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Baillie

Started by Traditionalist, October 26, 2011, 03:45:03 PM

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Traditionalist

James Baillie, 1819 - 1861. The only information found was a death notice in Coldstream. James Baillie, aged 42,mason's labourer, living in lodgings, died of heart disease and general debility. Wife Margaret Hill present. She was illiterate.

Unable to find birth notice, baptismal record, wedding notice (banns). As he was of Border gipsy origins this is not surprising.

This was probably the first and only official notification of James Baillie's existence. The memoriam written by John Younger's Editor, Rutherfurd of Kelso, is the only real source of information on James Baillie. He is famous for giving the spiders to Stewart, although he is not often mentioned in this regard.  

James Baillie 1815-1861

 Was, we do not hesitate to say, the best fly-fisher ever known in the Borders.  We have mentioned him in some of our notes to the present work, and some of these were printed before he died, his demise having taken place in November 1861, at the age of forty six.  He angled almost solely in the Leader and the Gala, and he seldom tried from spring to autumn any other lure than the fly. In the hottest days of June and July, when these waters were at their smallest, and when almost no angler ever thought of trouting with fly, he could, every day, and in a few hours hours' fishing, kill from 10 to 15 lbs. of trout.  For many years before his death he was in feeble health, and he could not stand the fatigue of fishing more than four or five hours a day ; and during these years he had to refrain from wading, as wetting his feet would have prostrated him entirely.  He fished always up-stream, and his principal flies were "spiders," thinly dressed.

He spoke of shop-made spiders as "liker bottle brushes than speeders."  His rod (not by choice, but necessity, for he was always poor, and had to live by his angling) was of unpeeled hazel : it was of two pieces, and when tied up it was well balanced and bent with every cast down to the hand.  His mode of casting was a firm throw from the elbow ; and he could throw a very long light line and make the hooks fall on the very spot he wished.  He did not like very fine gut, but when he had a choice he always picked the roundest strands.  His gut, however, unless someone presented him with it, was generally coarse; because he had to purchase it in penny-worth's in country shops, where little choice could be had.  We met him on the Leader one April day, and never saw a coarser casting-line than he was using.  The strands had been knotted down and down until we are certain the longest did not exceed six inches ; and with that line which was of a milky-white colour (for he almost never stained the  gut he purchased), he had captured upwards of eight dozen trouts that day.  A peculiarity of his angling was that he seldom caught very small trouts : this we noticed many a time when angling alongside of him.    He was often in very poor circumstances during the winter season, especially of late years, as he was not strong enough to shift about for a living, the way he did when in health.  He called upon us two months or so before he died, in miserable health, and poorly clad, and we had the satisfaction of seeing him leave with a lighter heart.  

He was of gipsy extraction, we believe, and from anything we know to the contrary - and we saw a good deal of him during the later years of his life - he was honest and trust-worthy.  

 Let anglers note this : he blamed his incessant wading in his early years for his early death.


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