Читать книгу On Fishing - Brian Clarke - Страница 17

ANYONE who reads the angling press regularly sees the same writers featured, time after time. If they go on long enough and have enough to say, such writers can acquire a kind of fame – though it is fame only within the closed world of fishing. Then, sooner or later, they disappear: either they lose interest, or they are displaced by younger, fresher writers or else, naturally, the man with the scythe intervenes. And that is that.

Every now and then, though, a fishing writer reaches a wider audience and is remembered by the national press when he dies. Arthur Oglesby was one of them. Oglesby was not a mover of mountains in angling, like a Falkus or a Walker, but he was a skilled writer and teacher who featured in the game fishing magazines for over three decades. He also lived in an exotic way. Oglesby had Brylcreemed good looks, money and social connections. Together with his fishing and writing skills, they took him to places, and into company, of which most anglers could only read. And he caught fish. Boy, did he catch fish. It was because of all this that I obituarised him in The Times.

WHEN Arthur Oglesby died on December 2, 2000 – the same day as his long-time friend Jack Hemingway (son of Ernest) – British angling lost a legendary salmon fisher: a man who repaid the privilege of a private income and the ability to fish pretty well when and where he pleased, by passing his encyclopaedic knowledge on to thousands of others through four decades of teaching and writing.

Oglesby was able to enjoy the cream of Atlantic salmon fishing on the international circuit in the days before disease, loss of habitat and pollution took its toll of this heroic fish, reducing it in many places to the point of extinction. He amassed a tally – it was over 2,000 fish in Britain alone – sufficient to take an ordinary mortal’s breath clean away. He counted among his friends many glittering names inside and outside the sport.

Indeed, Oglesby had been due to fish with Hemingway in Alaska earlier that year, but looming heart surgery prevented him from going. Then Hemingway himself underwent heart surgery and it was complications following their operations that claimed both men’s lives.

Arthur Victor Oglesby was born into comfortable family circumstances in December, 1923 and lived the early part of his life in York, close to the family business of Harvey Scruton Ltd., a firm of manufacturing chemists. He started to train as an industrial chemist immediately on leaving school, enlisted with the Black Watch at the age of 18, led his men into battle in the D-Day landings as a young officer – and was wounded in both chest and leg.

Oglesby left the Army as a captain and went into the family firm, which had been built on a widely known product of the time, Nurse Harvey’s Gripe Water, the first gripe water to come onto the market. In 1955 his father came into the younger Oglesby’s office – and collapsed and died in his arms. Arthur was catapulted into the managing director’s chair, struggled to overcome the burden of heavy death duties – and built the business up. By the mid-1960s he was able to hand over the reins to his brother David so that he could do what he had always wanted to do: devote his life to angling. Soon after he moved to Harrogate, where he settled.

Oglesby had been a passionate angler since childhood. In the 1950s he took to fishing the Yorkshire Esk, in those days an excellent salmon and sea trout river – and it was there that he met the man who was to prove, he was later to write, the greatest single influence on his fishing life: Eric Horsfall Turner.

Horsfall Turner, then Town Clerk of Scarborough, made an international name for himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s as captor of a string of giant blue-fin tunny – fish weighing 500lbs and 600lbs apiece – that put in a brief appearance along the north-east coast: but he was also a brilliant salmon angler, knew everyone in the business – and introduced Oglesby around.

In 1957 Oglesby went to Scotland with Horsfall Turner and there found himself introduced to Captain Tommy Edwards. Edwards was, by common consent, the finest fly-casting instructor of his day and had a fishing school on the Spey. Oglesby went back several years to act as Edwards’ unpaid assistant – and took over the fishing school himself on Edwards’ death in 1968. In 1969 he helped to found the Association of Professional Game Angling Instructors, the body that put until-then unregulated game fishing tuition onto a formal footing. He went on to run fishing courses personally until close to his death, teaching over 3,000 students on the Spey alone. Over the same time he regularly led paying clients on fishing expeditions to Russia, Alaska and Iceland.

By the time he started teaching, Oglesby had already made a name for himself through journalism. He first began to write for angling publications, then additionally for The Field and Shooting Times – at one time producing so much copy that he had to adopt a nom de plume to spread his name more thinly. He became European Editor of the American Field and Stream. He edited the Angler’s Annual for three years. He taught himself to fly and regularly presented field events for Yorkshire Television, from time to time adding glamour for participants and audiences alike by flying in and out on his own aircraft.

Like many successful anglers in their later years, Oglesby found that he needed to fish less and less, but he did not become the outstanding performer he was without being fish-hungry at the outset. This fish hunger – and resulting success – bred some jealousy and led others to spread rumours of how his captures might actually be achieved. In Oglesby’s case it led to some wonderful stories. A family favourite is of the time he arrived at the Yorkshire Esk for a day in the middle of what was proving, for him, a terrific season. Another angler, who did not recognise him, was on the bank when he arrived and saw that he was about to head upstream. ‘I wouldn’t go up there’, the other angler called, inferring by his tone the possibility of nets and maybe a little dynamiting, ‘I hear that bugger Oglesby’s up there’. A pause. ‘Oh, good’, Oglesby replied – ‘I think I’ll go and join him.’

It was in 1966 that Oglesby’s international career took off. Again, through Horsfall Turner, he met Odd Haraldsen, a Norwegian who had a prime beat of the Vosso, at that time the finest big-salmon river in the world and one on which spring fish averaged 28lbs apiece. Oglesby and Haraldsen hit it off and Oglesby came home with an invitation to return every year ‘until you catch a 50-pounder’.

He did not quite make the 50lbs but over the years pictures of Oglesby and his amazing Vosso captures became part of the page furniture of the angling and sometimes of the national press. At the time of his death, among the stag heads and books and other mementoes of a 60-year sporting life that looked down from the walls of his study were four salmon. They weighed 45lbs, 46lbs, 46lbs and 49lbs-plus. The biggest fish was caught on June 17, 1973. The three others were, remarkably, all caught on June 18 of their respective years. In 1981 Oglesby caught a bag of four Vosso fish that weighed 151lbs – an incredible total and one which now seems unlikely to be beaten anywhere.

Oglesby’s fame and wherewithal took him to many exotic places – and as a result he made many famous friends. Hemingway was one. Another was Charles Ritz, the Parisian hotelier and a man who, in private life, was a brilliant designer of fly rods. He fished with the Americans Joe Brooks, Lee and Joan Wulff and Al McClane. In Britain he knew and fished with pretty well every famous angler who wafted a salmon rod, most important among them being Hugh Falkus, with whom he made a number of films. It is a point of interest that it was Oglesby who first taught Falkus to Spey-cast – a fact that Falkus did not publicise widely.

Arthur Oglesby wrote several books, among them Salmon (1971), Fly fishing for Salmon and Sea Trout (1986) and an autobiography, Reeling In (1988). But it will be for his extraordinary captures – and the whirl and the world he lived in – that he will be remembered by most.