Club Fishing
- Details
- Published on Saturday, 27 November 2010 15:33
- Written by Bob Graham
During a day on the Clyde last season I was sitting having a cup of coffee when another fisher appeared and sat down beside me. We agreed that the Clyde has improved tremendously during the past few years and this, my new friend stated, was down to the fact that fishing clubs no longer existed. Interested I asked him what damage fishing clubs had caused and was treated to a long and rambling lecture on how clubs in busloads had descended on to the river every weekend, killed hundreds of fish both big and small and then left them lying after they had been weighed in. Again I asked him if he had ever been associated with a fishing club and was told that they had all gone before he took up fishing and a good job too – it took the river twenty years to recover in his sure and certain opinion.
I said nothing and let him rant on. But, my friends, I can assure you that whatever caused the trout population in rivers like the Clyde, Tweed and Tay to plummet after the mid 1960s it was not fishing clubs. I was there.
My first trip with a club was in the back end of the 1946 season. I was almost six years old and the club was the long defunct Whitrigg Angling Club. Whitrigg colliery, closed down in the early 1970s set up fishing club supported by CISWO (Coal Industry Social and Welfare Organisation), my dad was the first, and only, secretary. The club had eight outings each year; two dayshifts, four nightshifts and then another two dayshifts. On the dayshifts the bus left Browning’s garage in Whitburn at 5 am, picked up fishers in local towns and villages and aimed to be on the water sometime around 9 am with an “off the water” rule of 5 pm. On nightshifts the bus left at 3 pm, did the pick ups and aimed to be on the water between six and seven. Remember these were the days before motorways when a trip to the Tweed by bus could take up to two hours. Using the Tweed as an example again some drivers preferred to go via Carnwath and Peebles dropping fishers off all the way down to Mertoun Bridge. Other drivers went via Lauder and dropped off the fishers from the bottom up as it were.
The “weigh in” took place on the way back. If you know the Tay near Inchmagrannagan you will recognise a cottage at the side of the road just after the farm. That’s where the Tay weigh in was performed and a few fish were usually given to an old couple who use to live there. The scales were carefully zeroed after every fisher and a “coffin” was often called into play. The coffin was a piece of wood shaped like a coffin lid and exactly seven inches long. If the size of the fish was suspect it was placed on the coffin to measure it from the snout to the “v” of the tail. Since one of the prizes was for the largest fish any candidates were weighed individually and properly recorded, together with overall catch weights in an official notebook that was signed by the weigh in supervisor and a club official. Grayling were an exception and only those over two pounds were recorded but not weighed with one pound weight being allocated to each grayling over two pounds. Fish were never dumped but were all taken home for either personal consumption or distribution to neighbours.
As I remember it the cost of the trip during the 1950s and into the ‘60s was ten shillings. In addition anyone entering the competition paid another five shillings. Of this one shilling was retained for club funds and end of season prizes and the balance was distributed to first and second on the trip plus another for the heaviest fish. Assuming a bus load of thirty fishers the individual prizes were well worth winning. Five pounds for second place at a time when the average weekly wage hardy reached that amount was a dream for many but, as you will see later, only a reality for a few. Permit money was collected by the treasurer and handed as a lump sum to the first lucky bailiff to appear.
Further down the road on the way home there was always a stop, set at half an hour but usually much, much longer. Many of the fishers headed to a local pub but the driver, the laddies and the non-drinkers set off for the chip shop and then had a wander round the town while waiting for the others to turn up. There were no other stops and anyone desperate to answer a call of nature had to stand at the door of the bus and let it all hang out and spray the hedgerows.
Now, to the hundreds of fish that were killed. As with most clubs there were half a dozen very good fishers. One year when my Dad won the Rose Bowl for the third year in succession I looked at the list of winners engraved on it – during the twenty years from 1946 to 1966 only four names appeared. The Grahams and the Wilsons were the Rangers and Celtic of Whitrigg fishing club. It was not unusual for half the bus to blank and the catch of the top four fishers probably outweighed the total of all the others who did catch. So much for hundreds of trout being killed each week – it just didn’t happen no more than it does today.
The Whitrigg club and most of the other local were out of existence by 1970 mainly due to mine closures but there was another serious reason for the decline that has echoes today – neds. Although the club members were working class men they were also gentlemanly fishers and cheating was almost unknown. During the 1960s the neds, there is no other word for them, began to join the clubs attracted by the prize money. Bear in mind that in addition to the prize money for each outing there was an end of season dance where the overall club champion received the Rose Bowl and twenty five pounds with lesser sums to the second, third and heaviest fish of the season. Half a dozen neds would appear on each trip but only one would weigh in. A couple of times fish were checked and were found to contain a handful of lead shot. That’s what really killed the clubs – plus ça change.
Maybe a couple of stories to round off. As I mentioned grayling were not weighed but counted as long as the exceeded two pounds. On one trip to the Tweed, Jimmy Wilson, long gone but a great fisher found a shoal of big grayling just down from the bridge at Mertoun. He didn’t leave the water all day standing up to his delicate parts in freezing water pulling out fish after fish until he ran out of worms. That day he “weighed in” over eighty pounds simply on a count of grayling caught. During a trip to the Clyde I caught a trout of over four pounds at the mouth of the Duneaton. At the weigh in on the road back the heaviest fish was under two pounds and my Dad mentioned that I had a bigger one although it wouldn’t count since I was not in the competition. One of the neds, who were appearing by then, remarked that my Dad should have weighed it in and claimed the prize. I still remember his answer, ‘there are still some honest men in this club’.
That was club fishing. Don’t believe all the stories you hear.
Bob Graham is an occasionally lucky gentleman who claims he does not do very much these days other than try to catch trout five or six days a week. Bob is a regular at Hillend Reservoir and lives in Whitburn West Lothian.