Tony King (1952-2022) A tribute

 

Greetings!   You may well be wondering why Cagney & Lacey, cops of the eponymous TV series of the 1980’s, are featured this week. Sadly, it is by way of tribute to fishing guide, guru, mentor and our friend, Tony King, who very sadly died last week, the day following his 70th birthday as multiple cancers finally got the better of him.   Tony was born and died in Dorset, but that would be a parochial epitaph for a man who caught fish on the fly in every continent except Antarctica mostly, as Tony would say, the latter only for the lack of a bead head capable of cutting through the ice pack.

 

 

Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly) & Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless)

 

Born in the tiny hamlet of Worth Maltravers Tony’s early fishing life was as diverse as fishing for mullet in the sewage outflow at Swanage to the Hertfordshire chalkstream of the Rib, close to where his family moved in his teenage years. As luck would have his fishing horizons expanded across Wales and Scotland as his father, a design engineer in the arms industry, took Tony on field testing to the remoter parts of Britain.   School morphed into Winchester College of Art, affording his first opportunity to fish the hallowed Hampshire chalkstreams, before he was struck with the wanderlust that was to last for the remainder of his life. Australia, via southeast Asia and Hong Kong where Tony came upon the Five Spot Arcade, his source of high-end fly tackle at far eastern prices. Once in Australia Tony and his wife, on discovering she was pregnant with their first child, did what any expectant couple would do. Yes, they bought a camper van to drive around Australia and Tasmania fishing as they went, both saltwater and river, Tony accidentally getting his first guiding job after hanging around too long in a Tassie tackle store.   Ultimately, the demands of an 18-month-old son drew them back to England and talented artist/designers both they were offered a dilapidated house for restoration in the Hackney artist community at Beck Road in east London, that still exists to this day. However, this wasn’t for them, so Tony applied for a forestry job in Anglesey which came with a house on the Menai Strait in a forest that included a lake with a daily run of sea trout.

 

 

The watcher at work on his beloved River Frome

 

Tony used to say his life was driven by what he called his constant fascination with water, be it fishing it or watching it. Often it was more of the latter than the former, which wasn’t to the liking of every client. Some like to fish the water from dawn to dusk, Tony’s sit-on-a-bench-chat-with-a-fag-until-the fish-come-to-you approach, is not, as I say, to the liking of all with feedback of which I was sometimes on the wrong end of from both sides. He was, referring to the complaining client, ‘an expletive prat’, Tony would mostly fire back at me.     In Wales he and his wife, the designer of the pair, set up a knitwear business with sweaters made from hand spun wool. An encounter at a London trade fair with an American agent saw them exporting to North America, with the sweaters soon worn by Cagney and Lacey in the hit TV detective series which ran for seven seasons in the US, drew audiences of 20 million plus and was regularly in the BBC top ten. Its success was their success, turbo charging sales with resultant business-cum-fishing trips for Tony to California, Montana and their like. In turn the husband-and-wife team spotted an opportunity, funded by a grant and a house from the Scottish government, to move north of the border. Arriving at a house sight-unseen and not of their choosing, Tony took a walk to the bottom of their new garden – there was the Border Esk. Luck sometimes fuelled his fascination.   The knitwear business, to quote Tony quoting a Scottish saying, ‘went up like a rocket and came down like a stick’, so in 1993 Tony found himself in search of an income once again. Concluding he was getting too old for the demands of forestry, he set up his Esk & Borders Guiding Service which, in the pre-internet age offered salmon fishing on productive but hard-to-get-on beats of the Annan, Esk, Nith, Tweed and others with his tagline ‘fish like a local’.

 

 

Tony thrived and around this time in the mid 1990’s the fly fishing industry decided it had to get all professional, Tony was semi-willingly corralled into first taking the Scottish casting qualification and later the UK wide equivalents. It is somewhat ironical that a man who first saw these letters after your name as posh boys telling those who could already fish how to fish became a founder of the guide organisation REFFIS and later the Chairman of the Game Angling Instructors Association. However, the truth is that Tony’s legacy in this respect is that he rebased angling instruction as practical and fun.   Around this time Tony, now single, returned to his native Dorset dividing his time as an independent guide on the chalkstreams whilst working with Richard Slocock at Wessex Fly Fishing, Oliver Pope at the Wrackleford Estate and at Fishing Breaks. In between he worked on river restoration projects, river management and had a boat moored in Weymouth Harbour for bass on the fly. Tony hated to be idle.   I always envied Tony’s laconic approach to life. ‘What are you doing over the winter?’ I’d ask towards the end of each chalkstream season. The answer rarely included staying at his Weymouth home, despite its spectacular view over the sea. Africa. South America. The Caribbean. Take your pick as Tony followed the sun to work in a lodge or fishing camp. Emails would go unanswered for months until the time for a return home loomed large, Tony popping up for the opening day of the season as brown as a berry and hair that had not seen a pair of scissors since he had left the previous autumn.   It didn’t always involve work. A couple of years before Covid, with his partner of some 25 years Clare, they set off to island hop the Pacific for six months determined to never spend more than $20 a night for a place to stay. ‘Yeah,’ said Tony to me when I speculated as to the nature of the accommodation, ‘I’m an old hippy at heart.’   Closure: people talk of it as if it is a good thing. In writing this last paragraph of Tony’s life I’m not sure I want closure. It is all too final. So, for a while, I am going to pretend he has disappeared to some far distant river. Pretend that in the spring he will arrive with tales of those distant rivers. Where he has gone, I do not know. I hope it is a happy place.   Tony King died at his home in Weymouth on 7th November aged 70 years. He leaves his partner Clare, two children and grandchildren.

 

 

A Weymouth sea bass

 

In sadness,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

Goodbye Ranil. Hello Thérèse

 

Greetings!   As well as three Prime Ministers in as many months we are now onto our third Minister of State at the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) with arrival of Thérèse Coffey, replacing the avowed Trussite Ranil Jayawardena who barely had time to print his new business cards before returning to the backbenches.   Some people have questioned Coffey’s appointment, but this is a return home for her having started her ministerial career at Defra. With a PhD in chemistry and having spent her working life prior to parliament in finance I for one don’t feel inclined to write her off just yet but clearly, she has a difficult brief.   Essentially the problems drain into three buckets: formulating the legislation required to transition from environment law based on EU statutes to UK statutes. Reforming the regulatory oversight. Finally engaging in a public discourse that explains why proper water provision, sewage treatment and clean air requires higher consumer bills.

 

 

Thérèse Coffey (and cat!)

 

I got into trouble with some of you when I wrote in September that contracting-out our environmental legislation to the EU was always a bad idea and I was surprised that the ‘great and the good’ such as the National Trust, RSPB et al suddenly leapt to the defence of legislation they had routinely trashed and derided as inadequate for decades.   However, it seems I was not alone in my thinking as Henrietta Appleton, Policy Officer at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust said something similar last week citing, as an example, the ‘EU’s decision to ban the only effective herbicide for bracken control, based on residue data submitted when the chemical was used on spinach.’ Yes, rewriting 2,500 pieces of EU-derived legislation as required by the end of 2023 will be difficult. Not all the outcomes will always be good or to the satisfaction of everyone. But equally plenty will be better and ultimately, we should have a framework of legislation suited to the particular needs of our island.   If the legislative road will be a hard one for Coffey, then she can take some comfort that the regulatory one need not be. Bodies such as the Environment Agency, the Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) and Natural England are directly under her control. If fact, members of all these bodies sit on the Executive Board of Defra. Here are some stark facts she should lay out to our friends at the EA at the first board meeting as detailed this week by New Civil Engineer magazine,   ‘The 107 prosecution cases brought by the EA in 2021, are more than the 2020 (70 cases) but less than 2019 (143 cases). Data analysis provider Ends [a research group] has found that the number of prosecutions has fallen by 76.4% in the past decade compared to the previous one – an average of 710.6 prosecutions a year between 2000 and 2010, while between 2011 and 2021 the yearly average stood at 167.6.’   Let us just chew on that final statistic for a moment: the average number of EA prosecutions each year has fallen from 710 at the start of the millennium to 167 last year. Really? Have our rivers got cleaner with each passing year to warrant such a decline? Or course not. It is time to relieve the EA of a task to which they are clearly unsuited.   Finally, it’s that public discourse thing. All the legislation in the world will not change the parlous state of our rivers and coastline in the short and medium term. The one thing that hit me right between the eyes when I was doing the research for The Otters’ Tale was that it took a full thirty years for the organophosphates that bought our otters to the edge of extinction to work their way out of the food chain. However, we could stop pouring sewage into our rivers overnight if we built decent sewage processing plants. We could save our rivers from terminal abstraction with a national water grid and desalination plants. If we started today, and at less cost than HS2, within five years we could stop the rot and in ten start to make things better.   I know with all the talk of a cost-of-living crisis proposing higher bills comes with political risks but surely it is a conversation worth having?

 

 

Salmon Shame   I’m always slightly hesitant in giving a recommendation to watch a film where the topic is outside my area of expertise but I’m still going to suggest you watch Salmon Shame from Wildfish, the body previously known as the Salmon & Trout Conservation Trust.   The short film, just over nine minutes long is, in the words of the producers, ‘An eye-opening video that exposes the horrors of open-net salmon farming in Scotland.’ ending with an exhortation to ‘Say NO to open-net salmon farming’ at www.wildfish.org   You can watch the film here As an aside, the one thing that puzzles me is why, at the time of me posting this, has Salmon Shame only received 15,000 You Tube views? I’m guessing it is an issue the wider public have yet to latch on to.

 

 

Click to watch Salmon Shame

 

 

Meet the new Environment Agency Chairman   You will all know my scepticism for the new Chairman of the Environment Agency, Alan Lovell. He has, as you may also know, strong Hampshire connections, but what I did not know was that he was bought up in the Test Valley, on the banks of the River Anton in Upper Clatford.   So, in a return to the village of his upbringing he will be giving the All Saints’ Winter Lecture 2023 at the King Edward VII Memorial Hall in Upper Clatford on Monday 16th January. The topic of his lecture will be, “Restoring confidence in the quality of English rivers – the Challenge for and the Role of the Environment Agency”. Lovell will explain the role of the Environment Agency and how it will address the challenge in restoring the environmental integrity of the unique chalkstreams.

 

 

Alan Lovell

 

Tickets cost £12.00 per person. Please use this link to book. Doors open at 7pm and the lecture starts at 8pm at the King Edward VII Memorial Hall, Upper Clatford, SP11 7QL. A cash bar will be open before the lectures start. Parking is available behind the hall.

 

 

The law of the river   I sometimes dream of coming back in another life as a lawyer specialising in riparian rights, the dictionary definition of which is relating to or situated on the banks of a river.    I hardly know of a beat which, at some time or another, has not had some kind of disputation ranging from the totally trivial to the substantive. Most of the trouble arises with boundaries or access. Years ago, nobody attributed much value to a river so, coupled with inaccurate or indecipherable deed mapping, what might have been an accepted practice dating back decades for one party suddenly becomes a trespass issue for another. Yes, it soon can become a rich seam to mine for the legal profession.   Now, I can’t pretend this latest advice from Hampshire County Council is a cure-all for riparian woes, but it is a useful aide memoire, and I learnt a few new things so I reproduce it here at no charge (!) for general advice to squirrel away for a day when you might need it.

 

 

 

 

Quiz The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter.   It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.   1) What was discovered on this day exactly a 100 years ago in Egypt?   2) On what date is All Saints' Day celebrated?   3) What is the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill more commonly known as?

 

 

 

Have a good weekend.    Best wishes,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1) Howard Carter discovers the intact tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun 2) 1st November 3) Brexit Freedoms Bill