Life of a Chalkstream: 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 King

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.