Casting a line to times past

I HAVE been doing some research recently into the history of angling in Ireland for a television production company, and in the course of it I was re-introduced to a fascinating character, Viscount Grey of Fallodon.

He is probably best known to history as a Liberal politician who was British foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916 — tumultuous years. He is the man responsible for saying, at the outbreak of the First World War, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We will not see them lit again in our lifetime” — though ‘lamps’ is commonly mis-quoted as ‘lights’. He is not so well-known today for his beautiful writing about wildlife and fishing.

I took down two of his books from my shelves. One is simply called Fly Fishing and the other is a collection of essays called Fallodon Papers. I’m on the look-out for a third book he wrote called The Charm of Birds. There is a fascinating chapter in Fly Fishing about trips he made to Ireland when he was in his early twenties. As a schoolboy and an undergraduate at Balliol College Oxford he had learned the new art of dry fly fishing from the pioneers of it on the River Itchen at Winchester. He brought the new techniques with him on his Irish holidays and tried them out, eventually with considerable success, although he wasn’t fishing at the best time of year. He may have been the first fisherman to use classic chalk stream dry fly techniques in this country.