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ASK A NON-ANGILER to name the best-selling angling book of all time and the most likely answer will be Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Ask a fisherman – one over 40, anyway – and the one-word response will be ‘Crabtree’.

It is hard to find a middle-aged angler who does not have Bernard Venables’ marvellous book. In the 20 years to 1970 Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing was almost a compulsory buy. My own copy – yellowing, frayed and dated ‘Christmas, 1952’ in a childish hand – is beside me as I write.

No-one knows how many copies Izaak Walton’s pastoral hymn has sold, though in the 350 years since it appeared it has run to more than 400 editions, printed in dozens of languages. Anglers know that Venables’ paperback story of father showing son how to fish through the angling year – largely through wonderfully executed, cartoon-style strips with informative bubbles – sold hugely. Few know what the true figure was. All knew its impact on them. Its importance, the way it enthralled two generations of young angling minds, was so great that, in later life, Venables became positively revered, the first Izaak Walton since Izaak Walton.

I got to know Bernard quite well. I first met him in the early 1990s when I interviewed him for one of my columns for The Times. Subsequently we found ourselves, quite independently, guests at a fishing dinner in Wales and we jiggled the place-names about so that we could sit together and talk. The next meeting was at a small lunch party, held in a mutual friend’s home, to mark Bernard’s 90th birthday. I met him several times more before he died on April 21, 2001 – and subsequently was invited by Eileen, his wife, to speak at the memorial gathering held to celebrate his life. It was one of the greatest gatherings of anglers – eminent anglers – that can have ever been brought together in one place. I did not write about that, but I did write about his extraordinary burial.

ON MAY DAY, under a cherry tree just breaking into blossom and not a fly-cast from one of the rivers he lived much of his life for, the most-widely known and best-loved angler since Izaak Walton, was laid to rest.

Bernard Venables, creator of Mr Crabtree and author of the extraordinary Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, a work that sold over two million copies and that lit the torch in two generations of young angling minds, was not a religious man and there was not a trace of formal religion in the two events of the day.

The first was a simple, private gathering of family and friends – if it had been public, there would have been thousands there – in a village hall deep in Hampshire. Friends recalled their memories of the man they knew and one read a marvellously crafted, humorous piece that Venables wrote in 1953 about the dangers of leaving groundbait in the vicinity of horses. Later there was the simple interment ceremony conducted on the side of the sloping downland hill in the wind and the rain.

For all that there was no religion in the day, it was a spiritual occasion. Venables had lived his 94-plus years in tune with nature, close to the earth, marvelling at its wonders, secure in his mortality. When he died on April 21, after a mercifully short illness, he was ready and content.

Venables was devoid of pretension. He genuinely wanted to be buried in a cardboard box – he saw his own return to the earth as the landing of just another dust-speck on the turning wheel of time and felt that to use anything else would be pointless. But it was not to be. When he was lowered into the pure, white chalk it was in a more startlingly appropriate way: in a wicker basket made to take his own tiny frame, as light and natural a coffin as one of Old Izaak’s creels.

At the precise moment of his burial the heavens opened and a wind-driven rain riveted down. Someone said ‘typical fishing weather’ and we smiled and nodded before drifting away. A few held back. Someone dropped an old cork float onto Bernard’s creel. Someone else dropped down an artificial mayfly. Yet a third old friend dropped down another artificial fly and a fourth a small slip of wood which, he later said, had long-ago been harvested from the garden of Izaak Walton’s Staffordshire cottage.

A couple of minutes later a blackbird, gripping its swaying cherry branch tightly, burst into full-throated song. It was as if the clouds had parted and the sun had come out.

It is impossible to overstate the impact that Bernard Venables had on angling – and on young minds especially – with Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing. Crabtree was not Venables’ first book or his only book – Venables wrote a shelf-full of books, including one on tanks, one on a journey down the Zambesi and one about the open-boat whalers of the Azores. But Crabtree was his masterpiece.

Crabtree the angler hatched from a highly popular strip cartoon that Venables drew for the Daily Mirror in the years immediately after the war. In 1949 the Mirror decided the strips should be turned into a book. Venables pulled several of the strips together, added some new bits, a few watercolours and some linking text. The resulting marriage – of images so vibrantly crafted to words marvellously honed – proved a soft-backed, 96-page publishing wonder. All it seemed to do was follow a father and son fishing through the year – for pike in winter, for trout in spring, for bream, tench and carp in summer, for perch, roach and rudd in autumn. But it sold in its hundreds, its thousands, its millions, earning its author not an extra penny in the process because the Mirror took the view that he was an employee when he did the work and so all rights were the paper’s own.

There is no doubt that, in his later years, Venables came to view Crabtree with ambivalence. In a real sense he lived his later life struggling to get out of Crabtree’s shadow but whatever he did, the shadow lengthened and followed. Venables had much to feel frustrated about: not least the fact that his high artistic talents – ‘I live and breath for my art’, he once told me, ‘I am hell-driven by it’ – did not receive the recognition that was their due. Venables was a painter of a high order in oils and watercolours, a wonderful carver of wood and sculptor of stone. His work was hung several times in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. His cottage near Salisbury was crammed with the artillery of these inner conflicts: paintings, busts, easels, paints, brushes and inks jostled for space with rods, reels, bags, boxes, books and wellies.

The overriding question Venables leaves behind is as much – he would not like this – about Crabtree as it is about himself. Why did that tiny book with its both timeless and dated, working-class yet oddly classless team of father and son fishing and talking, become the publishing wonder that it was?

Acumen on the part of the Mirror Group obviously played its part. The timing was perfect. After the war, in drab days, long before television or videos or computers, most people were thrown back on their own resources for diversion and the reach and promotional clout of the paper made sure that anyone who might remotely be interested in the book, saw it. Venables’ great skill with brush and pen also played a key role.

But there has to be more, something that accounts for the book’s success with, above all, young boys.

A key feature, I believe, is that for the first time Venables took young minds which to that point had been physically marooned on the bank, down into the water and into the world of their quarry. He showed Crabtree and Peter at one end of the rod, fishing to the barrier of the reflecting surface. He showed the fish at the other end reacting to what the pair did and did not do. So Venables, for the first time, completed the circle: he made fishing come alive in the reader’s own mind, in the process giving each action at one end of the rod a visible consequence at the other. Naturally, also, his fish were great fish – and we knew that if we did what Crabtree and Peter did, whoppers would end up in our nets, too.