the EA is already doing plenty. There is all usual guff with buzzwords aplenty, but Boyd has definitely been to the gov.uk Covid School of Sloganeering. She urges us to “prepare, act and survive.” Give me strength. At this rate Boyd, who’s qualification for running the EA is 25 years in fund management compliance, will have us clapping every Wednesday evening for underpaid water company executives.

Emma Howard Boyd

But it is in the section of her report that sets out five climate “reality checks” that Boyd really throws the rivers of England & Wales under the bus. She says,

“Climate change makes it harder to ensure clean and plentiful water: existing issues with water stress will be exacerbated by climate change bringing altered temperature and rainfall patterns.”

As I have often written here, and in a recent article for The Spectator, attributing our current water problems to changing patterns in respect of the British weather is bunkum. But let us put that to one side for a moment and accept the EA report that states winter rainfall is expected to increase by approximately 6% by the 2050s and by 8% by the 2080s and summer rainfall is expected to decrease by approximately 15% by the 2050s. That 8% figure represents less than one inch of extra rain, one third of the average December English rainfall. That 15% decrease is just 1.2 inches of typical English summer rain, exactly half the amount that falls in an average June.

If accurate, and that is doubtful based on the fact the EA have extrapolated half a century ahead with little evidence, these figures are literally a drop in the bucket, deliberately framed out of context to fan alarmism. Essentially what Boyd is saying that fifty years from now the average English annual rainfall will be 32 inches as opposed to 33 inches with a tiny bit more in the winter than the summer. Errrr, with the greatest respect to the EA boffins, is that really going to make it harder to ensure clean and plentiful water?

The only thing hard is how hard it seems for the EA to get their act together. In the short term they need to beef up the regulatory regime to measure pollution and enforce the legislation that already exists. How far we are currently from this apparently simple task of measurement was shown earlier in the week with evidence given to MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee who asked how much sewage is going in our rivers.

The simple answer is nobody knows or perhaps not saying. Yes, the water companies will tell you when discharges start and finish but they don’t (or won’t) tell you the volume. The EA, who permit the discharges, do not seem to be inclined to press the water companies to measure the flows and the water companies themselves say they have an ‘ambition’ do so by the 2030’s.

Ashley Smith, founder of campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, who knows far about this than I, said the suggestion that water companies lack technology to measure their flows is “laughable”.

It seems to me if you want more clean and plentiful water a good place to start would be by stopping pollution. But for the EA the simple solution is not the one that suits their current narrative. Adapt or die? I think it is a phrase the EA should adopt for themselves.

Swapping Patricks

Many years ago, in that age long, long ago when David Beckham kicked a ball for a living, he was in Japan to play. Would he, asked a reporter from the press pack, learn a few Japanese phrases to bond with the locals.” I would if I could”, said Beckham, “but frankly I still have enough trouble with English.” I’m with David in that respect which leaves me in awe of anyone who speaks a second language.

I was put in mind of the shared verbal inadequacy Goldenballs and myself last week when I was chatting with Charlie Patrick as he wrapped up his 41st, and final season, as river keeper at the Compton Chamberlayne Estate on the River Nadder in Wiltshire. Charlie is a rare breed; a river keeper who is retiring before the job takes its heaviest physical toll in an overstretch of final years. He is also a keeper with an unexpected hinterland, fluent in French and a home in central Brittany where he will spend a portion of each retirement year.

Tom & Charlie Patrick

Charlie was born and bought up near Thirsk in north Yorkshire. Never much minded with books he was, by 13 years old, already helping on a local shoot and poaching on the local beck. He jokes that he was a well-mannered poacher, practicing the delicate art of upstream worming. God’s Own Country may well have remained his home for the remainder of his life but for an advert his Mother saw in the paper for a course in Shoot, River and Sporting Management at Sparsholt College in Hampshire. This was back in the days when a Sparsholt course was down and dirty; a practical year that was way different to the three-year Ba(Hons) of today.

Finishing with a Distinction Charlie was still just 16 years old, but he lucked out when beating on the Broadlands Estate as a Saturday job which landed him his first river keeper position working under Harry Grass back in the era when Lord Mountbatten was alive, and Royalty were regular visitors to the River Test. At £45 a week Charlie thought he was doing alright until he met a pal working as a game keeper in France, on a 10,000 acre estate, an hour north of Paris for a £100 a week plus a house. Got any jobs he asked? Well, yes. So, with his new wife Gina Charlie, only fluent in Yorkshire, headed to France. But after two happy years as a budding Francophile, for personal reasons and the death of the owner, they returned to England to take the job at Compton Chamberlayne just past his 21st birthday.

What’s different, I asked Charlie, forty years on? Unequivocally he says it is the state of the river. More dirty water. Less varied fly life. An absence of ranunculus. A dearth of rising fish. In short, the Nadder is less like the chalkstream that it should be, or the river Charlie recalls from his early years. He also rues the passing of the characters who used to fish though, having heard his tales of bare bottoms gyrating where they should not, maybe a less characterful fishery is no bad thing.

The changing of the guard is always a sad moment especially when, if like me, you have known someone for nearly all their watch. However, the family connection remains. Tom, Gina and Charlie’s 25-year-old son, is the successor moving into Dinton Mill Cottage, the house in which he was born, as the new river keeper.

We wish Gina, Charlie and Tom all the very best in their shared new adventures.

Welcome to Dorset

The history of Dorset is mixed. Yes, it was often the rural idyll of Thomas Hardy novels; Casterbridge was the fictional name he gave to Dorchester, the town of his youth. More recently, fired by the Jurassic film franchise of the 1990’s, the coastline has latched onto the value of all things prehistoric. But I suspect the first time most of us, unaware of the existence of Dorset, first became aware of its existence was due to a school history lesson concerning the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

I must admit I was one of those people; I knew nothing of Dorset in my childhood days. Not even its chalkstreams; tolpuddle literally means toll bridge over the River Piddle. As far as I was concerned Dorset was a county somewhere beyond Wiltshire which, as the story of the Martyrs evolved, I wanted to visit less and less. In 1834 six agricultural labourers, having been arrested for forming a union in protest at a cut in farming wages, were sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. Such was the outcry, with marches and a petition signed by 800,000 people (British population was only 15m at the time), that the sentences were commuted after three years allowing then all to return to England. It is no small irony that five of the six later emigrated to Canada, only one, James Hammett returning to Tolpuddle, dying in the Dorchester poorhouse in 1891.

I’ve always thought the story of the Martyrs, often cited as the beginning of the modern-day trade union movement, as an isolated instance of judicial brutality. But was it? Crossing the River Allen earlier this summer, another Dorset chalkstream and in many respects the twin of the Piddle, I saw this sign. Maybe the sentences handed down on the Martyrs, based on an obscure Act from the 1700’s, were more common than generally supposed?

A friendly welcome

Fishing for Schools

For those of you who do not know of Fishing for Schools it is an amazing project run by my old friend Charles Jardine for the Countryside Alliance which offers a short course for children aged between 10 and 16 and of all abilities.

Every time I see or talk with Charles, he is either on the way to, or on the way back, from one of the many schools in England and Wales that he and the team have visited over the 14 years the project has run.

Fishing for Schools operates a funding scheme where schools can apply for funded sessions using an online form. They are now accepting applications from schools interested in taking part in 2022.

If you have children or grandchildren who are aged between 10 and 16 years of age, please do let their school know about this fantastic opportunity and encourage their school to apply. Applications are invited from schools in Avon, Bath and North East Somerset, Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex, Essex, Kent, Derbyshire, Norfolk, Yorkshire and Wales.

But act fast! Applications close today https://www.fishingforschools.co.uk/