Angling has always been cavalier about its great men. We know who they were and what their contributions have been because, mostly, they wrote books and we have the books to read. But we know precious little about our heroes as individuals: about the kinds of men they were, the wider lives they lived, what drove and motivated them, what caused their creative springs to well beneath river and lake bed.
The Medlar Press, the small, specialist angling publisher, has started to change that. “Richard Walker - Biography of an Angling Legend” has been written by Barrie Rickards, a retired Cambridge professor. “Hugh Falkus - A Life on the Edge” is the work of Chris Newton, a former journalist. The Rickards book is an unashamed work of record, a series of essays that addresses different aspects of Walker’s domestic and known angling life, from his birth in 1918 to his death in 1985. The Newton book, by contrast, is a work of investigation - probing and analytical and full of revelation.
From the moment when, in 1952, Walker caught by design a record carp weighing 44lb and followed it up with a string of other monsters - carp were, at that time, regarded as almost uncatchable - he became the most famous angler in Britain. Through his books and a weekly column in Angling Times that went on unbroken for 30 years, Walker showed how any fish, no matter how big or difficult, could be caught if sufficient logic, science, knowledge of the quarry and physical skill could be brought to bear. Little by little, through his writings and example, he changed the mindset of millions. Almost single-handedly, over time, he dragged coarse fishing out of the dark ages into the light.
Falkus’s focus was narrower. He was a game angler above all. In Sea Trout Fishing - the much-enlarged 1975 second edition especially - he drew together all that was known and relevant about this fascinating fish, overlaid on it the results of his observations of the creature’s needs and behaviour and revealed tackles and strategies that would bring it regularly to the bank.
With “Sea Trout Fishing”, Falkus effectively invented a new and exciting branch of angling, largely to be practised at night. His monumental “Salmon Fishing” (1984) became the Bible for those pursuing Salmo salar. By the time he died in 1996, white-maned in the eyrie in the Cumbrian fells where he lived, Falkus had, among game anglers, the stature and reputation of an Old Testament prophet.
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We all had a pretty good idea, before the Rickards book, what manner of man Walker was. Thanks to his public appearances, his huge literary output and the blizzard-like scale of his correspondence, the man himself inevitably came through. He was by turns warm, generous, funny, sociable and arrogant. He was loyal, intellectually brilliant and family-rooted. He was, in other words, a rounded human being.
With a contribution by Walker’s widow, Pat - a member of the famous Marston angling dynasty - and with shorter pieces by some of those who knew him - including one by me - Rickards takes us without surprise through Walker’s early and domestic life; sets out his impact on angling at large and on coarse fishing in particular and discusses his place in angling history. Rickards concludes, rightly in my view, that Richard Walker was the most important known angler of all time.
Few, other than his friends, knew what Falkus was really like and, thanks to Newton’s book, some of them may come to feel that they scarcely knew him at all - possibly, now, would not want to know him.
On the evidence presented here, Falkus was a dysfunctional human being: a drunk, a philanderer and a bully. It seems that he lied about his oft-flaunted war record, as he did about much else. He left a trail of debris that included former wives, mistresses and friends. He even fathered children whose existence he refused to acknowledge. The extent to which it all arose from stresses and tragedies in his early life - a seemingly unloving mother, long periods of solitary confinement as a prisoner of war, the loss of his second wife (“the love of my life”, he once told me) who drowned at sea while the two were out filming together, can only be guessed at and then to little profit.
What cannot be denied is that Falkus, one-on-one, could be hugely stimulating company and was a man of extraordinary energy, intellect, creativity, physical courage and sporting prowess. He wrote and narrated all 40 episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, as well as a string of books, his pioneering works on sea trout and salmon fishing among them.
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We do not have to like or admire Falkus to acknowledge the value of his work, but, in the wider angling world at which these biographies are aimed, Walker was by far the more significant figure. Few biographies have been written about anglers. With these two, The Medlar Press has chosen the right ones to make their start. Any that follow seem destined to pale alongside.
Both books are available at medlarpress.com and cost £35 apiece. Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month.