Life of a Chalkstream: Starmer stymies Truss beaver legacy

Greetings!

I do not know about you but the direction of the Starmer administration in regard to the countryside confuses me, more akin to the Dominic Cummings dig at his former boss Boris Johnson who he described as “a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.

First, we had their extension of Inheritance Tax to farms, then the rescue plan of many years in the making for the chalkstreams championed by my friend Charles Rangeley-Wilson, was unceremoniously dumped and now, out of the blue, despite endorsement by the Department for Rural Affairs, 10 Downing Street have stepped in to kybosh the mass release of beavers.

Why? Well, at this moment with the official announcement still to come, we can only guess but the speculation is of a visceral reaction to a policy championed by previous Conservative administrations. If you recall Liz Truss’s leadership campaign manager cited the reintroduction of beavers as the candidate’s greatest achievement whilst Environment Secretary and Boris Johnson, who said he would give his father a beaver but never did, advocated “Build Back Beaver!”.

Read my Spectator article on the beaver menace. Spectator subscribers click here. PDF version click here.

In case you are equally confused in respect of beaver status as I am about Starmer, there already being an estimated 2-3,000 of these tree-eating rodents in mainland Britain, let me explain the difference between what we have and what is/was proposed.

Beavers were first smuggled from the continental Europe by eco-fanatics over two decades ago who, having failed to make the case for legal releases, illegally set them free first in Scotland and then in Devon. Whether this disparate group of people ever had a plan as such I do not know but if it was for the beavers to put down roots, breed a ‘native’ population, win the hearts and minds of the British public and then bring officialdom along for the ride, then their plan succeeded. It culminated in 2020 with a farcical study of the River Otter beaver population by Exeter University requiring the answer yes to decide whether the ‘wild’ population should remain and further licences for enclosed populations be granted.

There is, frankly, a load of tosh talked about beavers saving the planet. I know I am often unkind to Natural England, the Environment Agency and other members of ecological officialdom but I think even they would have worked out years ago that if building a few random dams was the answer to all that ails the British countryside and rivers they might just have worked it out. But no, apparently we have to leave it to some very dim and slow moving mustelids.

So, at this point we have the ‘wild’ beaver river population and another population, who make up the bulk of those few thousand, who live in maintained enclosures under licence. The final stage in the evolution of the British beaver was the licenced release of beavers into the wild advocated by that super quango Natural England, egged on by all the usual suspects such at the National Trust, Mammal Society and numerous Wildlife Trusts. Frankly, we all know the licensing of wild releases was just cover for a beaver release free-for-all and the ultimate victory for the eco-fanatics, so quite why this Labour administration has quashed it is hard to work out but nonetheless gratifying.

Watch out for Starmer Beaver Harmer placards at a protest near you soon.

When Tony went fishing .......

My piece on Jimmy Carter created quite a postbag. Firstly, the landlord of The Mill Arms Terry Lewis where the President took lunch during his day on the Test related his conversation with Carter which nicely summaries the predicament of being too famous.

“Smashing bloke who loved his fishing, he (Carter) was thrilled that the Test was so natural and challenging. He spoke of being invited to the Colorado River by wealthy supporters but on arrival they would have stocked the river with hundreds of fish to ensure that the President had a 'good day', quite defeating the appeal.”

Terry Lewis with Jimmy Cater at The Mill Arms

I was also pointed in the direction of that great book You Should Have Been Here Last Thursday by River Itchen keeper Ron Holloway who hosted Jimmy and Rosalind Carter the following day, Mrs Carter comfortably out fishing her husband from which Ron concluded she was the better dry fly fisher of the two, though he chose to keep such thoughts to himself.

Finally, on the subject of fly fishing British Prime Minsters it seems Tony Blair was gifted an exquisite handmade Edward Barder cane fly rod (RRP £3,300) when invited to fish in the US. Of when, where and with whom Blair fished I have no information, but if anyone knows ……

Fit for a PM - an Edward Barder outfit

Memories of The Wind in the Willows

The only book my father ever read me, though do not think we ever got to the end, was The Wind in the Willows. Still to this day I recall the very room and the very chair in which we sat each evening as the tale of Ratty, Toad, Badger and all the other denizens of Wild Woods unfolded. I was probably too young to fully appreciate the plot but vividly remember the colour plates in the book, that guided the story, flicking through the pages long after my father had completed the daily read. So, it was with a certain amount of nostalgia that I saw Kenneth Grahame’s last home in Pangbourne, Berkshire is up for sale.

As is well known, the setting for Grahame’s tale was the River Thames and his childhood home at Cookham Dean nearby which is 5 miles northwest of Windsor. He wrote the book, his only novel, based on bedtime stories he had told his son Alastair when three years old (about the age I was when read it) though Grahame wrote the book a few years later having moved away from the Thames, closer to Oxford on his retirement from the Bank of England.

Kenneth Grahame

Church Cottage is a pretty house, on the edge of Pangbourne village on the corner of Riverview Road, just a few yards from the River Pang, a chalkstream tributary of the River Thames, which it joins a quarter of a mile to the north. Towards the end of his life, though he died only aged 71, Grahame seemed to lose his memory transferring the location of The Wind in the Willows to either the Thames close to Pangbourne or the Pang itself. Two years prior to his death in 1932 but already immobile he invited artist Ernest Shepard, due to illustrate a new edition of the book, to Church Cottage, Shepard relating the conversation,

“He told me of the river nearby, of the meadows where Mole broke ground that spring morning, of the banks where Rat had his house, of the pools where Otter hid, and of Wild Wood way up on the hill above the river… He would like, he said, to go with me to show me the river bank that he knew so well, ‘but now I cannot walk so far and you must find your way alone’.”

Church Cottage is on sale with Singleton & Daughter at £1.65m.