THE weather that May was cold and dry, 'dust being everywhere, in street, road, and fallow Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee when ruling over some 450 million people in her Empire and Dominions. The Sultan of Zanzibar abolished slavery. Aspirin first appeared on the market. The Klondike Gold Rush began. Those low temperatures meant the 1897 mayfly hatches were late.
By the year of COUNTRY LIFE's founding, angling had become hugely popular throughout Britain. The sport had been formally subdivided into 'coarse' and 'game' in the 1884 Freshwater Fisheries Act; a year earlier, more than two million enthusiasts had visited the capital's Great International Fisheries Exhibition. Thousands of miles of railway track were opening up the countryside. Prominent pundits included Harry Cholmondeley-Pennell, William Senior and R. B. Marston (redoubtable editor of the influential Fishing Gazette, tuppence each Saturday). Within a few years, COUNTRY LIFE would publish a two-volume compendium, Fishing (1904) covering everything from trout to tarpon and running to 1,000 pages. Those were the days!
The majority of anglers fished for coarse species and there was a proliferation of clubs and associations, particularly in the industrial North and Midlands, which organised competitions and sweepstakes on the canals and other waterways, fielding all-male teams from pits and pubs. Prizes might include a sewing machine, calf's head or a bottle of rum. Despite the often polluted waters, tiddlers were caught with whole-cane roach poles and, on the Trent, a long-trotting style was evolved using a wooden ‘Nottingham centre-pin reel (ancestor of the revolutionary metallic Coxon Aerial, which appeared in 1896). Working mens' outings thrived on the Thames, too: there were more than 600 clubs attached to London pubs alone. In 1897, a 10lb trout was taken at Shepperton.
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