Life of a Chalkstream: Angling in the Paris Olympics

Greetings!

Sad to see that the Triathlon events at the Olympics were almost derailed by sewage pollution (cold comfort that the UK is not alone with this problem) which was an exact repeat of the 1900 Paris Olympics when the angling in the Seine, yes fishing was an Olympic sport, was disrupted for the same reason.

If you think angling was an odd choice for inclusion in the Olympics, think again for it was a very different celebration of sport to the one we watch today. The word eccentric barely covers the list of sports that took place in Paris but have gone by the way in subsequent Olympics: cannon shooting, lifesaving, tug of war, ballooning, obstacle course swimming, firefighting, pigeon racing and motorsport are just some.

This one and only time for angling in the Olympics attracted 20,000 spectators over the four days of the competition, with the first day alone drawing a crowd of 9000. A total of 600 anglers from six countries, France, Germany, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Italy and Belgium took part, with three days of qualifying and a final on the fourth day in early August.

Madame B.

However, in a prelude to what has happened in 2024, the book Les Jeux Olympiques Oublié, reported that Swan Island, the location for the fishing, just downstream of the Eiffel Tower, had been known to be full of fish, ‘”but alas, a sewer had acted up a few days earlier near the Pont de Grenelle. Farewell chub or pike: we will have to be content for the most part with small fry.”

Despite this, a total of 2051 fish were landed over the event, with 881 (possibly bleak) on the final day. Details of what they caught and how they caught it are scant, but we do know competition was also open to women, which was very progressive bearing in mind French women only got the vote in 1945, with one entrant from the de la Ligne Picarde club in Amiens, only identified as Madame B qualifying for the final.

The eventual winner was Élie Lesueur, also from Amiens, who was presented with a cup donated by none other than the French President with, rather bizarrely, the third placed Hyacinthe Lalanne taking the gold medal. The top ten finalists shared the not inconsiderable prize money of 3800 francs, about £85,000 today.

So, will angling ever return to the Olympics? The idea is not quite as farfetched as it might appear as the Confederation Internationale de la Peche Sportive representing us fifty million anglers in more than seventy countries did launch a bid for inclusion in the 2020 Tokyo Games but along with snooker, bridge, chess and others we failed to make the cut.

Aside from that old chestnut as to whether angling is a sport and though the concept of sport was something lost by the Olympic Committee long ago, I tend to agree with the French magazine Le Gymnaste, who wrote in support of angling for 1900: “Fishing should be considered as a sport. It has the enormous advantage of being accessible to all classes of society and to all individuals.”

1900 competitors with judge in top hat

Natural England executes the mother of all U turns

Tony Juniper, chairman of the all-powerful environmental quango Natural England, interviewed on the BBC Today morning radio show last week could hardly contain his excitement at the election of the new Labour government. Gone, with a mighty swipe of his pen, were those pesky nitrate neutrality rules which his organisation had deemed so important for the past five years, badgering the Conservative government, under the pretence of an EU directive, to direct local authorities to put on hold the construction of 140,000 homes, largely in southern England, that had already been granted planning permission.

What has changed, asked an incredulous interviewer, sensing that Juniper had, at the very best interpretation, been leant on by the incoming administration intent of ramping up homebuilding. I would say good old Tony waffled or deflected but frankly, he babbled incoherently. So, let me fill in the gaps.

Tony Juniper

Now, I am broadly sympathetic to the Natural England cause on nitrates. If we build new houses, each and every one a polluting entity that will spew for a hundred years or more, we need, at the very least, to mitigate that future pollution at the moment of construction. Of course, it makes no sense to continue to build where it does most damage, but that naïve belief will always be sacrificed on the altar of housebuilding as A Good Thing.

So, Natural England came up with a credit scheme, the so called nitrate neutrality rules, where developers could offset the nitrate increase for the river catchment in which the construction was taking place by seeking offsets which could take the form of, in a random selection, closing down a pig farm, creating a wetland or taking agricultural land out of production. This in itself has created a whole new financial sector dedicated to selling credits which saw land sold at a huge premium (now presumably lost) or fish farms closed to realise the credit. Of course, the huge irony of all this that the scheme was not making anything better. Nitrates are already catastrophically too high; all the neutrality scheme would do is keep them high for longer.

I have long thought Natural England a growing exponent of the extremes of ecological and environmental thinking, embracing beliefs that would have been considered crackpot twenty years ago (beavers!) but are now promoted as mainstream by those with their hand of the considerable levers of power. And believe me Natural England is all powerful in all things environmental. But then again, when you look at the CV of Tony Juniper, ex Friends of the Earth and World Wildlife Fund, should we be surprised? Take a bow Michael Gove, the government minister who appointed him in 2019. That phrase fox in the henhouse comes to mind ……..

But clearly Juniper has drunk the Angela Rayner Kool-Aid quoted by The Observer with his wish fulfilment drivel on the new housing proposals for “a joined-up approach that avoids environmentally harmful development while harnessing the contribution housing can make to restoring our natural world.” whilst also supporting building on the Green Belt with some vague future commitment to nitrate mitigation.

Welcome to a country where another body tasked with protecting your rivers and countryside has gone native, adding to that list of shame including Defra, Ofwat and the Environment Agency.

That was the month that was July

Maybe it is my heat addled memory but in years past was it not the month of August that was reserved for brutally hot days?

Doing a quick trawl through average monthly temperature data since 1955 does, in fact, prove the heat has got to me. In the past decade August has only been hotter than July on three occasions, with July just a fraction of a centigrade warmer than August when averaged over the past seven decades.

So, armed with that cooler knowledge, I am delighted to be posting Nigel Nunn’s August selection to David Wilkes who fished at Middleton, Bullington Manor and School Farm, the July Feedback Draw winner.

Klinkhåmer takes to the road

I must admit I cannot ever recall a roadshow for a fly, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Klinkhåmer and the publication of the book by its creator Hans Van Klinken, Hans will be visiting the UK later this month.

The inventor of the world’s most popular fishing fly by a living tyer is coming to Shropshire on 15 August. Join Hans at Ashford Carbonnel village hall at 7pm when he will give a talk and tie his famous fly.

Tickets which include a one course meal, are £10 and must be pre-booked from Ludlow countryside book publisher Merlin Unwin Books on 01584 877456.

Hans Van Klinken

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) Which city is hosting the 2028 Olympics?

2) Is the River Seine a chalkstream?

3) In what year did UK women receive the same voting rights as men?