The Dry-Dropper: Ancient and Modern

This essay explores the history of a local fly-fishing technique, the Dry-Dropper. It was described in a book by George Soltau (1801-1884) published in 1847. Widespread adoption of the Dry-Dropper was interrupted by the stentorian voice of the 'father of dry-fly fishing' on chalkstreams - Halford (1844 – 1914), and the silence of the 'father of nymph fishing' - Skues (1858–1949). It was rediscovered in the 1960s by the New Zealander Greg Kelly.

Fishing with a Dry-Dropper on the Upper East Dart

Eventually it returned to Devon, as illustrated by this YouTube video of Simon Kidd and Dave Groves fishing with a Dry-Dropper rig on Dartmoor in 2020.

In the 21st century  "A dry-dropper rig is simple: a dry fly with a nymph tied to it" (Burgert 2020).

In the 20th century it was given various catchy modern names that belie its origins: 'Klink and Dink', Duo Method, Dry Dropper, New Zealand Dropper, as well as Fitton's neologism Wry fly (i.e. Wet and Dry Fly).

Despite appearances, the Dry-Dropper is not a modern development. It was described in 1847 by George William Soltau who fished on Dartmoor and rivers in South Devon (UK). This essay describes its early development, and how it later fell out of favour because:  "The attitudes of dry fly purists such as Halford, his peers and successors played a major part in the strangulation of the development of nymph fishing" (Lawton 2005 p23).

In addition, Soltau moved his Dry-Dropper to mimic the behaviour of natural insects. This way of fishing the Dry-Dropper rig was accidentally discovered by Tom Rosenbauer (2008), and described as 'Loch-Style High-Sticking for Trout' by Ed Engle in 2010.

Soltau's book may have had no effect on the development of fly-fishing outside Devon (UK), but it certainly was of interest to serious collectors of English halieutic literature. A copy of Soltau's (1847) book was included in Charles Thacher’s gift in 2021 to the American Museum of Fly Fishing. According to the museum,   "Mr.Thacher is discerning, he knows what merited addition to his collection and what did not."

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The North Country Angler

The roots of the Dry-Dropper go back to the north of England. Terry Lawton, the author of two books on the history of nymph fishing, credits the unknown author of  The North Country Angler  with describing "fishing with a dry fly and a sunk fly"  in 1786.

The next quotations describe how the unknown author fished two flies in a way to represent the behaviour of surface, and sub-surface insects:   "I do not like to fish with a single fly, though, some nice anglers pretend, it is the best way: and, if my observations are good, you will be of my opinion...And this is my reason for making the end fly a dubbed one, and the upper, or drop-fly, a hackle" (1817 4th edition p54; also in Unknown 1789 2nd edition p54)

"When I fish with these flies , I let one of them, the hackle or drop - fly, only touch the top of the water; the uppermost only sometimes; for I have observed, that the fish strike the boldest at those flies , that do not touch the water; because they appear to be upon the wing, and are making their escape from them . But the end fly I let sink two or three inches sometimes, having observed, that it is often better taken a little underwater , than on the very surface, the reason of which, I suppose, is , that these flies are bred in the water , under the stones and among the gravel ; and as soon as their wings are grown, they come to the top of the water , before they can fly, and are an easy prey to the lazy trouts, who feed on them under the surface"  (quote from 1817 4th edition p55, also in Unknown 1789 2nd edition p55)

The British Museum Reading Room

Lawton explained the significance and implication of this 1786 book: "Here we have an eighteenth century angler aware of nymphs and that trout feed on them yet Skues, the acknowledged founder of nymph fishing, was seemingly unaware of nymphs and their significance until the 1890s. Did he not read old fishing books ... ". (Lawton 2020 p15; Lawton 2005 p 17).

Lawton was incredulous because Skues had a reputation for spending time in the Reading Room of the British Museum consulting the fly-fishing literature.

I agree with Lawton's assessment that: "The way that the North Country Angler fished with a dry fly and a wet is not so different from some current practices where a dry fly on a dropper is used as both an indicator and a fly in its own right, or a nymph is tied to the bend of the hook of a dry fly, a technique much practised in New Zealand and now in other countries"  [emphasis in original] (Lawton 2005 p18).

We don't know what books Skues read at the British Museum. However, we do have the evidence - from Appendix 10 in Hayter's biography of Skues - of the books owned by Skues.

At some stage Skues acquired a copy of the 1817 4th edition of The North Country Angler  . In addition, he also owned books by several Devonian authors: Soltau 1847; Pulman 1851 and Cutcliffe 1863 (Hayter 2013), which described in more detail the two-fly Dry-Dropper technique introduced in 1786 by the North Country Angler.

This raises an obvious question. What happened to this technique over the years? I think it may have continued quietly in the background in Devon until Halford's first book in 1886; then gradually:  "The attitudes of dry fly purists such as Halford, his peers and successors played a major part in the strangulation of the development of nymph fishing"  Lawton (2005 p23)

To this day, the Dry-Dropper   "is not a method you would even think of using on an English chalkstream, where if you were found fishing with more than one fly you would probably finish hanging from the nearest tree."  (Goddard 2003 p127-9).

It may be significant that Skues early reading in the British Museum was influenced by Halford's first book published in 1886. At that time Skues had only spent four years fishing on the Itchen, and was focussed on dry flies, rather than nymphs or fishing techniques: Skues explained that:  "the success of Francis Francis in taking a leash of 2-pounders on my first day, inspired in me an enthusiasm for the floating fly which was clinched when, in 1887, I was presented with Halford’s Floating Flies and how to Dress Them. In the latter part of that year I took up trout-fly dressing with enthusiasm and I read in the British Museum and elsewhere every book I could find on the subject and analysed and recorded the dressings.  (Skues 1939 p51).

"Remember Skues began his serious fly fishing career under the shadow of Halford and was in fact a follower of the Halford doctrine." (Travis 2016).

Cultural transmission of local knowledge
Fishing a team of spiders without droppers

It is only recently that the use of two flies fished simultaneously to represent different stages in an insect's lifecycle has been widely adopted.  "I just don't know why this method is not practised more widely. It combines the advantages of both dry-fly and wet-fly fishing, and avoids at any rate some of the drawbacks of both ... A countryman who never reads a book first showed it to me"  (Wiggin 1987 p103).

Wiggin's anecdote is a good example of how techniques can be passed on by word of mouth, or simply by observing other anglers. 'Cultural transmission' crops up at several points in the Dry-Dropper story.

I think the answer to Wiggin's query lies with two chalk-stream anglers - Halford and Skues - who published a series of very influential fly-fishing books at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Halford is sometimes called the 'father of dry-fly fishing', and Skues the 'father of nymph fishing'. There was a bitter feud between the patriarchs and their followers which rumbles on in some quarters to this day. One strange aspect of this battle is that Skues continued to fish with either a single dry fly or a single nymph, but despite owning 18th and 19th century books that described fishing with a dry and a wet fly simultaneously, he never proposed using the Dry-Dropper technique to arrange a 'marriage of convenience' between the warring parties.

Waiting for the rise

The Dry-Dropper rig might have healed the chalk-stream schism because it overcomes one specific problem experienced by each group. Under Halford's code of practice the opportunity to fish was restricted; anglers had to sit by the river and wait before casting their dry fly until a trout was seen to rise to take a hatched dun from the surface. The dry-fly angler was obliged to forgo an opportunity to catch a trout feeding on nymphs. On the other hand, for followers of Skues, a dry fly could have acted as an 'indicator' to overcome the problem of detecting the take when a trout ingests the nymph.

A problem arises from calling Halford and Skues 'fathers' of particular fly-fishing methods. It is made worse by claiming that they brought about revolutionary change. There is a risk that history will concentrate on the revolution, and the fallout from the revolution - history is written by the victors - whilst pre-revolutionary practices are overlooked, or fade into insignificance.

The separation of dry from wet fly, and a reluctance to acknowledge the utility of the Dry-Dropper is illustrated by the positive reception accorded to George Pulman's contribution to the development of dry-fly fishing, whilst ignoring his promotion of the Dry-Dropper technique.

Pulman: Dry-Fly Hero or Early Adopter of the Dry-Dropper?

George Philip Rigney Pulman (1819–1880) was an East Devon newspaper publisher and editor. He had a branch of his newsagent's and tackle shop in Totnes, a town in South Devon on the banks of the River Dart. He won a bronze medal for artificial flies at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Pulman gets a good press from fly-fishing historians; some even propose that he was the first to suggest fishing trout flies as dry flies: "Many books on the history of fly fishing for trout credit George Pulman for being the first writer to suggest fishing trout flies as dry flies." ( Sylvester Nemes 2004 p27).

For example, Skues wrote : "The dry fly was not hinted at in angling literature until 1841 — (G. P. R. Pulman, Angler’s Vade-Mecum 1841 and 1846) — and was first definitely described in the same author’s Third Edition, 1851"  (Skues 1939 p4).

Skues' comment is important because he reflects the consensus at that time - the term 'dry fly' was new; before 1841 the phrase 'dry fly' was not used in the fly-fishing literature. The British historian Dr Andrew Herd (2003 p272-273) has written a fascinating history of the artificial fly. Herd draws a distinction between a  floating fly  and the  dry-fly method  with the laudable purpose of helping his readers  "make some kind of sense out of the chaos"  of the story of how, what we now call, a dry fly evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1913, Halford (1913 p61) gave his strict definition of dry-fly fishing:  "There is no such thing known as a half-way house between dry and wet-fly fishing; either the fly is floating, in which case it is dry-fly fishing, or it is more or less submerged, and is wet-fly fishing."

The problem is not just the vagueness of his definition -'more or less submerged' - but what Halford called 'dry-fly fishing' may have existed in practice for many years before the late 19th century. It can be argued that Halford defined a new dry-fly method, but he used 'floating fly' and 'dry fly' as synonyms (Kenyon 2022b).

The American fly-fishing historians Gordon M. Wickstrom (2013) and Glenn Law (2015) choose an earlier date, but express the same opinion. G.P.R. Pulman was the first to define the complete method of fishing a dry, floating fly in The Vade Mecum of Fly-Fishing for Trout, published in 1841.

Pulman: Dry-Fly Hero?

Others regard the 1841 first edition of Vade Mecum of Fly-Fishing for Trout,  as marking an important transition in dry-fly fishing - "the final metamorphosis of the floating fly into the dry fly .. during the second quarter of the nineteenth century". (Herd 2003)

Voss Bark and Restall (1999 p183) gave a more qualified opinion: Pulman has "the reputation, given to him by J. Waller Hills, of being 'the father of the dry fly'. " Hills was certainly impressed by Pulman:  "Pulman, withdrawn from view in the West Country and musing on problems of fishing where the clear Axe winds through level meadows, suddenly, and all unnoticed till long after, produced the theory and practice of the dry fly full grown from the brain of its parent." (Hills 1921b p97).

Here is Pulman's early description of dry-fly fishing in 1841:   "Now, it is impossible to make a soaked artificial fly swim upon the water as the natural flies do, so that, when cast by the angler to a fish thus occupied, it most commonly escapes his notice, engaged as he is with 'things above', by sinking in the water beneath him. This is plain, because if the wet and heavy fly be exchanged for a dry and light one, and passing in artist-like style over the feeding fish, it will, partly from the simple circumstances of its buoyancy, be taken, in nine cases out of ten, as greedily as the living insect itself. " (quoted in Herd 2003 p275).

Pulman recognised that floating flies had a tendency to become wet and sink below the surface. Pulman's advice to use a dry fly - "a fly that he had just taken out of his box to replace a fly that had become soaked" (Voss Bark 1992 p 83)" - was to overcome the problem of a soggy floating fly passing beneath a fish looking for food on the surface. 'Dry fly' probably replaced 'floating fly' because the phrase rolls off the tongue.

The British fly-fishing historian John Waller Hills (1921 p122-123) felt that Pulman's 1841 book was not the finished article. In Hills' opinion, Pulman supplied the final definition in a famous passage in the third edition published in 1851: " Now, the angler's fly is wet and heavy, and .. has a certain weight of line in addition. Let a dry fly be substituted for the wet one, the line be switched a few times through the air to throw off its superabundant moisture, a cast made just above the rising fish, and the fly allowed to float towards and over them, and the chances are ten to one that it will be seized as readily as the living insect. This dry fly, we must remark, should be an imitation of the natural fly on which the fish are feeding,"  [emphases added] (Pulman 1851 p132)

One interpretation of this passage is that a wet heavy line will cause a floating fly to become waterlogged and sink. Pulman was helping his readers cope with this problem by describing steps taken to dry their line after attaching a fresh (dry) fly taken from their fly box.

But Hills came to a very different conclusion: "This is the earliest mention I know of the intentional drying of the fly. The remarkable thing about this description is its completeness. The dry fly springs to view full grown: there are no tentative fumblings ..." (Hills 1921 p123). Much has been made of the impact of Pulman's statement: "Anglers at that time had listened to this and Halford was entranced" John Bailey (1990 p49)

Tony Hayter has reservations about the significance of Pulman's suggestion. He quotes H.R. Francis writing about the 1840s :"Every fly-fisher must have occasionally seen a fly, which he had just bent [tied] on, being taken by a fish before it had ceased to float".  Pulman was just passing on this useful hint to novices. Hayter is also critical of the significance given to Pulman by fly-fishing historians: "The well known passage from Pulman (1851) is often quoted as if it was a milestone in practice" (Hayter 2002 p54). A clear example of this are the introductory comments in Gingrich's chapter Halford and Purism (Gingrich 1974 Chapter 10 p198-).

In Conrad Voss Bark's opinion Pulman did not invent 'dry-fly fishing'; that was to come later with the publication of several books by Halford.  "Whether Pulman was the first to think of fishing the dry fly is unlikely. He makes no such claim... if the method had been new he would almost certainly have said so. He did not." ( Voss Bark, Ann 1983, p 113-)

In the 1860s, the introduction of plaited silk fly lines dressed with linseed oil enabled dry-fly anglers to make long accurate upstream casts with short stiff-actioned single-handed rods. The fly lines used by earlier anglers were made of a woven mixture of horsehair and silk (Turner 1989 p26).

In the 20th century, Conrad Voss Bark made a replica horsehair line, and reported several important observations about its performance that gave him surprising insight into the capabilities of the tackle used by earlier anglers. He concluded:  "No question about it. Our ancestors were attempting within the limits of their technology, to fish with artificial flies on the surface of the water where the natural flies were hatching. They were attempting to fish a floating fly, what we would now call a dry fly, and when it sank, as it frequently did they would fish it as an emerger pattern, or they could lift it off the water, whisk it dry and cast again. No wonder they did not discriminate between wet fly and dry. They could fish either one or the other in the same or consecutive casts." [emphasis added] (Voss Bark 1992 p8-10).

Roger Fogg administers the coup de grâce. He suggested that we should "Forget the false assertion that George Pulman introduced the dry fly in 1841 and reconsider the whole question. Indeed, we may as well throw the cat among the pigeons and begin with the seemingly outrageous proposition that fly-fishing began as near as dammit with the dry fly."  Fogg (1979 p39). The same point was made by Richard Walker : "It seems to me that it is almost certain that the dry fly was invented long before anything about fly fishing was ever written; that the very first artificial was fished dry." (Walker 1982 p144) Fogg extended his historical 'heresy': "Yes, I am actually suggesting that not only does dry-fly fishing have a much longer history than normally is accepted to be the case, but nymph fishing as well." Fogg (1979 p41) [emphasis added].

Pulman: Early Adopter of the Dry-Dropper

Traditionally Pulman is quoted for his contribution to the develoment of dry-fly fishing. But his way of fishing a dry fly and wet fly together would have been anathema to Halford.

Pulman's books remain important for a reason that has been overlooked; they contain a description of a method of fly-fishing with two flies simultaneously that probably existed in several locations, including Devon, in the early, and mid-19th century.

This - recently rediscovered - Dry-Dropper method was largely abandoned in the wake of Halford's dry-fly revolution.

Pulman & Edward Fitzgibbon

In the 3rd edition of his book Pulman (1851 p158-160) quotes at length from pages 25-6 of Edward Fitzgibbon's 1847 book Hand Book of Angling which he describes as 'admirable' but Pulman added an important footnote.

Fitzgibbon explained that the angler must cause the flies  "to drop lightly on the water, because the natural fly does so ; he must cause them to swim down as near the surface as he can, because the natural fly moves upon the surface of the water ; and he must impart motion to his flies, — a species of fluttering, generally speaking, being the best. All this is comprehended by the expression 'humouring' one's flies. To do it, the moment your flies alight upon the water, hold up your rod, so that the drop fly next to it may appear skimming the surface ; the other two * [sic] , if properly proportioned and attached to the casting line [or collar], being ever so little under water. If you allow your upper dropper to be under water, all the flies below that dropper will be sunk too deeply to appear living insects to the fish, and therefore any motion you may give them will be useless. They then can only be taken by the fish for dead flies. When you keep your last dropper on the surface of the water, impart to it a slight skipping motion, by a tremulous shake of the rod, and the flies that are just under water will receive the most natural motion you can give them. Never drag your flies straight across the water towards you, and never work them against the current. A small fish may, perchance, rise at them when so worked, but seldom or never a large one." ( Pulman 1851 p159-160).

Fitzgibbon (1847 p71) stated: "I would always have three flies on my casting-line at the same time."   Crucially, Pulman added the following footnote that refers to the * [asterisk] placed within his quotation from Fitzgibbon:  " * Our author is speaking of a collar fitted up with three or more flies ; but there will be no difficulty in applying his remarks to one fitted up only with two, as we advise" [emphasis added] ( Pulman 1851 p159).

Pulman is unambiguously advising his readers to use two flies, a 'drop' fly on the surface, with an underwater 'stretcher' fly. This advice is repeated: "If but a single dropper be fished with (and we advise no more) it should be placed about half a yard down the collar"  This is the Devonshire two-fly arrangement described before, and during the Halfordian revolution, by Soltau (1847), Pulman (1851), Cutcliffe (1863), and Rabley (1910).

Pulman's alteration to Fitzgibbon's advice is important because of Fitzgibbon's influence. For example, Skues' personal copy of Edward Fitzgibbon's [Ephemera]  A Handbook of Angling  was donated by Charles Thacher in 2021 to the American Museum of Fly Fishing.

Fitzgibbon has been described as  " as one of - if not the most - influential angling writers ever."  (Herd 2020). "For a long series of years he wrote on angling for 'Bell's Life in London,' his knowledge of the subject and the attractive style in which his articles were written giving them great celebrity. From 1830 to the time of his death [in 1857] his writings had given a marvellous impulse to the art of fishing, had caused a great improvement in the manufacture and sale of fishing tackle, and largely increased the rents received by the owners of rivers and proprietors of fishing rights." (Wikipedia entry for Edward Fitzgibbon).

In the mid 19th century, the use - by Devonian authors - of only two flies on the cast was not the usual national practice. The Scotsman, Stewart (1857) reported: "The number of flies that should be used at a time is a matter upon which great diversity of opinion exists ; some anglers never use more than three, while others occasionally use a dozen."  (p94). Stewart's  fly-cast  consisting of three or four flies (p117-8).

Skues appreciated that some Devonshire flies were designed to float: "In 1863 came Dr Cutclifie’s extremely clever little volume on Devonshire trouting, 'Trout Fishing in Rapid Streams'. His patterns are all hackled patterns, rather bulky, and are dressed with sharp bright hackles which would make the flies dance in the waters of the tumbling streams he frequented. "  (Skues 1939 p119). But suitable hackle would have been scarce with the banning of cock fighting in 1835: "the hackling [preferably from the Game Cock breed] is generous and sometimes even bushy.. the almost exclusive use of carefully dubbed bodies .. Wings, in general, are not favoured"  (Lawrie 1967 p31-41). Stewart criticised 'bushy' flies because they had a tendency to float - a feature Stewart sought to avoid (p91), but was a desired effect for Devonshire anglers.

Stewart was at pains to avoid any fly creating a disturbance on the water surface: "No angler with any pretensions to skill ever allows his flies, or even his line, for yards above them, to create a disturbance in the water, nothing being more calculated to alarm a trout than seeing flies or line rippling the surface, which the flies must do if drawn along the water sufficiently fast to keep the main line out of it" (p93). This is in sharp contrast to Soltau, Pulman, Cutcliffe, and Rabley who explicitly moved their 'bob' fly to create surface disturbance.

As well as fishing simultaneously with two flies, Pulman held very critcal opinions about 'exact imitation' that was later to become a cornerstone of Halford's dry-fly method: "At the outset, then, we unhesitatingly say that much of the exact imitation system appears to us very much like quackery. We have been for twenty years mixed up with anglers of different grades of intelligence and skill, and have invariably found that what is commonly called imitation — namely, an old-womanish fastidiousness about the minutest colours, the most daguerreotype [ an early photographic ] copy of some fancied facsimile of nature, selected as a " pattern fly," — is by no means a proof of the existence of an amount of practical skill and consequent success."

With a few exceptions to deal with peculiar circumstances, "As a general rule, and for ordinary circumstances, we believe that a very few sorts of flies (say the red palmer and the duns) are sufficient for every useful purpose." ( Pulman 1851 p125-6).

Pulman favoured impressionism in fly design, rather than exact imitation: "And so, as regards flies, we conceive the main points of imitation to be size, colour, form, character, and more important than all, action, — which last depends, of course, upon the angler and not upon the fly-maker. "

As a tackle dealer in Devon he was aware of the ultra-imitationists error in paying too much attention to the fly, and assuming that " Because A. caught fish yesterday with a particular fly," argue they, " therefore B. must do so to-day." instead of being aware of what Pulman termed action; today we would use the term 'presentation'.

The Three Fates in Strudwick's 1885 painting "A Golden Thread"

Did Pulman, as some historians claim, define the method and theory of fishing a dry fly that was adopted on chalk streams? I don't think so; Pulman was using two flies - one floating, the other sunk. Halford would have classified this as wet-fly fishing. Halford's over-arching purpose was to draw a sharp distinction between fly-fishing methods: 'dry-fly fishing' and 'wet-fly fishing'. Halford did this by cutting the Golden Thread that joined a floating (dry) fly with a wet (sunk) fly, and fishing with a single dry fly.

Pulman was based in East Devon. There is evidence that the two-fly Dry-Dropper method was also used in South Devon in the mid-19th century.

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G.W. Soltau (1801-1884)

George William Soltau was a pillar of Victorian society: Deputy Lieutenant of Devon, and a Justice of the Peace. He was Lord Mayor of Plymouth twice in 1838 and 1841 (Jewitt 1873).

In 1847 he published his first, and only book on fly-fishing “Trout Flies of Devon and Cornwall and How and When to Use Them”. His aim was to present a clear account of an existing technique. This is clear from the first paragraph of his book:  I am induced to offer the following pages to the youthful aspirant after piscatory fame, from the belief, that the various treatises, which have appeared from time to time on Fly-Fishing, do not contain those minute details, which are so essential to the ready acquirement of the art, and which are generally learnt by slow degrees; either from some experienced angler, or by the accidental discovery of the noviciate.

Basic Duo rig, from Gaskell (2021)

Soltau had 20 years of experience fishing freestone rivers around Plymouth (Devon, UK). The technique involved casting upstream with two flies, a dry fly above a wet fly, in an arrangement now reinvented, and referred to by various names: Dry-Dropper, 'Klink and Dink', Duo Method, or New Zealand Dropper.

A problem of definition: What is a dry fly? There is a difference of opinion about what constitues a dry fly. Some regard a floating fly as a dry fly; others define a dry fly in terms of how much of the artificial fly is above the water, and the direction it is cast. I discuss this  ad nauseam  in an earlier essay  Early Roots of Fly Fishing in South Devon  (Kenyon 2022b). It's worth pointing out that the way Soltau fished his "bob" fly made it a drier dry fly than anything cast by Halford, or any of his ultra-purist followers !

In addition, Soltau described moving flies to mimic the behaviour of the natural insects. The importance of dry-fly movement was rediscovered by the American fly-fishing author Leonard M. Wright in the 1970s, and more recently popularised by John Gierach (2005) and Tom Rosenbauer (2008).

Soltau's Fly-Fishing Technique

The more detailed section of Saltau's book is contained within the second part of the title: "How .. to Use Them"

Soltau used a 12 foot rod with a casting line (i.e.leader) seven or even eight feet long, Here is his description, and rationale for using, what has become a popular modern technique, the Dry-Dropper: "Never use more than two flies, one at the end of the collar, called the 'stream-fly', the other about three feet from it, called 'the bob'.... The stream fly should fall lightly on the desired spot, and the line, being just of sufficient length to allow of the exact point being reached, the bob fly will rest on the surface of the water, and by imparting to the rod a slight tremulous motion, from right to left, the stream fly will appear to be struggling in the stream, whilst the bob will occasionally bob up and down, (from which circumstance its name is derived) exhibiting the movement of the natural fly, when it alights, rises, and again alights."  (Soltau 1847 p38 & 48).

Diagram from Soltau (1847)
Trout Flies of Devon and Cornwall and How and When to Use Them

Soltau provides this diagram, and a detailed description of how to fish the 'bob fly' and 'stream fly' across-and-upstream for brown trout:  "Commence by throwing the fly across the tail of the stickle, thus:—A. is the fisherman, B. the banks of the river, C. the tail of the stickle, D. its commencement. A. first throws his fly across to E. then draws it with a kind of tremulous motion to F. then to G. and back to H. A. then moves on, and takes up his position at J. casts over to K. and across to L. tries again at M. and hooks a fish. If it is small, as too many of our West Country fish happen to be, it may be raised instanter, gently out of the water, and deposited in the basket. A. then advances a few paces, and finishes the pool between M. and D."  (Soltau 1847 p51)

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How did Soltau cast his Dry-Dropper rig?

I need to give a description of the tackle used - on South Devon rivers - by Soltau in 1847 in order to understand how he might have cast a Dry-Dropper rig. He was fishing before the introduction of bead head flies - weighted flies designed to target fish feeding near the bottom - and before the development of false casting to drive water out of a sodden dry fly.

Soltau advised readers to "procure a twelve-foot rod". For comparison purposes, only a few rods from the mid-19th century survive. This fishing rod, in the Royal Academy of Arts collection, belonging to J.M.W. Turner RA (1775 - 1851). Andy Crisp  comments that Turner's six-sectioned rod "bears a considerable resemblance" to one made of greenheart, lancewood & split cane retailed by Ebenezer Creed in the mid 19th century (1839 - 1865). Turner may have fished the  River Erme  during his visits to paint the Ivy Bridge in 1811 and 1813. "Fishing often featured as a subject in Turner’s paintings and he often combined painting outdoors with fishing." (Royal Academy Collections Team 2015)

Andy Crisp commented that greenheart fly rods in the 1880s tended to be soft-actioned, and: "... were consistently long and heavy, the majority of anglers still fishing teams of wet flies downstream. False casting was little known and the flies were delivered by the simple action of "whipping" the line. "

Not all 19th century rods used in Devon were long and clumbersome. In this video John Stephenson describes a 9 foot three piece rod made by C. R. Brookes of Stone House, Plymouth. The butt and middle sections are made from greenheart with a tip of spliced lancewood. An inscribed plaque on the butt section reveals that it was presented in 1886 to Major W.J. Mackintosh by the Staff Sergeants and Sergeants of the 2nd Volunteer (Devonshire) Brigade, Western Division, Royal Artillery, on his retirement from the Adjutancy of the Brigade, which defended the Plymouth Dockyard and nearby Devon coast.

I haven't been able to find a clear description of "whipping" the line, but it may have resembled a 'switch cast'. Here's an interesting if inconclusive discussion between fly-fishing historians about the origin of the switch cast in which Paul Schullery makes an important point:  "Picture an expert fly fisher, say in the sixteenth century. He has a fourteen-foot rod, and a tapered horse-hair line that is anywhere from the same length to maybe twice as long. He’s been fishing with this rig for thirty years, and because he’s a reasonably thoughtful and intuitive outdoorsman he can make it do things that amaze the beginners."

Therefore, I imagine that Soltau - and other local anglers - would have discovered for themselves techniques to overcome the limitations of their equipment.

Cholmondeley Pennell (1870) describes a Switch cast - which sounds similar to a modern Roll Cast to cope with overhanging vegetation that would interfere with an overhead cast: "By raising the rod to the full stretch of the arms the flies are drawn in until they are nearly below the angler's feet. Then with a very sudden, strong, circling movement of the rod they should be cast straight out again, up, down, or across, and the first process repeated. "Switching" requires practice, but it is well worth the trouble of learning."

Writing a century later, Edwards and Turner are clear that 'switch cast' and 'roll cast' refer to the same thing:  "confusion is caused by insistence that there is a difference between the roll cast and the "switch" cast. We have never been able to see this distinction as a difference" (Edwards and Turner 1960 p 101).

Soltau's description of how he cast suggests that he may have used a roll / switch cast, rather than an overhead cast:  "The spring of the rod should do the chief work, and not the labour of your arms. To effect this, you should lay the stress as near the hand as possible, and make the wood undulate from that point, which is done by keeping the elbow in advance, and doing something with the wrist which is not very easy to explain. Thus, the exertion should be chiefly from the elbow and wrist, and not from the shoulders."  [emphasis added]

Rod length affects line length on surface (from Wright 1972)

Soltau's 'casting line' (i.e.leader) was made of tapered gut seven or even eight feet long; his stream (point) fly was attached to the end of this casting line. Soltau had a reel and line, but his term 'casting line' suggests that he had very little of the reel line outside the tip of his rod. Therefore, the distance he could have thrown his casting line would be a function of where he stopped the rod on the forward stroke. An article by August Gresens (2023) provides a useful table showing how reach beyond the rod tip increases as a function of rod length, and the angle of the stop on the forward cast.

Moving the dry fly (and consequently the sub-surface fly) is discussed below in the section  The 'twitched' dry fly comes of age

Although Soltau was using a dry fly, he was probably not false casting - in the modern sense of that term. He did not need to because he used a long rod to keep his dry fly on the surface. False casting requires an overhead or side cast. Andrew Herd (203 pp277-9) covers the history of false casting which he defines as  "a cast made where the fly touches the water on neither the forward nor the back cast". This came towards the end of the 19th century, and was important for the development of dry-fly fishing on chalk streams. It encouraged the manufacture of light single-handed rods with pliant tops to generate sufficient line speed to dry the fly, and cast longer distances. However, a roll / Switch Cast could be used to drive water out of a dry fly; for example, consider the teaching exercise involving flicking water from a wet paintbrush to improve roll casting. In addition, Soltau's flies   were designed to float.

I try to avoid false casting because it causes problems on tree-lined rivers - loosing flies on trees behind me, and encourages habitat destruction.

For example, the tackle merchants W.J. Cummins of Bishop Auckland came up with the device pictured here:  "Armed with this simple little 'fool-proof' appliance the overhanging tree has no terrors for the fisherman, and its cost is soon saved in the casts, points, and flies recovered"  (Cummins 1932 p198).

But there is a price to pay, elegantly summed up by Tom McGuane (2001 pxi):  "The perfect over-hanging branch so hard on presentation, so cherished by trout, pruned away by riverkeepers who do not seem to realize that the fish leave with the offending branch and that while the sport may then luxuriate in unencumbered presentation, it is for naught. If the fish is there, he is smaller than the fish that used to be there" (McGuane 2001 pxi). Roll casting reduces the need to damage trout habitat.

Modern Euro Nymphing rods are generally longer (between 10 and 11 feet) than the rods we use today for dry fly fishing on narrow rivers with overhanging vegetation, but they do approach the advantage of length (12 feet) enjoyed by Soltau. As I understand it, some styles of Euro Nymphing involve keeping the actual fly line off the water surface which corresponds to Soltau fixed length of leader. Euro-Nymphing shares a problem encountered by anglers who adopted Skues' method of fishing a sub-surface nymph -  bite detection

Another difference is the weight of flies which is an addition to the bite detection problem. Soltau's flies were probably not weighted, they were similar to American 'flymphs' or soft hackle flies designed to fish just subsurface, whereas Euro Nymphing involves using a weighted fly, or fly designed to sink quickly. Tom McGuane describes the problems caused by casting weighted flies:  "Casting becomes a matter of spitting this mess out and being orderly about it...Gone are the joys of casting, the steady meter and adjustment of loop that compare well to walking or rowing. The joys of casting are gone because this ignoble outfit has ruined the action of your fly rod." (McGuane 2001 p100). McGuane's point is illustrated in this  Footnote.  And if a bead head clips your graphite rod, more than its action will be ruined. Swentosky (2022) points out that the tendency to use the shoulder to 'lob' weighted flies when tight-line and Euro-Nymphing can be very tiring.

The lighter flies in Soltau's version of the Dry-Dropper rig are easier to roll cast than heavier bead head flies which can require a Water Haul cast (e.g. Kutzer nd).

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Soltau's flies in Hearder's Fishing Tackle Catalogue

Soltau's flies from:   Trout Flies of Devon and Cornwall

Soltau made an arrangement with the Plymouth-based scientist and fishing tackle dealer Dr. J. N. Hearder to sell precise copies of his flies to accompany publication of his book in 1847. Soltau urged readers  to procure patterns from the makers and imitate them, rather than take those in the lithographed sketch   [in his book]  for their guide.  Hearder advertised  "Soltau's flies from his original patterns".   In Hearder & Son's 1875 catalogue (p70-1) they were recommended as  "suitable for any of the rivers in the vicinity of Plymouth"  .

Hearder recommended Soltau's Dry-Dropper rig: Two Flies only should be used, and the most useful are a Blue Stream and a Red Bob. Many sportsmen never use any others (Hearder & Son 1875 p58-9).I can find no record of the dressing of either fly, but it is reasonable to assume - on the basis on their names - that the Red Bob was fished on the surface as a dry fly, and the Blue Stream was fished as a wet fly below the surface.

Hearder offered this overview of the fishing for wild brown trout in nearby South Devon rivers: the Yealm, Plym, Tavy, Erme, Avon, Dart and Teign. "The Trout in these streams are small, but very abundant and sweet-flavoured: a half-pound fish is considered a fine one, though fish of a much larger size - even as much as three or four pounds — are occasionally taken [probably sea trout]. A good sportsman will catch from four to eight dozen per day.

Turner describes Hearder of Plymouth as "one of the oldest firms in the west of England to sell fishing tackle". They were in business from c.1820 to the early 1900s (Turner 1989 p115), located in the center of Plymouth on Buckwell Street. It's interesting that in 1908 Gallichan refers to Soltau's flies still being sold by Hearders, half a century after the publication of his book (Gallichan 1908 p74).

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'Hi-Regan' (John Joseph Dunne 1837-1910)

Like Soltau (1847) and Fitzgibbon (1847), 'Hi-Regan' described adding movement to a dry fly. In his case to tempt a fish that had shown interest in a fly, but failed to take it the first time it was offered. He wrote a popular Irish fishing guidebook -  How and Where to Fish in Ireland - that went through 17 editions between 1886 and 1904

When he was 20 years old he felt that drying a fly was  "a useless fad". Even in later years, he was of the opinion that in  "spring the advantages of dry-fly fishing are not to me very clear. Trout then are not so wary as to justify even the loss of time which drying the fly takes.  ⁸   (Hi-Regan 1886 p24).

However, the footnote ⁸ reveals that he later regretted his youthful impetuousness:  The Gipsy "soldier servant," to whom I elsewhere refer, was the first to suggest to me the idea of dry-fly fishing (in 1857). I confess at the time I put it down as a useless fad though I had the sincerest and highest opinion of the man's accomplishments and ingenuity in "snafflmg" all fish, flesh, or fowl that were edible. Four years ago [1882 ?] an article in the Field recalled the gipsy's injunctions, and 1 have since had an opportunity of testing their great value." 

He may be referring here to an earlier 1857 article by Francis in the Field  which recommended letting a dry fly float over the fish without motion. Hills suggests that this shows that Francis used a dry fly long before 1857 (Hills 1921 p127).

Hi-Regan reveals that the problem was treating the fly with a suitable floatant:  "In the "Mutiny year" [1857] parafin oil was little known, but "Pegg" made many raids on the bottle of " Burmese " oil, which I used for my guns. This was the "thinnest" oil then known, and he used it to steep fly materials before tying. These he dried, and though he lost some material by discolouration, he preserved enough for his purposes.

This is a very interesting record of an early Irish solution to a serious problem in the development of dry-fly fishing:  The use of floatant, was also a great advance. It reduced the amount of false casting required to keep the fly dry and buoyant - always a wearisome activity with the heavy rods of that time (Hayter 2002 p55). Hayter suggests that the use of paraffin in England began later some time in the late 1880s - probably after 1887.

Hi-Regan continues:   Not thinking dry-fly fishing worth pursuing, I took no pains to acquire the niceties of it, and must store away with other regretable indiscretions of youth, my neglect in not learning the secret of making feathers "waterproof" (Pegg's word). In this connection may not the popularity of coot's, mallard's, teal's, and starling's feathers as wings be accounted for? They are all birds which have oil glands for lubricating their plumage. Rail's feathers also resist moisture, to enable the bird to comfortably traverse the wet meadows"  (Hi-Regan 1886 p24 footnote 8).

It is interesting that, as early as 1857, dry-fly fishing was discussed by an Irish poacher who also took active steps to waterproof the flies he tied. Hi Regan gives this description of his informant:   "This man was a gipsy, an excellent soldier, and as excellent servant for a sportsman, but the most pestilent poacher of all preserves to which his master had not access. I refer to him elsewhere concerning a device of his in dry fly-fishing."  (Hi-Regan 1886 p35-6 footnote 1).

This early reference to the use of the dry fly in Ireland is consistent with Conrad Voss Bark's suggestion that the direction of travel for the development of dry-fly fishing was from the provinces to the chalk streams, rather than Halford's claim that the spread of influence was in the opposite direction (Voss Bark & Restall 1999 p77-9).

Here is Hi-Regan's description of dry-fly fishing, with its emphasis on movement which repeats the importance of moving a dry fly described many years before by Soltau and Fitzgibbon: "When a trout has risen at a fly, but missed it, even though he has not been touched, it is bad practice to cover him again instanter. If he be a feeding fish, waiting a minute is unimportant. If he has only been attracted by the beauty or novelty of the fly, the less the natural suspicion, he showed, by only flourishing, is excited the better. Marking well his lodgment, and what, and how cast was the fly which he came at, the trout should be again covered in, first, a little more dancing manner, and, if unsuccessfully, then in drowned-fly fashion ; but an interval of at least a minute should be given to let the fish reconsider the bonne-bouche which he missed.

Hi-Regan fished with two flies on his cast, three if small trout were expected:  I mount that fly as tail-fly which I expect to be most attractive ; but as to droppers, I always keep in view that the effigy of a moth, small gnat, or other dancing fly, if used, should be third dropper (that nearest the hand), for this is the only position where an angler can simulate, through all the cast, the motion of the ballerina." [emphases added] (Hi-Regan 1886 p24-5).

Hi-Regan's phrase 'motion of the ballerina' describes exactly what an angler is striving to achieve, to mimic the behaviour of a natural insect. But it struck me as an unusual phrase for an Irish ex-soldier in the 19th century. His obituary in an Australian newspaper the  Advocate,  (1910) hints at his theatrical interests. It describes him as a:  " Soldier, author, artist, sportsman, story-teller, humorist, and various other things, he was akin, in some respects, to those versatile, devil may-care, high-spirited. pleasure-loving Irish military adventurers ... A young Irish officer of 22, Captain Dunne thoroughly enjoyed himself in this way for some years in Melbourne, " He was an enthusiastic theatre-goer and considerd that  "Melbourne had the finest aggregate of dramatic talent in the world. Even London, he declares, never had at the same time such a splendid group of actors"

High Stick Dry Fly Fishing

This 19th century Irish author is suggesting adding movement to tempt a fish that has shown interest in a fly, but failed to take it the first time it was offered. This 'provincial' tactic was described by Soltau as well as Fitzgibbon in 1847, and has been rediscovered by modern authors e.g. Wright (1975), Gierach (2005), Rosenbauer (2008), and Engle (2010). Maybe by moving their floating flies, Hi-Regan and Pegg would not have qualified as English dry-fly purists because   "The drag-free float is a cornerstone of the dry-fly technique and it is one of the features which distinguishes the dry-fly method from the older floating-fly technique" (Herd 2003 p281-2).

In the Preface (dated 1900) to the sixth edition ''Hi-Regan' recognised changes in the intervening years:  "the advance in dry-fly fishing and the more general use of split-cane rods might suggest that there is now a somewhat old-fashioned air about what I wrote many years ago"  [i.e. in 1886] (Hi-Regan 1904). He had read Halford : "The May-fly fisher should buy Mr. Halford's beautiful book. His spent gnats are simply perfect"  (footnote 7 p21 Hi-Regan 1886).

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H.C. Cutcliffe (1831-1873)

We don't know when Skues acquired Soltau's book, but Appendix 10 in Hayter's biography of Skues reveals that he owned several books by Devonian authors (i.e. Soltau 1847 and Pulman 1851), which described the two-fly Dry-Dropper technique.

Around 1888 Skues was given a book  The Art of Trout Fly Fishing on Rapid Streams published in 1863 by the North Devon angler H.C. Cutcliffe. (Skues 1939 p52).

Cutcliffe makes no reference to Soltau's earlier book, but both fished with two flies, one of which floated on the surface of the water. They did not use the later expressions 'floating fly', 'dry fly' and 'wet fly'. Soltau refers to 'bob fly' and 'stream fly'; but the meaning is clear:  "the bob fly will rest on the surface of the water"  above the 'stream fly' (Soltau 1847 p48). Likewise for Cutcliffe: "I prefer to use two flies only for upstream fishing, you are better able to throw and to work two flies in the water, and can better command them with the rod — and, moreover, you can more keenly observe when a fish moves, than you could with three flies ...you may raise your rod, so as to keep the bob-fly on the surface"  above the 'end fly', or 'stretcher' (Cutcliffe 1863 p112, 114).

In 1933, Eric Taverner commented that Cutcliffe [and Soltau]"wrote before the fishing world had lost its sense of proportion over Precise Imitation." [capitals in original]. Taverner quotes with obvious approval what he calls Cutcliffe's pregnant sentence about the lack of attention paid to a trout's underwater food sources:  "I find so much spoken about the natural fly and its imitation, but little about the insect before arrival at maturity. How seldom does one imitate the larva or pupa of the several insects!"(Taverner1933 p28)

In the Foreword to  The Way of a Trout with a Fly  (1921) Skues wrote a patronising criticism of Cutcliffe's flies; he called them 'lures': "Cutcliffe's "Trout Fly Fishing on Rapid Streams", one of the most intelligent works on fly fishing ever written, explores a corner of the subject, but his patterns are mainly lures, and when he comes to deal with patterns which are, or purport to be, imitations, representations or suggestions of the natural fly, he is manifestly out of his depth. It then became my plan to work on the theory of the art of trout-fly dressing"  (Skues 1921 & 2017, Foreword pX).

Skues was clearly not impressed with Cutcliffe's flies: "for the streams of Devon to which his fishing was confined, that was not a side of the subject to which he attached much importance"  (Skues 1921 p75). As fellow-Devonian Pulman said:  "much of the exact imitation system appears to us very much like quackery" ( Pulman 1851 p125-6).

Why did Skues mention Cutcliffe's book at all? Was he referring to Cutcliffe's method of fly-fishing? Skues judged Cutcliffe's book as one of the most intelligent works on fly fishing ever written. Maybe Skues was signalling to anglers - on freestone rivers - to consider Cutcliffe's fly-fishing method of two using flies - one wet, the other dry to act as an indicator when a trout had taken the nymph.

In the 1930s, Skues dare not have suggested its use on chalk streams. In 1936, the 78 year old Skues was informed by a member of the Abbots Barton syndicate that it was a violation of the lease agreement to even fish with a single nymph (Kenyon 2022b). Even in the 21st century, Goddard warned against its use on chalk streams:  "..it is not a method you would even think of using on an English chalkstream, where if you were found fishing with more than one fly you would probably finish hanging from the nearest tree."  (Goddard 2003 p127-9).

Skues would have appreciated that some chalk stream anglers - fishing much clearer waters - had problems detecting the trout's underwater take: "..you had to strike a trout before you felt him, often without seeing the rise ... by instinct or some sixth sense" (Hills 1941). This can be an even greater problem in freestone rivers if the take is invisible.

Skues, like Goddard (2003), may have realised that the Dry-Dropper addresses the problem of detecting when a trout has taken the nymph, and gives the angler the opportunity for taking trout both on and below the surface.

The Three Fates in Strudwick's 1885 painting "A Golden Thread"

I think that Skues realized that someday wet-fly science and dry-fly art would be combined again in the form of the two-fly Dry-Dropper arrangement described by the unknown author of  The North-Country Angler,  Pulman, Soltau and Cutcliffe. But this was impossible in his lifetime due to Halford cutting the 'Golden Thread' that joined dry with wet fly.

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Dry-Dropper: The Wilderness Years

Conrad Voss Bark (1913-2000) was a journalist, fly-fishing enthusiast and historian. From 1979 he was  The Times  fishing correspondent for twelve years after retiring from the BBC as their Parliamentary Correspondent.

Voss Bark suggested that the direction of travel for the development of dry-fly fishing was from the provinces to the chalk streams, rather than Halford's claim that the spread of influence was in the opposite direction. He considered that the dry fly as we know it was invented :  “around the 1840s to 1860s and became the shop-talk of tackle dealers and gillies in the provinces. It then spread to the fishing and country magazines, and from them to the chalk streams ...”.  (Voss Bark & Restall 1999 p77-9).

Tom Fort points to the importance of advances in equipment in the development of dry-fly fishing: "Advances in fishing tackle ... made the management of the dry fly much easier."  Skues played an  important role  in persuading English tackle makers to follow the American lead in producing light split cane rods.

The Three Fates in Strudwick's 1885 painting "A Golden Thread"

In addition, regional influences also played a role:  "Aided by the appearance of a new generation of professional fly tyers, the [dry-fly] technique spread rapidly from the West Country and Derbyshire where it originated to the chalkstreams of Hampshire. There it was turned into a cult"  (Fort 2021 pp182).

However, something important was lost in this transformation into a cult - the West Country practice of fishing with two flies simultaneously a dry fly and a wet fly. Halford's over-arching purpose was to draw a sharp distinction between the two fly-fishing methods: 'dry-fly fishing' and 'wet-fly fishing'. Halford did this by cutting the Golden Thread that joined a floating (dry) fly with a wet (sunk) fly, and only fishing with a single fly.

Fly fishing with two flies simultaneously, in what amounts to a Dry-Dropper arrangement, continued in the background in Devon whilst Halford and Skues argued about catching, often stocked, chalk-stream trout on dry or wet flies. In the meantime, it was described in a number of unpretentious books by Joyce, Rabley and Wilson.

Charles Alfred Rabley

Voss Bark wrote a short essay for  The Times about Rabley's 1910 book Devonshire Trout Fishing. He writes: ".. his advice on how to fish small Devon rivers is splendid. I like Mr Rabley and I wish I could have met him, for he could have resolved one of the most extraordinary puzzles about fly fishing which has been nagging at me since I read the book. He writes, he tells us, of wet fly fishing .. with a point fly and a dropper."

Voss Bark then questions if Rabley is actually employing  "standard wet fly fishing practice"  because Rabley's description suggests  "that he fished a floating fly, that is a dry fly".  In addition, Rabley moved his flies; Voss Bark concluded:  "I am no expert on the subject but I have read Pulman and Stewart and cannot find in either any reference to animating the sunk fly. Perhaps there is somewhere, I may be wrong, but it does seem to me that this obscure Devon schoolmaster was anticipating the induced take of the sunk fly by some thirty or forty years"  (Voss Bark 1986 p37-9). Rabley's book also explained to Voss Bark what Cutcliffe (1863) and Pulman (1851) "actually meant when they wrote, as they often did, about 'working' the fly"  (Voss Bark, Anne 1983 p117).

Voss Bark does not mention Soltau's 1847 book which includes a clear written description, and supporting diagram, showing that the fly-fishing technique used by Rabley had a long history in Devon, and was recommended by the Plymouth tackle dealer Dr. Hearder (1875) for the rivers fished by Rabley.

J.M.W. Turner RA: 1813 watercolour of the bridge across the Erme
in Ivybridge, near Plymouth, Devon.
He often combined painting outdoors with fishing.

Charles Alfred Rabley was born in 1863. He saw fly-fishing for the first time on the River Erme in 1877, when he spent three weeks on holiday in Ivybridge with his sister in her cottage at Harford Bridge which spans the river Erme a short distance from where I live. During the second week of his holiday, several fly-fishermen passed by:  "..failing to open up a conversation on fishing with some of them, I followed one fisherman, intently watching all his movements. While taking his lunch he showed me his rod, fly-book, and the cast attached to his line, giving also a general idea about fly fishing. After seeing him and three trout I left, and firmly resolved to be a disciple of the ‘gentle craft’" [emphasis added].

Devonshire Avon: Bickham Bridge

In 1880 Rabley moved with his parents to South Brent which is about six miles east of Ivybridge. At that time the fishing on the Devonshire Avon was free from the source on Dartmoor to Bickham Bridge. (Hearder 1875 p 68).

Bickham Bridge crosses the river at Diptford, a village six miles by road, downstream of South Brent.

Devonshire Avon: Brent Mill Bridge

The move "opened up the opportunity of trying the Avon, which was considered a much better trouting stream than the Erme, as bigger fish could be caught in its lower course below Brent Mill bridge "  in South Brent.   He got to know two local fly-fishers Captain Lovell and Mr. Bidmead that enabled him to gain "a practical insight into fly fishing, and laid a good foundation to build on in the future"

Rabley spent several days fishing with Mr. Bidmead on Dartmoor "who seemed easily able to land from four to six dozen trout in a long day’s fishing".  Captain Lovell preferred to fish the Avon below the moor, he "contented himself with quality instead of quantity in the reaches of the river nearer South Brent. He delighted in the long, summer evenings to carefully whip the deep pools in which he had spotted the big ones, and his basket generally held fish above the average"

In 1881 Rabley left South Brent to live in Exeter, but spent six weeks of his summer holidays fishing the Erme and Avon "and had reached the first stage of proficiency in the use of the fly rod."  In 1883 he moved to Ashwater School ( in north-west Devon ) as Head Teacher until he retired in 1923 (Ashwater Council School 2009). He fished the Carey and Tamar "regularly for 30 years, with an occasional day on the Thrustlebook (Wolf), Torridge and Inney"  (Rabley 1910 p6-8).

It is clear that from 1877 to 1883, Rabley learnt how to fish with a fly from local anglers who fished the rivers Avon and Erme, and on Dartmoor. It is reasonable to suggest that his teachers would have been aware of Soltau's flies, and the methods recommended in Hearder & Son's 1875 catalogue (p70-1) as "suitable for any of the rivers in the vicinity of Plymouth" - the Yealm, Plym, Tavy, Erme, Avon, Dart and Teign.

The lessons Rabley learnt stayed with him throughout his life. For example,  "I read books on angling 30 years ago [i.e. around 1880], and obtained initial help from them, but shall make no use of the knowledge thus gained, or copy their style. This book contains statements from my own observations"  On several occassions Rabley benefitted from acquiring fly-fishing techniques through 'cultural transmission' - talking to, and observing local anglers - as well a reading books.

Rabley does not say what books he read. In 1877 at the age of 14, Rabley  "commenced duties in St. Peter’s School, Plymouth, as a pupil teacher".  At that time he and his brother  "usually fished on Saturdays in the Great Western Docks in Plymouth";  they may have purchased their sea fishing tackle from Hearders in Plymouth. For the next six years he fished for trout on the Avon and Erme. It is likely that he had Hearder's catalog which contained details on the flies and methods recommended by Soltau for those rivers.

Reading Rabley's book conveys the impression that, by the age of 20, he had adopted the West Country two-fly paradigm described by Soltau in 1847; Soltau lived at Little Efford about 10 miles from the River Erme at Ivybridge. Even by the early years of the 20th century Rabley had not embraced the chalk stream single dry-fly paradigm introduced by Halford in the 1880s.

Mr. Notley (1979) considers that Rabley "used, wet flies, as dry flies were not in fashion in those days."

Above Gara Bridge on the Devonshire Avon

Writing of the period 1899-1914, Mr. Notley records that  "A Dr. Perkins and his friend Mr. Tozer, both from Teignmouth, used to come to Gara Bridge by train, reaching there at 4.30 p.m. and Dr. Perkins would often catch the 18 trout limit before supper, they stayed with Stabb at Hazelwood. Dr Perkins fished with dry fly, something quite new to me."  Stabb took over as Bailiff from Martin in 1911, which places Notley's first exposure to the dry fly within the period 1911 to 1914.

H.S.Joyce

Over 70 years ago, H.S.Joyce's A Trout Angler's Notebook (1948 p31-7) paints a less clear cut picture. It is another unpretentious, but very revealing, book which suggests that using a dry fly as dropper above a wet point fly was more effective than Halford's single dry fly on Dartmoor. He prefers hackled flies, a dark rusty Blue Upright as the tail fly with a light red-hackled fly as dropper.

Although Henry Stanley Joyce (1882-1961) was not a Devonian born-and-bred, he was chairman of the Barnstaple and District Angling Club in 1941. He was influenced by Halford's fly-fishing philosophy. Joyce describes some of the Dartmoor "natives" fishing  "with a long cast and flies strung down it's length like washing on a clothes-line".  Many of these anglers were successful, and caught large numbers of fish, but "differ somewhat from the sportsman angler in their point of view...The sportsman angler can count a day well spent that produces only one fish caught under memorable conditions. I never dispute with one of these local worthies, nor do I waste time by attempting to argue with them on any line of sporting ethics. I put on my most half-baked expression and let them tell me the whole story of how to catch trout. Often I pick up quite a nice lot of useful information. "

Thus Joyce's writing at the end of the Second World War reflects two traditions:

the decline - outside Devon - of the Dry-Dropper and wet-fly fishing in the face of Halford's promotion of "sportsmanship", and insistence on fishing with a single dry fly

the retention of older local practices, and fly designs, that stood the test of time because they continued to be successful on Dartmoor.

The Cherry Brook a tributary of the West Dart River on Dartmoor.

Joyce is very critical of fishing with a team of wet flies, but adopts the local Dry-Dropper technique:  "I will not descend to this water-raking business. I adopt a compromise. I prefer to use one fly only; but I find that by using two I can combine the delight of casting one fly with deliberate intent at a selected fish and at the same time be in a position to put into practice a little trick I have often found pays extremely well. By having my dropper at least one yard from the point fly I find that I can fish the latter dry to a fish rising in the slack .. I can use both wet when I come to a stickle where a dry fly would be out of place; and I can "dibble" the dropper when I come to the sort of place where this particular method is often most successful.".

Joyce describes the importance of using his tail fly as a "brake" whilst moving his dry fly to mimic the behaviour of an insect that has fallen into the water.

Joyce trumpets the status given to fishing a single dry fly: "It is admitted by every fly-fisher that dry-fly fishing is the highest form of the art, and I think quite justly, the dry-fly man is usually looked upon as a more artistic angler than any other; but it is well known that the dryfly has its limitations, and, under certain conditions, and at certain times, the method is almost useless if one wishes to capture more than a very occasional trout." Joyce restricted his use of a single dry fly to  dead low  water conditions.

It is revealing that Joyce reverted to fishing wet flies across-and down when conditions demanded it. A visiting chalk-stream friend "remonstrated, remarking that I could hardly expect a trout to take a fly under those conditions." The Dartmoor method proved  "more profitable than the more stylish-looking dry-fly method"

Joyce always used hackled flies, not because he had any particular predudice against winged flies, simply because he found hackled flies easier to tie, and winged flies broke up with use. He didn't spend time changing flies unless his favourites were unsuccessful:  "I once met a man who said that he had tried thirty-two varieties of flies in a day. That sort of thing may be all right on the Test, but I think it is a waste of time on moorland waters. This poor fellow had one trout to show for his troubles."

Books by Soltau (1847), Cutcliffe (1863), Rabley (1910), and Joyce (1948) as well as Hearder's catalogue (1875) indicate that a two-fly dry dropper upstream method was used on Devon rivers from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century (Wilson 1970).

Henry Williamson (1895 – 1977): Dry-Fly Purism in Devon

Despite the use - by a few anglers - of the traditional West Country two-fly technique on local rivers, it was increasingly replaced by the chalk stream single-fly paradigm. In 1928 the prolific Devon author Major Kenneth Dawson reported that :"Of recent years the dry fly has invaded the moorland and mountain streams which were once the invioable sanctuary of the sunken lure." An example of this is provided in Henry Williamson's A Clear Water Stream.

Williamson's book deserves a place in the history of fly-fishing in Devon; it reflects the growth in popularity of dry-fly fishing in the county. Not only did Williamson fish with a dry fly, he created - on his stretch of fishing on the River Bray - ideal conditions for Halford's method of dry-fly fishing: stocking with farm reared trout, followed by in-river supplementary feeding with pellets, and planting aquatic plants to house shrimps and nymphs. Stocking was, and still is, carried out on some Devon rivers with existing populations of wild brown trout.

Williamson's approach to fly fishing combined the new with the old. Although he described himself as a dry-fly purist, he fished with flies he discovered in H.C. Cutcliffe's book  The Art of Trout Fly Fishing on Rapid Streams published in 1863.

Henry Williamson is perhaps best known as the author of Tarka the Otter published in 1927, for which he was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for Literature worth £100 in 1928. Still popular, in 2018 it was the runner up in an Arts and Humanities Research Council poll to find the UK's favourite nature book.

In September 1929 he moved with his family from Georgeham to live in Shallowford on the Castle Hill Estate of Lord Fortescue in the hamlet of Filleigh in North Devon (Lamplugh 1991). Williamson (1978 chapter 1 ) described Shallowford as a fishing cottage; he paid an annual rent of £30 for the house, and £30 for the right to fish (fly only) two miles of the river Bray - a tributary of the River Taw. He lived with his family at Shallowford from 1929 until 1937. This period is described in  A Clear Water Stream  published in 1958.

Williamson's book gives - in considerable detail - a picture of how, under the influence of Halford's promotion of the dry fly, fly-fishing techniques had changed in North Devon since the publication of Cutcliffe's book in 1863. For several years, Cutcliffe lived in South Molton (about 3 miles from Filleigh), and like Williamson fished the river Bray.

Shortly after he arrived, Williamson saw trout feeding underwater. Standing on Humpy Bridge on the approach to Shallowford he   saw several trout lying just under the the top of the water ... taking something that was rising from the bed of the river. What could the insects be? A word heard in early years from my father who used to fish in his youth came back to me. Nymphs.  This made him  keen to go into the town to buy rod and tackle (Williamson 1958 p28).

It's worth repeating the advice of the local tackle dealer; notice the clear distinction between dry- and wet-fly fishing, as well as the absence of any reference to Cutcliffe's combined dry and wet fly technique. Williamson bought  a two-piece split cane [rod] nine feet long and weighing four ounces, by Allcock of Reading ... a bronze reel to balance the rod; enamelled silk line for the reel, a small aluminium box with a dozen flip-up micra windows for flies, of which I picked a selection - Blue Upright, March Brown, Wickham's Fancy, Yellow Sally, and others whose names and colours took my fancy. A circular box of the same metal, with dual flannel lining, for keeping silkworm casts pliable when fishing- of which I bought six, each nine feet long, as recommended by the dealer, who explained that the local rivers were usually fished with wet flies, which were 'swum' underwater, imitating nymphs, while dry flies imitated the dry flies above the water. Finally I chose a collapsible net and wicker creel, and with a half-crown Conservancy Board licence to take brown trout from March 1 to October 1 in my pocket  (Williamson 1958 p29-30).

It's no surprise, given the tackle dealer's advice, that he began by fishing with a team of wet flies. But he only managed to catch one trout. A local angler informed him that it was difficult to catch trout on a wet fly when the river was low. Williamson confirmed this advice for himself when his: team of wet flies - Blue Upright at tail, Olive Dun dropper, March Brown bobbing near the loop of the gut cast - merely scattered them in that clear water   (Williamson 1958 p32 & 36).

Williamson & Cutcliffe

Subsequently, Williamson met an angler who showed him a dry fly that had caught eighteen trout under low water conditions. Williamson accepted this angler's offer to show him how to fish Halford's dry-fly method: He unpicked the barb of a small red-whisker'd object from the cork of his rod handle, ... 'Look at the shining hackles! Look how it rides! It's deadly in low bright water...I call this fly The Poacher...Red game-cock hackles, tied with gilt wire. Three whisks. Don't put on too much grease - it's parafin wax, you know - just enough to waterproof the hackles and make the fly ride high. Brush the hackles lightly between thumb and finger, like this. They should stand out like a floating thistle seed, all around the clock. The fly should ride down the water well cocked-up, irresistible.  His instructor showed Williamson how to false cast to dry a fly, and shoot line to increase distance. He gave Williamson two spare 'Poacher' flies, and told him more were available from the local tackle dealer. (Williamson 1958 p42-3, 57-8).

Title page of Cutcliffe 1863

This instruction enabled Williamson:  to enjoy many a happy hour with the dry fly, including two of a variant pattern I discovered in an old book, by a doctor who wrote on the art of fishing in rapid streams. He, too, had used the buzz type of floating fly (Williamson 1958 p60) [emphases added].

This sounds very much like a reference to flies tied in the 'variant style' described by Dr. Cutcliffe FRCS in his book  The Art of Trout Fly Fishing on Rapid Streams,  originally published by W. Tucker of South Molton in 1863 (A second edition was published in 1883 by the London publishers Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington). Williamson caught  several dozen good fish  with these flies.

It is clear from the judgement passed by Richard Perrot that there is a distinct difference in the effectiveness - on Devon rivers - between the style of flies described by Cutcliffe, and the daintier split-wing dry flies favoured by chalk stream anglers.

Why didn't Williamson name Cutcliffe as the author of this book that he found so useful? He may have anticipated criticism from some dry-fly purists - who assumed from reading Taverner's description in  Trout Fishing from All Angles  (1933 p240) - that Cutcliffe was a wet-fly fisherman who fished with a cast of three flies - a method that would not have been approved of by Halford's followers. Writing at the turn of a new century, the fly-fishing author and tackle dealer Geoffrey Bucknall (1929-2020) recognized the enduring influence of Halford even on rain-fed rivers: Use ... a buzzy dry fly on a dropper [above a nymph] if it doesn't give you an ethical twinge of guilt  Bucknall (2000 p60)

Williamson continued to fish with hackled dry flies; he describes casting a single fly upstream to rising fish  in a long leafy tunnel: my eyes watching for the least break in the dark flow where a fish had risen. He had wanted to clear the overhanging branches on this stretch, but was unable to persuade a local farmer to carry out the work. Instead he had a rod made for him by Westley Richards to cope with these obstacles:  It was of split-cane, weighed two ounces, and was seven feet long. (Williamson 1958 p60).

Cutcliffe's flies from the John Shaner collection

The description given by Williamson of 'The Poacher' dry fly suggests that it was tied in the style described by Cutcliffe.

Cutcliffe described the flies he used on the Bray from February through August. Paul Gaskell's 2019 book  Fly Fishing Master H.C. Cutcliffe Rediscovered in The Art of Trout Fishing in Rapid Streams  contains clear pictures of most of these flies, and their dressings as tied by the respected fly tier Roger Woolley (1877 - 1959 ), and now owned by John Shaner.

Williamson may have had some flies tied by a professional tyer, possibly Woolley:  I had some flies tied on barbless hooks. With increasing experience he tied his own flies including one he named Tarka Twilight which resembles the Poacher fly with its body of heron's crest bound by gilt tinsel and hackles of red gamecock, it's whisk's of pheasant's tail  (Williamson 1958 p101, 140, 175-6).

Dry flies from Halford Floating Flies and How To Dress Them (1886)

Williamson is correct in his use of the term 'variant' to describe Cutcliffe's flies tied with oversized hackle and tail compared to the more delicate winged dry flies such as those recommended by Halford for chalkstreams.

Williamson aspired to be a dry-fly purist.  Chapter 8 is titled At Last, A Dry-fly Purist!. For example, he waited until he spotted a rising fish before casting his fly (Williamson 1958 p74, 104-5), which satisfies Halford's definition of a 'purist':   Those of us who will not in any circumstances cast except over rising fish are sometimes called ultra purists and those who occasionally will try to tempt a fish in position but not actually rising are termed purists... and I would urge every dry fly fisher to follow the example of these purists and ultra purists (Halford 1913 p 69-70).

This aspect of dry-fly fishing - waiting for a fish to rise - suited Williamson; he was quite content to stand still for long periods to quietly observe the river life around him; his essay  My Best Hour of Fishing  (1936) relates how he set forth in the evening to catch trout , but ended up watching a salmon until dusk without casting a fly.

It is understandable that as a purist, Williamson would not have paired a dry fly with a nymph as described by Cutcliffe:  The dry-fly fisherman never uses more than one fly on his cast at the same time ....  (Dewar 1910 p 39).

But, at first glance, it is surprising that he used Cutcliffe's flies at all; Skues called them 'mainly lures':  Cutcliffe's "Trout Fly Fishing on Rapid Streams", one of the most intelligent works on fly fishing ever written, explores a corner of the subject, but his patterns are mainly lures, and when he comes to deal with patterns which are, or purport to be, imitations, representations or suggestions of the natural fly, he is manifestly out of his depth. (Skues 1921 & 2017, Foreword pX).

The point here is that a dry-fly purist should attempt to use artificial flies that are constructed to imitate the natural fly that the trout has been observed taking. W.H. Lawrie (1967 pp32) cautions  superior fly-fishermen  against using the term 'lure' in a derogatory way because of our lack of scientific certainty as to the optics of trout [emphasis added].

Williamson & Stocking

In his 1889 book Halford devotes a chapter to stocking chalk streams. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear from Halford's advice on the need to  Stock, feed and protect  (Halford 1889 p260), that stocking a moorland river will be far from straightforward. Nevertheless, in subsequent years, stocking was adopted on several Devon rivers.

Henry Williamson attempted to improve the fishing on his stretch of the Bray by introducing stocked brown trout obtained from a fish farm on the Barle: At a cost of £29, subsidised by his landlord, he stocked 300 yearlings, 100 two-year-olds and 3 larger fish intended to be brood stock. At that time, and for many years afterwards, it was thought that the younger, smaller trout (yearlings)  quickly became ‘naturalised’ in the wild and that they made a significant contribution to the available trout resource for angling  in future years (Wellard 2012).

The first problem encountered by Williamson was that his stocked fish did not remain on his beat. Some of them travelled upriver and benefitted the  Fisherman's Arms   which soon did a brisk trade selling fishing permits to visiting anglers (Williamson 1958 p51-2, 56). To overcome this problem Williamson bought fish-food:  The fish in the pools leapt to it. The fishmaster told me that daily feeding would hold them there. In future, I determined no one should fish for my tame fish (Williamson 1958 p 59 [emphasis added]). The stocked fish were fed by Williamson and his children which brought home that they had become dependents, and he expressed unease about catching them:  Where was the skill in throwing a fly into a stewpond? (Williamson 1958 p176).

This aspect of fishery management - artificial feeding - continued for many years, and may not have been obvious to the occasional angler. Nowadays, because of  “The negative ecological impacts of  [unconsumed food]  adding nutrients and organic matter to the river system ... Unless consent is granted, in-river feeding is an offence under Section 85 of the Water Resources Act 1991. This activity would currently not be granted consent by the Environment Agency " (Wellard 2012 p66).

Williamson mentions using barbless hooks - I think this was unusual in the 1920s and 30s. Barbless hooks would have enabled him to catch-and-release his stocked trout. He certainly took care of undersized fish; he asked one angler Do you think it is a good thing to wet one's hand before touching undersized fish? which received the reply: Waste of time in my opinion. Far too many parr in the river. Take food of trout. They're a nuisance. The more out the better  ( Williamson 1958 p58). This was not an unusual attitude to salmon in 'trout' rivers. I came across this proposed salmon management plan from the Devon Fishery Board that involved removing late-run salmon because  the young consume food which would be better employed in feeding the brown trout   (Dawson circa 1948.)

It was many years before the significance of Williamson's initial experience of stocking a Devon river without in-river supplementary feeding was recognized.

Stocked fish: The discussion continues in 2021

For obvious reasons - as this video reveals - stocking continues to be popular with anglers. But, no less an authority than Halford, had pointed out the limitations of stocked fish to aspiring 'dry-fly purists'- they are too easy to catch on a dry fly:  "When first thrown on their own resources they will take any fly offered to them, give little sport, and a large proportion soon succumb to the wiles of the dry-fly fisherman. Those that survive, never having had to seek their own food, rapidly fall off in condition and drop from the streamy water to deep and comparatively sluggish reaches, when they rarely feed on the surface of the stream"  (Halford 1913 p393) [emphasis added].

Stocking of English chalk streams had been carried out from as early as the 1830s, which is long before Halford wrote about dry-fly fishing. But the practice persists to this day because :  "Chalkstreams will not provide decent sport without stocking. Because they are for all intents and purposes artificial sporting rivers"  (Cooper 2021 - minute 52). In addition, because of their (mis)behaviour, Halford's method of fishing a dry fly may be particularly successful at catching stocked trout.

Peter Hayes gets straight to the heart of the matter in these comments: "Halford and his coterie were complete believers in stocking, and it was not until much later that the disastrous experiences of Ramsbury, Abbotts Barton, and the Bourne finally demonstrated that stocking destroys wild trout fishing. Not that many fishery owners took much notice. Skues was one of the few who opposed the practice, which, when you think about it, compromises the whole idea of imitation as the key to the sport, insofar as a stock fish is more likely to be deceived by an accurate imitation of a pellet." (Hayes 2016 p. 31). A similar point is made by the American John Gubbins in his 2018 article   The Myth of the Dry Fly Hero.

Gubbins, invokes a plausible variation of the 'educated trout' myth to explain why fish raised in a hatchery, and then stocked into a river, are easier to catch on a dry fly than wild-born trout. " The ordinary regimen in hatcheries is to deliver trout feed from above the surface of the water. The disturbance food pellets creates when falling on the surface of the water comes to act as a dinner bell for domesticated trout. And they carry this hatchery trait into the wild. Thus when a dry fly fisher casts his floating line and floating fly on the surface of a stream, the disturbance caused by the cast stimulates the domesticated trout to rise upward in the water column to feed. It is possible that a clumsy cast or the slapping down of the fly will draw even greater interest from domesticated trout."  (Gubbins 2018) [emphasis added].

Williamson's efforts should not be regarded as an eccentric 'one-off', restricted to one river in North Devon. Stocking continued for many years on other Devonian rivers.

In Devon, migration away from the stocking site was not the only problem. It slowly emerged that relatively few of the stocked fish were caught, and those that were caught were taken soon after being placed in the river. Mike Weaver reports that: "... the old Devon River Authority, stocked the Upper Teign over a period of four years in the late 1960s. Each year the Authority carefully analysed the catches and in 1968, when 25 per cent of the stocked trout were caught, 89 per cent had been taken by the end of April, with seven per cent in May and less than one per cent in the remaining months of the season" (Weaver, 2008). In addition to there being a small window of opportunity to catch stocked fish, Gubbins (2018) analysed how the cost - to the public purse - of each fish caught by an angler rose to an unsustainable level. Of course, this is not a consideration in private waters where the cost of stocking can be passed on to the angler.

It took until the 1960s before the upstream and downstream movement of stocked fish emerged as a recognised problem in South Devon. But the ease of catching stocked trout - if only shortly after they had been put into a river - may have been an important factor in the retention of stocking, and the increasing popularity of dry-fly fishing. The first mention of an angler using the dry fly on the Avon in South Devon - that I am aware of - is just before the First World War. It is contained in a history of the river written by Mr. J.B.S. "Jack" Notley in 1979.

The Devon River Authority advised the Avon Fishing Association  "that the best way to improve the fish feed, was to encourage weed growth."  Aquatic weed was planted in the river, but by 1972 members were complaining that the introduced weed was a problem, and weed cutting commenced to keep it under control.

Williamson had also tried introducing acquatic weeds. He was aware of the differences in the insect life between chalk streams, and the acidic moorland rivers he fished. Dry fly purism required precise imitation of the various species of upwinged flies (ephemeridae) found on chalk streams.

Williamson (1958 p126-7) described one species of upwinged fly on the Bray:  It was a creeper of the March Brown which, I had heard, took the place of the (M)mayfly in a stony stream lacking lime.  

The Mayfly is the most famous British chalk stream upwinged fly; they often hatched in enormous numbers , and gave rise to supposedly easy fishing conditions named the 'Duffer's Fortnight'. Williamson appreciated that Mayflies  were not common in the rivers that ran down from the moors of the West Country  and he understood that the reason was due to the lack of fine sand and silt in moorland rivers into which  the larva of the (M)mayfly must burrow and feed and be concealed during the two years of its watery life  (Williamson 1958 p222-4).

In an attempt to increase the number of different species of upwinged flies (ephemeridae) on his stretch of the Bray, Williamson inadvertantly created conditions that improved the build up of fine sand and silt that provided better conditions for the growth of that one species - the Mayfly.

Williamson took steps to increase the natural food supply for trout on his fishery:  One day, motoring from London to Devon, I stopped beside a river bridge, the air above which was white with mayflies. Looking over, I saw trout of all sizes, some of them four- and five pounders, in the streams of water between weed-beds. The plants had white flowers, with yellow pistils, on long tresses waving in the river. The very plants I needed for my river! I kneeled on the bank, pulled a string of water-crows' foot from its root, and saw how extraordinarily numerous were the nymphs and larvae of the ephemeridae crawling on the fonds. Fresh water shrimps flipped along the stems, many with their smaller wives held in their arms. I bought two large pails from the village shop, and filled them with weed. When I got home, I waded immediately into the river and planted lengths of ranunculus fluvitans under stones, spacing them in different runs and eddies.  He was told that the next flood would wash them out (Williamson 1958 p109-110).

This was not to be; Williamson's plantings flourished. But a more serious problem arose; he was warned that if ranunculus spread downstream he could be sued by the riparian owners for the loss of income from their salmon beats, and half that amount in rents collected by the Rural District Councils - a total sum he calculated to be four hundred thousand pounds including legal costs! At night lying in bed, depression set in ... At three o'clock in the morning I got out of bed and put on clothes, fishing stockings, waders and brogues; and taking a rake, mattock and scythe from the summerhouse, went out into the water-dim dawn to begin a task of removing all traces of weed from the river (Williamson 1958 p185). Williamson laboured in vain, but his worst fears did not come to pass.

Towards the end of his tenancy, Williamson reflected on this episode:  In high summer the river was beautiful with white blossoms of the water-crow's foot upon the gravel. I learned, as I had learned before, that the ideas of inexperienced men often work by opposites. Thus the greatest patches of weed collected the most silt, making shoals in the shallows; and when the river-level dropped in hot weather, the shoals became islets. The exposed weed on these islets died away; and between the islets the currents ran faster, undercutting the new gravel banks. Fish lurked there, in water made more lively by its swiftness. And mayflies, which were scarce in the river owing to the few silt beds in which the larvae could burrow, began to increase. The trout in in other years, when I was gone, would feed on them, and grow bigger. I would not be there to see them, for my work on the river was ended (Williamson 1958 p226-7).

Readers of Williamson's books will not be surprised that he did not follow this advice from Halford before improving his fishery:   It is scarcely necessary to point out that in establishing a fishery the order of procedure should be to kill down enemies and prepare water first, and then to adopt the plan selected for stocking the water  (Halford 1889 p275). Halford's list of 'enemies' included: herons, poachers, as well as otters:   Otters have a very bad name, and are considered very destructive to a fishery  (Halford 1889 p387). Williamson reluctantly shot a heron, and fed it to his stocked trout . But he adopted a different tactic to deal with poachers !

The Great War Interviews - 3. Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson describes encountering a group of poachers; they were out of work, some had fought in World War 1, he paid each of them a few shillings for information they gave him about 'green-back' salmon (Williamson 1958 p65-6). Williamson's benevolent attitude to these veterans was influenced by his own war experiences - particularly the Christmas Truce in 1914 - that stayed with him throughout his life, and suffused all of his writing:  On various levels he was in a state of breakdown for the rest of his life.   (Quote from Henry Williamson Society website)

Mr. J.B.S. "Jack" Notley also served in World War 1, and like Henry Williamson both suffered from what today would be termed PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Jack was born in the Rectory at Diptford on the banks of the River Avon in South Devon. At the end of the war he taught fly fishing and fly casting on his home river. He wrote a comprehensive and vivid account of his war service which is available here courtesy of John Gregory a close family friend of 'Uncle Jack' Notley, and now a Trustee of the Henry Williamson Society. In this photograph - taken in 1965 by John - on the Avon where Mr. Notley  caught his first trout, with a nurse beside him to prevent him falling in; he was six years old  (Notley 1979).

It is possible that both men found solace in fly fishing after their wartime experiences. Fly fishing is now recognised as effective in the physical and emotional rehabilitation of disabled military service personnel, (e.g. the American Healing Waters Project)

As noted above soon afer moving to Shallowford, Williamson had seen trout taking subsurface nymphs. He rarely discussed fishing with a wet fly to nymphing trout on the River Bray, instead stressing his dry-fly purism. His son Richard Williamson remarks in his introduction to  Salar the Salmon,  which was researched and written by Williamson during the Shallowford years, that his father was a very close observer of river life:  As he fished the Bray he watched, marked and noted down everything that he saw. He had learned as an Army officer to record everything.  This is reflected in his description of the life history of the March Brown, the Stone Fly, and Mayfly (Williamson 1958 p126-128; 222-225).

Williamson kept abreast of fishing developments outside North Devon through reading the weekly Fishing Gazette magazine, subscribing to the quarterly  Salmon & Trout (the Journal of the Salmon and Trout Association), and purchasing a complete set of backnumbers of that journal (Williamson, H 1958 p45, 170; Williamson R. 1987 p13-14).

As the years passed, he may have relaxed his dry-fly purism, and fished a nymph. For example,  Something was being taken under the surface: the rings were slight bulges. I flipped over my fly and it sank, being wet, and was taken. This happened three times; then the rise ceased, leaving me with three other Loch Levens  [stocked fish] (Williamson 1958 p177). The reference to bulging is significant because Skues developed fishing with a nymph to cope with 'bulging' trout which were  "taking nymphs as they come up to hatch",  in contrast to Halford who  " had advised dry-fly anglers to leave bulging fish alone. " (Berls 1999).

Williamson's manuscript of  A Clear Water Stream  was not well received by his publisher. Williamson's diary records his reaction: Thursday, 4 July 1957: Got a very depressing, alarming, and almost destructive letter from Dick de la Mare, registering his great disappointment, together with all other readers at Faber & Fabers, at the Clear Water Stream book. Later that year, on the 6th December, he agreed to: remove a suggestion of author's grievance against the Poacher I take this to mean one of the anglers who had continued fishing on his beat without permission. He may have placated his publisher by including a sympathetic piece about a group of poachers at the end of the chapter 4 I visit a Fish Farm, and Meet Poachers.   Five thousand copies of the book were published in 1958, which sold out fairly quickly. It was reissued six times in the next fifty seven years including in America, and in Germany (Williamson, Anne (nd)).

Despite the publishers reservations, the first edition received a multitude of favourable reviews, which have been collated by The Williamson Society (available online). Most reviewers focussed on his writing about Nature rather than fishing. One notable exception was Maurice Wiggin (1912-1986) who, perhaps wisely, made this enigmatic comment in the briefest of reviews Not exactly an angling book, but surely irresistible to anglers.

Maurice Wiggin was certainly not a dry-fly purist; his attitude was that  dry-fly fishing is beautiful, productive, and deeply satisfying, but it is child's play compared with the subtle craft of fishing the sunk fly effectively  (Wiggin 1987 9th impression). It is interesting that the chapter  Neither Dry nor Wet in Wiggin's book, describes the Dry-Dropper technique  discussed below

Despite this difference, the two men were friends. Williamson dedicated The Power of the Dead (1963)  Vol. 11, in  A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight  to Maurice Wiggin. The dedication pays tribute to a man whom HW (Henry Williamson) had known over a considerable length of time, although strangely there is very little mention of him in his archive papers... He wrote a perceptive and powerful article about HW,  ‘The Hermit of Ox’s Cross’  for the Sunday Times, published on 1 June 1958.

Wiggin referred to Williamson as  my most distinguished friend, the only friend I have who is undisputably a genius. I have known him as a writer since the late ’twenties (Extracts from Anne Williamson Available online).

Williamson & Ted Hughes

Dr Mark Wormald wrote of Williamson's early influence on the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. As a boy of eleven in South Yorkshire, Hughes  borrowed Henry Williamson's great violent story of the 1920s 'Tarka the Otter' from the school library and kept it out for eighteen months, committing it to heart, every word of it to memory,... (Wormald 2022 p29). Ted Hughes owned several books by Henry Williamson including  A Clear Water Stream.

The Devon writer and former Children’s Laureate   Michael Morpurgo  was a good friend of Ted Hughes, and reports that Hughes had:   known Williamson well, that he was a great writing hero of his, a kind of mentor in a way, and a huge admirer of both Tarka and Salar  ...Both men, it seems to me, perceive the world as a barn owl does, minutely, distinctly, yet from afar, knowing what they see, how every creature and plant lives and dies, and its place in the scheme of things.(Introduction to Williamson 2010).

As a boy, John Bailey (1990) fell under the spell of Henry Williamson. In his book  The Great Anglers,  Bailey placed Williamson alongside the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes as great angling writers:  Some anglers are technicians and scientists others are dreamers of dreams who nod more than they cast and dream more often than they cast.  Maurice Wiggin and Eric Taverner were in the former group, Henry Williamson and Ted Hughes were in a small group of writers especially admired by Bailey not necessarily for their technical innovations:  To read Jefferies, Hughes and Williamson is to extend our humanity. To study them is to increase our stature as selfless naturalists (Bailey 1990 p205-12).

These writers are each the subject of academic research , including their influence on each other. Writing about the impact of Williamson's books including  A Clear Water Stream and  Tarka the Otter on Ted Hughes, the academic Yvonne Reddick (2013) remarked on the  close lexical parallels between Hughes’s poetry and Williamson’s prose writing, in both published and in draft form, point to the importance of Williamson’s writing to Hughes...he [Hughes] was steeped in the work of Williamson.

But this is balanced by Reddick's analysis of the tensions between the two men:  Hughes championed Williamson’s writing and admired his interest in conservation, and yet the two men disagreed profoundly about Williamson’s fascist politics. 

The bridge at Bondleigh, Devon by Robin Lucas

Williamson and Hughes had a detailed understanding of the wildlife in and around the Taw and Torridge.   Ted Hughes loved to fish the Taw... He set out to catch his first Taw trout at 6 a.m. on the 15th of March 1962, at Bondleigh...Many of the trout that lived in bankside hollows and castles of roots were known to him ‘almost by name’. April 1966 saw him catch six trout of a pound each in a hundred-yard stretch of river  (Reddick nd). The subsequent decline in the Taw and nearby Torridge prompted Hughes' interest in conservation, and his leading role in the formation of the Westcountry Rivers Trust.

Hughes spoke at Williamson's Memorial Service in 1977:  'It is not usual to consider him as a poet. I believe he was one of the two or three truest poets of his generation [. . .] in those early books about wild life, he created a real poetic mythology.'  ( Quoted in Henry Williamson: The Man, The Writings). The University of Exeter holds two letters, and one poem from his friend the Poet Laureate.

I think there is more to it than Bailey's conclusion that Hughes and Williamson   are dreamers of dreams who nod more than they cast and dream more often than they cast.  (Bailey 1990 p205-12).

Throughout his career, Williamson insisted that the primary duty of the writer was to seek and represent the truth and that truth could only be found through close and sustained observation ...This stress on the importance of observation connects Williamson with the principles and practice of ethology (Bunten 2018 p8, 231)[emphasis added].

For Williamson observation sometimes trumped catching fish; fishing gave an opportunity to gather information for his writing - at that time Salar the Salmon (1935). His retrospective essay  My Best Hour of Fishing   published in the American magazine  The Atlantic   in 1936 doesn't involve catching anything. Evening is the best time to cast for trout in the small stream which runs down the valley, a few yards away from my cottage door. For, as the low sun lengthens the shadows of the oaks in the deer park, the spinners appear over the trout stream...There was a solitary salmon lodged under a clump of roots a few yards below where I was standing at the bend. I had been watching that fish for more than two months...I was about to drop lightly an imitation of a red spinner, tied to a cast of single horsehair, into the run. But for nearly twenty minutes I had been standing motionless at the bend of the river, hardly daring to move. For when I was about to make my first cast, standing still in water about ten inches deep, the salmon had swum slowly up the run, and paused within a few inches of my feet... I watched until dusk, when it moved down into deeper water below. (Williamson 1936).

It was different for Hughes. It went far beyond observation. First and foremost, Ted was a fisherman. Yes, his fishing inspired several poems, but he did not simply fish to gather observations for his writing. His self-insight, expressed as :  “Fishing is my way of breathing” , is clear from Mark Wormald's book Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (2022). A close friend reported that:  He needed to fish. It sustained him. It took him into the natural world and reminded him of who he was, who he had been.  (Wormald 2012 p25). Professor Ehor Boyanowsky, who fished with Hughes in Canada for a decade describes Hughes as a true angler. .. someone who will catch fish if anyone can. A fish hawk.  (Chacksfield 2011).

These quotes from Ann Skea tell me a lot about Ted Hughes - the man:   : we met at Ted’s home in Devon and he took me and my husband, David, for a huge Devonshire Tea in a Dartmoor village. On the dashboard of his car lay a few hand-tied fishing-flies. His car was a muddle of boots and fishing-gear, and he drove like a country farmer (which he was) who is used to having the road to himself ... I grew to think of him as a gentle giant, warm-hearted and generous, with a sharp, Yorkshireman’s, sense of humour and a formidable range of knowledge. (Skea 1999).

Mark Wormald reports strange incidents; Hughes was often unable to speak when he returned after fishing: When he'd been fishing alone, ... he lost the power of forming words completely; sometimes for hours. Concentrated silence by the river left him physically unable to speak at all. He knew this was unusual - he'd heard or read nothing about this phenomenon anywhere else...

So: the fishing diaries were where the words came back...The fishing diary I'd heard of, and heard an authority I had no real reason to have doubted dismiss as a curiosity, nothing more ...  (Wormald 2022 p10, p6) [emphasis added]. Consequently, before Wormald, academic analyses of Hughes' work had overlooked his fishing diary which began in May 1983.

It may be equally important to analyse Henry Williamson's oeuvre from the perspective of his interest in fly-fishing - especially Purism. He equipped himself with what he thought was the proper equipment for a fly-fisherman...,  including waders, Norfolk style jacket of many pockets, amadou to dry flies, and fly-floatant, Now, I thought, I was ready to start my initiation into the art and mystery of a dry-fly purist  (Williamson 1958 p55). Williamson already had a small aluminium box with a dozen flip-up micra windows for flies,  (Williamson 1958 p29-30) probably one of the beautiful boxes made by Wheatley. Compare Williamson's meticulous collection of fly-fishing equipment with Ann Skea's description of Ted Hughes' car with its muddle of boots and fishing-gear and flies on the dashboard.

Was there something in Williamson's character which the dos and don'ts of dry-fly purism appealed to?

Was Ted Hughes inspired to become a dry-fly purist by Williamson? Mark Wormald devotes a chapter to explore this question in his book  The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes. I discuss this, and the role played by Dermot Wilson in forming Hughes' attitude to dry-fly purism here. Incidentally, Emory University holds a collection of  fishing books   owned by Hughes,these include a 1970 reprint of Cutcliffe's 1863 book, as well as Eric Taverner's  Trout fishing from all angles ,  but none written by Halford or Skues.

Henry Williamson supplemented his income with book reviews.   HW could be somewhat idiosyncratic in his reviewing, and sometimes they reveal more about himself than the books under review  (Henry Williamson Society, Book Reviews Available online).

For example, Williamson wrote a review of Clive Gammon's first book  Hook, Line and Spinner published by Heinemann in 1959. Williamson laments that:  Fishing is now, like football pools, big business. The new type of urban sportsman now invariably spins. The old art of fly fishing is out.  [emphasis in original]. As a self-confessed dry-fly purist, Williamson was stung by Gammon's claim that  The whole sport of angling is slowly recovering from the Edwardian pomp and absurdities that surround (together with, he adds, 'its divisions and snobberies') dry-fly fishing for trout. Williamson concludes his defence of dry-fly fishing by asking:  Snobbery?Pomp?Absurdity? or just gammon?

Clive Gammon (1929 - 2012) survived to enjoy a successful career as a sports journalist, and authored several more fishing books.

Williamson's review of Gammon's book removes any lingering doubts - after reading A Clear Water Stream   (1958) - about his grasp of the details of Halford's dry-fly purism, and the controversy that surrounded Skues' fishing with a single nymph in the early years of the 20th century. It also explains why Henry Williamson as a self-proclaimed Dry-Fly Purist did not name the North Devon angler Henry Charles Cutcliffe as the author of the book that he consulted as the source of successful flies for the River Bray. Williamson's book was read by a wide audience that would have included readers who realised that Cutcliffe advocated fishing with two flies - a nymph suspended beneath a floating fly - that would have been anathema to Halford, and to this day, the Dry-Dropper  is not a method you would even think of using on an English chalkstream, where if you were found fishing with more than one fly you would probably finish hanging from the nearest tree   (Goddard 2003 p127-9).

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George Garrow-Green (1848-1929)

George Garrow-Green - began writing under the pseudonym 'Black Hackle' for  The Field  and  The Fishing Gazette.  He was described as a "well known Devon fisherman" (Voss Bark 1983 p52-3).

He did not adopt, and maybe was unaware of, the two-fly Dry-Dropper technique described by earlier Devon authors - Soltau (1847), Cutcliffe (1863), and Rabley (1910).

Garrow-Green probably began writing after he retired around 1894 at the age of 46.

After he moved to Devon (probably to Sidmouth), he fished on the rivers Erme, Avon, Axe and Teign (Voss Bark 1983 52-3). Writing in 1920, Garrow Green confirms Kenneth Dawson's conclusion:  "It is only of late years that the more rapid brooks of the mountain and moor have been exploited by the dry-fly man, yet even here he has conclusively proved that his lure [i.e. a dry fly] will kill trout in low summer water when wet fly would avail little" (Garrow Green 1920 p42).

The brooks he refers to include the Harbourne and Hems. In a 1904 letter to the  Fishing Gazette  he sings the praises of the Harbourne:  "The Harbourne brook is a tributary of the Dart, which it joins some five miles below Totnes, and is not unworthy of mention as holding a far better average of sizeable trout than the larger river...To the angler who is disappointed with the small and by no means free rising trout of the Dart — that most capricious of rivers — this little stream offers a most agreeable change. A good deal of it can be fly-fished by a canny performer...But with the luxuriant growths of May, the fly-fisher will have but a poor show compared with the clear water worm expert, and later he who adopts the Devon style of dapping"  which he proceeds to describe in detail.

He makes a revealing comment about access to the fishing:  "...the stream is full of nice fish, and it is practically unfished. The Harbourne is not included in the Dart Association water, and almost throughout its course permission is readily granted by the hospitable Devonshire farmers."

There is little, if any, modern commentary on Garrow-Green's 1920 book, but I did come across this suggestion:  "It is quietly apparent that G. Garrow-Green might have been a man of limited financial means and tended to fish smaller waters mainly because he could afford to, rather than larger waters where expensive fees might have been required. He mentions the privilege of permission to do so on more than one occasion."  (Unknown 2011).

In his 1920 book Garrow-Green includes separate, relatively short, chapters on dry-fly and wet-fly fishing. He fishes the dry fly in the way introduced by Halford: a single split-wing dry fly that imitates the natural insect, he casts it upstream, and avoids drag;  no motion whatever is given to it. He is prepared to 'fish the water' if no rise is seen.

Garrow-Green was no dry-fly purist ! His chapter on wet-fly fishing contains a description of a 'high art' employed by an 'old poacher in Cornwall' who fished downstream, and let the current gradually take out more line. Garrow-Green moves his wet flies (no more than two) to imitate ascending nymphs and  found jigging of the dropper very effective.   He mentions 'switch-casting' to deal with overhanging vegetation. He recommends several wet flies including the Red Maxwell and Blue Maxwell which Taff Price (1976) reports  "do have their adherents in parts of Devon and Cornwall".

As early as 1905, in the letters page of the  Fishing Gazette  Garrow-Green [writing under his pseudonym 'Black Hackle'] mounted a stout defence of clear water worm fishing which he learnt in Ireland under low-water summer conditions. He includes a long chapter on that technique in his 1920 book, and also describes dapping with natural insects as well as spinning with real and artificial minnows.

Garrow-Green's 1920 book suggests that he adopted the practical aspects of dry-fly fishing during the first quarter of the 20th century, but that he abandoned what I call the 'Halfordian paraphenalia'.

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The Return of Soltau's Duo Method: A Journey 'Back to the Future'

Adoption in Devon of Halford's dry-fly chalk stream method continued until by the 1970s I never saw anyone fishing the older Dry-Dropper method. Why did this happen? Dermot Wilson's  Fishing the Dry Fly   provides as good an answer as any. He introduces his book as suitable for beginners, describes dry-fly fishing  "as an art, and sometimes as a cult... and that acceptance into the elite can come at the end of a very long process".  He goes on:  "What a load of nonsense! Dry-fly fishing takes less time to learn than most other sports." (Wilson 1970 p viii).

Despite its inherent simplicity, in some quarters dry-fly fishing is viewed as 'exclusive' to this day (Cohen 2016). Visitors to the Test are keen to catch a trout on a dry fly, but they often have to resort to a nymph - the method introduced by Halford's nemesis, Skues (Cooper and Jardine 2020).

Perhaps, sadly, Halford's lasting legacy is responsibility for a kind of sporting elitism that still dogs the dry fly (Herd 2002, Gubbins 2018). And the dry fly versus nymph debate continues to this day on English chalk streams (Cooper & Jardine 2020). Needless to say the Dry-Dropper technique would not be allowed on most chalk stream beats with a 'Dry Fly Only' rule.

The fact that our discarded provincial technique - that allows a dry fly and nymph to be fished together - was recently rescued from oblivion attests to its effectiveness. (Goddard 1991, Hughes 2002). This repatriated method,  "A dry-dropper rig .. a dry fly with a nymph tied to it"  (Burgert 2020) is now widely used again on the rivers I fish in South Devon, and admirably described by Nicholas Fitton in his book In Search of Wild Trout  (1992).

Nowadays Soltau's (1847) method of fishing two flies, a dry fly above a wet fly or nymph, is universal. It is referred to by various names: 'Klink and Dink', Duo Method, Dry Dropper, New Zealand Dropper, as well as Fitton's neologism Wry fly (i.e. Wet and Dry Fly). These are probably re-inventions, rather than being directly inspired by Soltau. Terry Lawton (2020) traces its history. A comment by Lawton about New Zealander Greg Kelly who rediscovered the duo method for himself in the 1960s is revealing: Kelly thought that he had devised a system that led him to think that he had "something so good that for ever more I could catch trout when I wanted to"  Lawton (2020 p202).

Lawton gives the 1930s as the date when the 'trailer nymph' was developed in New Zealand, and devotes a chapter Dry Fly and Nymph to tracing the history of the technique from the 18th to 20th centuries. It's as if the duo method left the field at half-time while the two captains - Halford and Skues - argued about how the game should be played in front of a divided crowd of 'dry bob' or 'wet bob' supporters.

In the first half of the last century, several authors described a two-fly technique they used on freestone rivers.

Ray Bergman & Alfred W. Miller

The American Ray Bergman's (1891-1967) book Trout was first published in 1938; Gingrich (1974 p313) considered that it   can be likened to Dr Spock's baby book for quite literally a whole generation of  [American]  fishermen grew up on it.  

Memories of "Sparse Grey Hackle" from Hoagy Carmichael & Nick Lyons

Bergman described fishing in 1933 with Alfred W. Miller (aka Sparse Grey Hackle)  a good fisherman and student of fishing ...Not many flies were hatching and rising trout were few and far between... At this time Sparse was a dry-fly purist. He placed as pretty a  [dry]  fly as anyone could wish in just the rght position under the bridge. He did it, not only once, but a score of times  without success. Bergman used a dry-fly dropper on the leader above the nymph. This was to help me in floating the nymph perfectly, and at the same time it enabled me to see any action that might occur from the performance of the dry fly. .. For several feet it  [the dry fly]  floated at the same speed as the current, and then it hesitated - stopped. Immediately I struck and hooked a ten-inch brown... Sparse was becoming more interested in nymph fishing every time I got a strike.  (Bergman 1976 p78-9).

Dr. William Baigent

Dr. William Baigent (1862-1935) is reputed to be the first angler to fish with two dry flies spaced two feet apart on his leader (Kreft 2023). He didn't publish a description of his 'Two Dry Fly Technique', but corresponded with Keith Rollo who described it as revolutionising dry-fly fishing in his book Fly Fishing . In the Preface presumably published in the 1931 first edition, R.L. Marston praises Rollo for addressing this most unorthodox matter . Rollo added that “If trout are nymphing, a nymph or wet fly could be mounted on the point, whilst a dry fly could be mounted on the dropper.” Rollo recommended this technique for fast-running streams in Devonshire (Rollo, 1944, Smith undated).

Why did Baigent have relatively little inpact on English anglers? I don't think he had any interest in, or need to get embroiled, in chalk-stream politics. Baigent was a medical doctor in Northallerton, a market town in North Yorkshire (UK). He is remembered for Baigent’s Brown, and his influence on the Catskill tradition of fly-tying through correspondance with American authors George La Branch and Preston Jennings (Smith undated). Baigent had struck out on his own. He did not follow the local well-established fly-fishing culture. Born and living his life in North Yorkshire he fishing dry flies in an area of England where fishing soft-hackled wet flies reigned supreme. He fished dry flies at a time when the Halfordian doctrine of precise imitation was de rigueur. He eschewed precise imitation, instead devoting many years to breed Old English Game Cock to supply hackle to tie his unique 'variant' style of flies including this long-hackled Baigent's Brown. Asked what the Baigent Brown was tied to represent, Baigent replied:  "It is not tied to represent any fly, it is tied to catch trout  (Roberts, 1994, p 215).

Dr Baigent would not have been surprised that his 'Two Dry Fly Technique' was lost with the passage of time. In a article for the journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing his adopted daughter   Sheona Lodge  recalls that: What my father himself said of new inventions was that an original idea can occur almost simultaneously, sometimes at opposite ends of the earth; that discoveries are countless as seeds, but not all come to fruition. (Lodge 1976). The same fate befell William Lawrie's 'surface nymphing' technique.

W.H. Lawrie

The two-fly duo method was mentioned by the Scotsman William Lawrie in 1939, but described in greater detail in his book  The Book of the Rough Stream Nymph  published in 1947. Neither book refers to Soltau, Cutcliffe or Marston. Lawrie's duo method consisted of two flies, either two dry flies, or a point fly treated with "a touch of dry-fly oil ... designed to represent the dun at eclosion", and a dropper to "represent the mature larva floating inertly just below the surface." (Lawrie 1947 p 75-)

"Skues thought that Halford did more than anyone to discredit the wet fly on chalk streams...Someday they will learn to combine . . . wet-fly science and dry-fly art " (Berls 1999). The crucial word there is 'combine'. Skues is silent on the form this combination might take.

Lawrie solves the problem that Skues avoided. Lawrie introduces the term 'surface nymphing' to describe combining fishing a dry fly together with a nymph  "There can be little doubt that surface-nymphing, based as it is on natural events, is the link between the old method of dry-fly fishing and wet fly fishing or nymph fishing, and its recognition should do much to dispel rigid preferences for one or other method when dry-fly fishing and nymph fishing are certainly complementary"  (Lawrie 1947 p76). It was not to be so.

In 1947, Lawrie reported that his departure from orthodox (single-fly) chalk stream practice in his 1939 book - Border River Angling - had "evoked some comment". It's not surprising. In the Foreword (in my 1946 reprint) he had written: "The use of the dropper nymph with dry-fly is believed to be entirely original"  (Lawrie 1946 pvi). He christens his invention 'Surface Nymphing', "In the writers opinion this is the most deadly of all the avaiable methods of nymphing, and it is believed to be entirely new, for the discovery was made personally some years ago when angling on Tweed"  (Lawrie 1946 p15)

Lawrie's  Border River Angling was first published in 1939, a year after the 'Nymph Debate' in which dry-fly anglers argued that even fishing with a single nymph was unethical and damaged chalk streams. Similar debates were still being held in the 1960s and 1990s (Robson 1998 p214-5).

Published after the war, his second book  The Book of the Rough Stream Nymph   addressed the concerns of chalk-stream anglers:  "Comparatively short lengths of chalk streams command rentals favourably comparable with those of the best of our Scottish salmon fishing, so it is natural and understandable that both owners and lessees of fishing rights in the South take sport very seriously and frame rigid rules and conditions to preserve and maintain the quality of trout stocks. And as to the ethics of fishing methods, it is certain that nowhere in the world has this aspect been more seriously and extensively examined, discussed and propounded than in the Clubs where chalk-stream fly fishers are wont to foregather"  (Lawrie 1947 p48-9).

His title  The Book of the Rough Stream Nymph  makes it clear that his advice was for anglers on freestone rivers, rather than chalk streams. Even his new term 'surface nymphing' seems designed to appease Southern concerns:  "In courtesy to our Southern neighbours, it is not permissable to describe or term our methods of using nymphal representations as "nymph fishing" for that title is reserved for the technique evolved and developed on the chalkstreams by chalk stream fly-fishers" (Lawrie 1947 p47).

Lawrie claimed to be the first author to discuss 'eclosion', what we now call 'emergence'.  "Deliberate representation of Ephemeroptera at the time of eclosion does not appear to have been dealt with so far in angling literature, so that what follows is in the nature of breaking new ground" (Lawrie 1947 p33-4). Lawrie's 'surface nymphing' provided a way of fishing an emerger, as well as "a system pattern for the hatching dun which can be adapted for any upwinged species"  (Roberts 1994 p171).

 "The emergence of the topic of emergers was delayed, pushed back down below the surface as it were by Halford"  (Hayes 2016 p79). Progress in this important area was hampered by Halford's definition of what constitues a dry fly:  "There is no such thing known as a half-way house between dry and wet-fly fishing; either the fly is floating, in which case it is dry-fly fishing, or it is more or less submerged, and is wet-fly fishing."Halford (1913 p61)

Although Lawrie is recognised as a  "great authority of anglers' flies"   (Voss Bark & Restall 1999), I have not found other writers discussing his use of a dry-dropper arrangement. Roberts (1991 p83, 135) describes  The Book of the Rough Stream Nymph   as 'undervalued' and regards the section on surface nymphing as outstanding, but doesn't explain that Lawrie was fishing with a dry-dropper rig. Fitton (1992) who made an exhaustive search of the literature for references to the Dry-Dropper rig, only refers to Lawrie's 1939 book  Border River Angling.

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Maurice Wiggin (1912-1986)

Maurice Wiggin was the Angling Correspondent for several newspapers for fifteen years. He published twelve books including Fly Fishing in 1958 which appealed to young and older readers taking up fly fishing in the early post-way years. It remained in print for twenty nine years, and can be picked up second hand for around £3.50 - less than the cost of today's fly-fishing monthly magazines.

Wiggin's book, was promoted as A Guide for the Novice & Enthusiast. The Introduction gives this rationale: Generations of propaganda have convinced many people that fly fishing is so complicated and difficult that years of close study and expert tuition are necessary to master it. This is quite untrue 

Chapter 13  Neither Dry nor Wet  described the Dry-Dropper technique:  It is an exeedingly simple method. You simply tie on both a dry fly and a nymph and methodically search all the likely places with them. "I just don't know why this method is not practised more widely. It combines the advantages of both dry-fly and wet-fly fishing, and avoids at any rate some of the drawbacks of both. It is very simple. A countryman who never reads a book first showed it to me."  (Wiggin 1987 p103).

Wiggin had come across earlier writings about the technique, but does not mention the authors' names. Wiggin's book was the starting point for Nicholas Fitton's exploration of the two-fly arrangement.

Nicholas Fitton's Wry Fly

In his enthusiatic book of rediscovery  In Search of Wild Trout: Fly Fishing for Wild Trout in Rivers  (1992) Nicholas Fitton introduces a new term - 'Wry' fly - to describe fishing two flies, a dry fly above a wet fly or nymph. Fitton gives a detailed description of the history, and his experience using, this almost-forgotten technique.

Fitton makes no mention of Soltau as the source of this technique, but suspects that it was developed in the West Country because of this passage in Dermot Wilson's book Fishing the Dry Fly: "Some experts in the West Country fish dry and wet at the same time and this can be a very successful method. They use two flies on their cast, a wet fly as a tail fly and a dry fly half way up as a dropper. They cast upstream and the trout can take their choice." Wilson (1970 p88, 1st published 1957). Without naming him, Dermot Wilson provides a clear summary of Soltau's two-fly dry dropper upstream method.

I don't know the name(s) of the West Country experts Wilson refers to, but they may include James Perrott (1815-1895) and his son Richard (1840-1936) who were fishing guides on Dartmoor rivers from the middle of the 19th to the early 20th century.

Fitton reaches this conclusion: "I am inclined to think that wry fly [his term] has its origins in upstream wet fly and was first evolved during the last century .. a method so deadly that those anglers who mastered it kept it to themselves ..." Fitton (1992 p17). This is an example of how a fly-fishing technique may have been passed on via 'cultural transmission' rather than through a book or magazine article.

In 1986 Fitton wrote an article, and refers to another by James Langan, that described the dry + wet duo system in the UK Trout and Salmon magazine. Both articles "elicited no resonse from readers." Goddard (2003 p127) remarked that Fitton's Wry-Fly technique  "never received very much publicity."  I don't think lack of public exposure is the whole explanation. I think British anglers had become accustomed to fish with a single dry, or a single sunk wet fly, and they certainly expected to do so on chalk streams.

In a further break with this single fly tradition, Fitton discusses fishing with two dry flies. He devotes a chapter  Twin Dry Fly  to fishing with two dry flies which he adopted after several years fishing the conventional Dry-Dropper technique. Fitton discussed this technique with the orthopaedic surgeon  Alan Bell Tawse (1915 - 1995)  who knew the Northallerton GP  Dr. Baigent   who fished with two dry flies - Baigent's Brown and Baigent's Black - on the same cast. Fitton discusses the advantages of this technique; for example, pairing a small dry fly with a larger dry fly increases visibility of the position of the smaller fly.

John Goddard (2003) speaks highly of the Dry-Dropper (Fitton's Wry fly): "The wry fly in my opinion not only offers an excellent alternative, [to a strike indicator]  but also provides the opportunity for taking trout both on and below the surface." 

But he adds that its use is restricted to freestone rivers: "It is not recommended on, and indeed not very effective, on clearwater streams such as spring creeks or limestone or chalkstreams , and certainly it is not a method you would even think of using on an English chalkstream, where if you were found fishing with more than one fly you would probably finish hanging from the nearest tree." (Goddard 2003 p127-9).

There is no need to fish with a Dry-Dropper on chalk streams because the separate single-fly methods introduced by Halford and Skues continue to satisfy the socioeconomic needs of anglers and riparian owners to this day on English chalkstreams.

In a way Nicholas Fitton's 'Back to the Future' journey was relatively straightforward. His route followed the signposts planted by Maurice Wiggin, Keith Rollo, W.H. Lawrie and Dermot Wilson. Others were less fortunate, and encountered distractions along the way.

In 2002 the prolific American fly-fishing author Dave Hughes included a chapter Nymph Tactics in his book Trout from Small Streams. It was agony to read. It kept me on the edge of my seat. It was like reading a detective story where you thought the crime would remain unsolved. Hughes describes starting to fish with weighted nymphs on long leaders; progressing to using a painted cork as a strike indicator; that was replaced by a yarn indicator dressed with dry-fly floatant. I checked ahead to see how many pages were left in the chapter because he was getting very close to discovering Soltau's Dry-Dropper rig. At this point Rick Hafele entered the story. Rick and Dave fished together and co-authored Western Hatches. I knew what was about to happen, anyone who fishes regularly with a friend is prepared for some 'leg-pulling at some stage. Sure enough it came: "Rick fiddled with his rigging about the same time I did, but he kept his back to me while he did..He had not, it appeared to me, even bothered to change flies. I needn't go on with the story. You know that Rick had dangled a nymph on a couple of feet of tippet, tied to the hook bend of the same dry he'd been using when he was catching the same thing I was: Nothing." Hughes (2002 p118)

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Will the Dry-Dropper Replace the Single Dry Fly in South Devon?

The short answer is 'No'. The two methods have strengths and weaknesss, and complement each other rather than compete. Contemporary fly-fishing authors are keen to avoid reopening the controversial, and essentially fruitless, arguments in the 1930s between followers of Halford and Skues.

This anecdote shows that strict adherence to all the elements of Halford's chalk-stream code of practice could lead to disappointment for visitors to freestone rivers in Devon.

Devonshire Avon: Pembertons' Pool at Loddiswell"

In 1915, Bradley recalls meeting a young marine on the Devonshire Avon who had been "sitting all the morning by the big open pool beside him waiting to see a fish rise. .. He proved dear fellow to be an embryo dry-fly fisherman, .. and a victim of dry-fly literature in what may be called its arrogant days. He honestly thought that 'chuck-it-and-chance-it' fishing, as he called it, had disappeared among sportsmen everywhere, and that waiting for a rise and throwing a dry fly over it was the only legitimate way of catching a trout." (Bradley 1915 p271).

Fishing with a single dry fly became increasingly popular because it was, and still is, simple and effective. In 1928 the prolific Devon author Major Kenneth Dawson reported that :"Of recent years the dry fly has invaded the moorland and mountain streams which were once the invioable sanctuary of the sunken lure." Mike Weaver added: "Today I would go even further and say that, from the middle of April on, the dry fly will on most occassions take more and better moorland trout than the wet - certainly as far as the south-west is concerned." [emphasis in original] (Weaver 1983 p58).

Dermot Wilson M.C. (1924-1996) & Ted Hughes O.M. (1930-1998)

Dermot Wilson lived beside a chalk stream - the Wallop Brook, a tributary of the Test. Sidney Vines (1996) regarded him as  "the leading authority in the UK on dry fly fishing".  

In his book  Fishing the Dry Fly,  he refers to a Dry-Dropper arrangement:  "Some experts in the West Country fish dry and wet at the same time and this can be a very successful method. They use two flies on their cast, a wet fly as a tail fly and a dry fly half way up as a dropper. They cast upstream and the trout can take their choice." Wilson (1970 p88).

Maurice Wiggin had made a similar comment :  "I just don't know why this method is not practised more widely. It combines the advantages of both dry-fly and wet-fly fishing, and avoids at any rate some of the drawbacks of both ... A countryman who never reads a book first showed it to me"  (Wiggin 1987 p103).

I can find no evidence that Dermot Wilson used the combined wet and dry fly technique on his trips to Devon. There was no compelling reason for him to do so because he took an open-minded balanced approach to fishing with a dry fly on Dartmoor rivers:  "There is no point whatsoever in sticking religiously to the dry fly when a sunk fly is more successful...however, a dry fly can be be more profitable than a wet fly at certain times, especially in high summer when the water is low and very clear" (Wilson 1970 p59).

He was also prepared to relax the chalk-stream practice of 'fishing the rise':  "On the chalk-streams you usually wait till you see a rise and then you settle down to catch the trout that made it. On West Country streams such as the Tamar you can certainly do this with the trout you see rising but when there are no insects on the water you have to go and search for the trout with your fly.". This is the result of different amounts of food for trout in chalk streams compared to freestone rivers where there "is far less food. They cannot afford to let any edible morsel pass them by and so they are on the lookout practically all day long." (Wilson 1970 pp83-4).

Dermot Wilson and Mike Weaver helped dismantle the ritual paraphernalia that had collected around dry-fly fishing. They both contributed chapters to Anne Voss Bark's influential book  West Country Fly Fishing  published in 1983. It contains chapters on the techniques used by local experts, including one by David Pilkington on The Wet Fly that opens with this declaration:  "The wet fly, without any doubt, is the most flexible way of fishing of them all, upstream or down, fast or slow, deep or shallow, in every kind or water. Indeed I do believe that if trout cannot be taken on a correctly presented wet fly then the angler is very unlikely to do much better with the dry. However, there are times when one method may be more productive than the other so the wet fly and the dry must be thought of as complementary." Complementary is the word used by Lawrie (1947 p76), and the sentiment expressed by Skues:  "Someday they will learn to combine . . . wet-fly science and dry-fly art" Berls (1999).

Pilkington's chapter is packed with valuable advice based on his long experience on Devon and Cornish rivers. He describes fishing upsteam and downstream with conventional wet flies, and makes the point that:  "Nymphing in our West Country spate rivers differs dramatically from the more publicised nymphing on the chalk streams" where the angler can see the trout "and in some cases .. watch the take." Detecting the take can be difficult on chalkstreams and free stone rivers; Pilkington watches for the 'take' revealed by  "the magic point where the nylon goes through the surface."

Dermot Wilson's chapter  Trout of the Valleys  was based on his experience fishing a dry fly on the Lyd and Carey. Because of his chalk-stream background, he made an important point about the insect life in freestone rivers running off Dartmoor: "You will seldom find here the exclusive concentration on certain ephemerids that is such a feature of the behaviour of trout in chalk streams. Sedges, for instance, are more common in relation to ephemerids than they are on chalk streams. So are midges and stoneflies. And so are all manner of bugs and goodies, many of them terrestrials in origin, which may hatch or drop on the water ..."  (Voss Bark, Anne 1983 p 77).

Edward James "Ted" Hughes (1930 – 1998)

Ted Hughes was a writer, Poet Laureate, and fisherman. From 1961, he lived in North Tawton, on the banks of the Taw in North Devon.

Image from  interview  in  Wild Steelhead & Salmon,  Winter 1999, pp50-57

But first and foremost, Ted was a fisherman. His self-insight, expressed as :  “Fishing is my way of breathing” , is clear from Mark Wormald's book Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (2022) .

Canadian Professor Ehor Boyanowsky, a friend of the poet who went on a fishing trip with Hughes every year for a decade, describes him as “a true angler. Not the best caster, not a fly tier, not a rod techie, not even an aggressive wader, but someone who will catch fish if anyone can. A fish hawk. It was on one of their trips that Hughes triumphantly caught his biggest fish — a 19.5lb rainbow trout "  (Chacksfield 2011). [steelhead = a seagoing rainbow trout].

Michael Morpurgo recalls meeting Ted Hughes for the first time:  He was fishing for seatrout late on a summer’s evening, and loomed up from under the river-bank. I remember a giant of a man who greeted me warmly enough, and introduced himself as Ted Hughes. I could tell from his demeanour that he wished to be left alone with his river. I learnt later, as I got to know him better, how single-minded he was about his fishing  (Introduction to Williamson 2010).

Hughes wrote mainly about salmon and sea trout in his chapter 'Taw and Torridge' in  West Country Fly Fishing, but also fished for wild brown trout on the Dart.

In 1984 Hughes and Dermot Wilson exchanged letters. They may have met in 1983 at the launch party for  West Country Fly Fishing  held by Anne and Conrad Voss Bark at the Arundell Arms (Wormald 2022 p 238). According to Vines (1996), Hughes - a distinguished writer in his own right - admired Dermot Wilson's 1957 book Dry Fly Beginnings :  "Wherever I open it my eye alights on a paragraph that is delightful to read, and that leads on irresistibly to the next paragraph that is equally delightful and that leads on irresistibly . . . etc etc. "

Hughes also admired the revised edition of Dermot Wilson's  Fishing the Dry Fly   published in 1987 which "Ted had read, and told Dermot how much he'd admired [it] for spicily stylish river of language, its current drawing the reader's eye from one seductive pool of a paragraph to the next" (Wormald 2022 p 246).

It is reasonable to assume that Hughes was influenced by Wilson's advice when he fished for trout on a stretch of private water owned by Sir Simon Day who, in 1980, gave Ted an  "open invitation to fish some prime salmon and sea-trout water, rights to which he'd acquired in the late sixties: three miles of the Dart between the bridges at Dartmeet and Holne where its gorge was at its deepest, and the half-mile of the West Dart above its confluence there with the East Dart...'   Five years later  "Ted described the river below Dartmeet ... as the prettiest and wildest fishing in the West" Wormald (2022 p 203).

Wormald (2022 p 233-4) describes Hughes fishing downstream of Dartmeet with his own version of an elk hair caddis, cast upstream at a likely spot with a slack line to avoid drag that will scare fish, and lifting off gently to avoid the fly sinking which will also spook fish. This chalk-stream fishing style is consistent with Dermot Wilson's advice on fishing the dry fly. But notice the relaxation of the strict Halfordian chalk-stream rule to 'fish the rise', and instead 'fish the water' likely to hold a trout, which is often necessary when fishing a dry fly on Dartmoor rivers.

The contrast between fishing on chalk streams and Dartmoor rivers is illustrated in Ted's reaction to fly fishing on the Rivers Test and Dart.

In the mid-1980s, Dermot Wilson arranged a three day visit for Ted "during the height of the mayfly season, on English rivers famed for the richness of their fly life and their place in fly-fishing history".  Wormald describes this as Ted Hughes' initiation into chalk-stream practices; a visit to the Itchen  where Dermot had access to the beats on the upper river which Viscount Grey had fished, and then hymned [in his book] 'Fly Fishing'.  Then Wilson took Hughes to the Piscatorial Society water on the Avon: "whose rules encourage the use of the upstream dry fly, frown on nymphing and prohibit altogether the use of a weighted fly".  On the final day Hughes was taken to the Test,  the river on which, in the late nineteenth century, Frederick Halford had married entomology to imitation and pioneered the art of dry-fly fishing that succeeding generations of wealthy gentlemen had turned into a cult, a religion (Wormald 2022 p 243).

This may give the impression that Wilson was trying to recruit Hughes into the Dry-Fly cult. I don't think this was the case. John Bailey described Dermot Wilson as  "Probably the best dry fly man in England, and certainly the nicest. Everything is made clear without condescsion and with abundant humour. Dermot Wilson is the ultimate debunker" of the Dry-Fly cult (Bailey 1990 p58-61). Wilson's hospitality enabled Ted to experience chalk-stream fly fishing at its best, and compare fishing for wild brown trout on freestone Dartmoor rivers with fishing on chalk streams under a set of restrictive historical rules, often for stocked fish.

It felt wrote Ted, like 'performing in an old English mystery play'.  As the years passed, Ted came to recognise the limitations of chalk-stream dry-fly fishing: "'Dry Fly Fishing', he told [his editor] Reid, was 'the English Art', but only if you accepted that England meant Hampshire, and that the only rivers were the 'elite trout streams', and the only fish worth catching were their elite trout. And only if you were the kind of fisherman who brought an 'attitude of detachment' to the river, ... Respect the rule; accept what is not done. All this made 'this regime of the Dry Fly' remind him of 'typical attitudes to poetic form'."  [emphasis in original] (Wormald 2022 p 243-247).

It's interesting that Ted Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College, but transferred to reading Anthropology which may have given him a framework to appreciate the cultural tradition surrounding dry-fly fishing. The distinguished social anthropologist Mary Douglas has written a penetrating analysis of the influence of 'sportmanship' on the promotion of dry-fly fishing over fishing with a nymph or wet fly from the 1880s: The English idea of the sportsman is morally laden with strong pretensions to virtue. The sportsman is trustworthy, essentially fair and ethically worthy. And the true sportsman deserves a worthy, educated and selective quarry:  The English trout literature vaunts and debates the cleverness of the trout  (Douglas 2003).

Obviously, I'm not qualified to explain what Hughes meant by 'poetic form' is. (A Google search gave this definition: "a set of rules that dictate the rhyme scheme, structure, rhythm, and meter of a poem"). But even a cursory examination of academic appreciation of Hughes' work is enough to convey what Hughes meant when he applied the phrase to chalk-stream fishing.

Nevertheless, these two very different characters found common cause in their concern over the growing evidence of the effects of pollution and water abstraction on fish populations.  "Dermot Wilson became a founding member of the Salmon and Trout Association Water Resources Group" (Wormald 2022 p 240).

Ted Hughes' father died in June 1981. During the period immediately following the death of his father Ted Hughes strove to overcome as best he could a dull state of depression...He was no longer very successful as an angler, and the thought recurred that the water in which he was casting his line was so poisoned with acids that fish could no longer live in it.  (Moulin 2015)

Sir Jonathan Bate reading “Ted Hughes: Eco-Warrior, or Eco-Worrier?”
Starts at minute 51.

Ted Hughes  "informed himself extensively about the problems caused by pollution in the Devon rivers near where he lived for much of his adult life. These articles provided the empirical evidence behind his campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s against the pollution of the Devon rivers where he fished... Ted also uses the vocabulary of aquatic science to enrich and expand his poetic lexicon. [His] poetry shows a diverse blend of scientific terms, meticulous first-hand observation and archetypal myth. It is clear that freshwater biology was instrumental in the creation of his most riverine poetry."  (Reddick 2014).

Ted was acutely aware of the decline in the Taw and Torridge (Gifford 2021, Inniss 2013). In 1994 he became one of the original trustees, and later President, of the Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT) (The Westcountry Rivers Trust Story nd), with headquarters at Rain-Charm House, presumably named after one of Hughes' poems. (Reddick 2013 p361)

Arlin Rickard, the first director of WRT, recalls that " after we had pored over the spreadsheets Ted would fix me with his eye and ask, “Yes that’s all very well but, how many extra fins will it mean in the river?” He was right, of course"  ( Rickard 2021).

The Westcountry Rivers Trust is not simply a conservation organisation, it runs the Westcountry Angling Passport  scheme:  "The Angling Passport Scheme offers fishing for wild brown trout, sea trout, salmon, grayling and coarse fish in unrivalled surroundings. There are 38 beats available as Token Fisheries and also the extensive Dartmoor Fishery on the East and West Dart and tributaries."

I'm lucky enough to manage with Russell Weston (MD Snowbee UK Ltd) one of these beats - the Upper Yealm Fishery. We feel it's important for visitors and local anglers to have a good chance of catching a wild brown trout.

The  catch reports  show that an increasing number of anglers use the Dry-Dropper rig. It's roots go back to the middle of the 19th century as an effective way of catching trout on South Devon rivers including the Yealm.

Local author Kennneth Dawson in his book Successful Fishing for Salmon and Sea Trout (1951), remarked that:   "... in the Yealm good sea trout up to 4-5 lbs. can be taken by day on very small flies ..."

In an online event earlier this year, Mark Wormald describes Ted Hughes' immersion in sea trout and sea-trout fishing (Ted Hughes Society 2022). Hughes owned a copy of Lemon Grey's  Torridge Fishery (1957), and fished a part of the river described in the book. Grey describes fishing for sea trout during the day:  "I believe that a slightly dragging dry fly will bring them in the day-time better than anything. What would put down a trout seems to arouse a peal [sea trout] - but, of course, it must be done artistically."

There are two unusual elements in Grey's method; firstly catching sea trout during the day - dusk or after dark is the geneally recommended time to fish for sea trout. And secondly, 'dragging' the dry fly -  Much has been made of the importance of avoiding drag in fly-fishing books and articles  (Kenyon 2020e).

In West Country Fly Fishing (1983), Roy Buckingham describes catching sea trout during the day on a dry fly skittered across the surface like a sedge. He goes into greater detail in a 2008 article published after his retirement.

Ted Hughes appreciated the skill of these anglers:  "Fishing the summer run of sea trout in low water by day can be a fascinating business. Here you see the real artists - with a dry fly, or a nymph in the deep holes, or a Tup's dangled across the sunken spill of of broken water in the neck of a pool."  (Hughes in Voss Bark 1983 p36).

This essay describes in more detail how Soltau's (1847) 'twitched' dry fly has been used to catch sea trout in South Devon during the day (Kenyon 2020c).

In the first half of the last century some Devonshire anglers viewed sea trout as a piscivorous pest that should be removed to protect brown trout stocks. Thankfully there has been a Change in attitudes to sea trout : Salmo trutta's lifestyle choices  (Kenyon 2020b)

Anne Voss Bark MBE (1928-2012) owned the Arundell Arms Hotel (Lifton, Devon)
West Country Rivers Trust founder &
Regional Fisheries Advisory Committee chair

The clear message in  West Country Fly Fishing (1983) was that the doors of the Arundell Arms hotel in Lifton, Devon were open to wet- and dry-fly anglers. Dermot Wilson, Mike Weaver and David Pilkington described fly fishing in a manner that allowed - in later years - easy acceptance of the Dry-Dropper technique on West Country rivers. For example, in the last 10 minutes of a  conversation with Dr. Phill Williams, , Mike Weaver (2012) recommended fishing early in the season with two flies, a weighted fly on the point and a Klinkhåmer on the dropper.

This transition was seamless because of the non-confrontational style of the authors assembled by Anne Voss Bark, described as  A woman of charm and acumen. Anne had a quiet, modest charm concealing the acumen, enthusiasm and energy that enabled her to excel in everything she did (Tavistock Times Gazette 2012). She deserved her inclusion in John Bailey's  The Great Anglers.

Views on Dry-Fly Purism: Ancient & Modern

"Those of us who will not in any circumstances cast except over rising fish are sometimes called ultra purists and those who occasionally will try to tempt a fish in position but not actually rising are termed purists... and I would urge every dry fly fisher to follow the example of these purists and ultra purists." (Halford 1913 p 69-70)

I grew up in Yorkshire, and fished with a team of wet flies: Greenwell's Glory, Partridge and Orange, and Snipe and Purple. In 1958, the 'standard text' for youngsters was published - Maurice Wiggin's  Teach Yourself Fly Fishing  with subversive chapters such as  Neither Dry nor Wet , and the outrageous  Fly-cum-float  based on the heretical bubble-float technique introduced by Alexander Wanless - very encouraging if you only had a fixed-spool reel and spinning rod ! Wiggin put another idea into an impressionable young mind:  It is possible to fish for sea trout, in daylight, even when the water is clear, with the upstream dry fly  (Wiggin 1958 p174).

Bernard Venables' interview, in the late 1960s, of a chalkstream dry-fly angler shows
the blinkered and pompous attitude of the southern chalk-stream stockie bashers  towards wet-fly fishing (Smith 2023).

Robert Smith in his book  The North Country Fly: Yorkshire's Soft Hackle Tradition  (2015), describes the piscatorial hinterland that I inhabited in my early teens:  The Edwardian 'dry fly only' code that gripped the southern counties of England fortunately never took a firm hold in the northern counties...The doctrine of dry fly only - fishing on heavily managed streams for an artificially large population of stocked trout, was seen in the north for what it was - a contrived method of angling governed by a contrived creed.  (Smith 2015 p254). I'm not sure that the method was 'contrived', but the creed merits that description.

Then I moved to South Devon where the dry fly had been used since the early years of the last century. Henry Williamson described dry-fly fishing in Devon from the late 1920s to the early 30s; he aspired to be a dry-fly Purist. Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire, but fished for wild brown trout on Devon rivers; he made some perceptive comments about the creed of purism after fishing on premier chalkstream beats with Dermot Wilson.

In 1983, Anne Voss Bark edited  West Country Fly Fishing  which took an impartial view of fly-fishing techniques with separate chapters written by anglers experienced in fishing for wild brown trout with either wet or dry flies on Dartmoor rivers.

Conrad Voss Bark's closing chapter  As Time Went By  discusses local Devon authors - Pulman (1851), Cutcliffe (1863) and Rabley (1910) - who fished upstream with a two-fly Dry-Dropper technique in earlier times.

Nevertheless, to this day, the Dry-Dropper  "is not a method you would even think of using on an English chalkstream, where if you were found fishing with more than one fly you would probably finish hanging from the nearest tree."  (Goddard 2003 p127-9).

Over the years, the insouciance of some chalk-stream anglers led to stasis in fly-fishing's development. For example, the  "attitudes of dry fly purists such as Halford, his peers and successors played a major part in the strangulation of the development of nymph fishing" (Lawton 2005 p23).

This problem was identified right from the outset by several well-informed angling commentators with many years of chalkstream experience including Robert Bright Marston the son of Edward Marston, a partner in the publishing firm of Samson Low, Marston & Co, Robert worked for his father’s firm during the period 1878 to 1886 (Schullery 2014; Lawton 2002 p113), and was a director in 1903 (Tod 1903 p ix-x).

R.B. Marston & Regional Fly-Fishing Styles

Schullery regarded R.B. Marston (1853-1927) as an important fly-fishing scholar. He probably had an influential voice in selecting books which highlighted the richness and overlap of regional fly-fishing techniques across the North Country, West Country and the Midlands. In 1886 they published, Halford's long-awaited first book  Floating Flies and How to Dress Them  for anglers on southern chalk streams. This was the first and last of Halford's books published by the company.

Francis M. Walbran

Francis M. Walbran

In 1883, Samson Low, Marston & Co released a revised edition of Michael Theakston's  British Angling Flies  that was first published in 1862.  F.M. Walbran (1851-1909) edited the revised edition. Walbran was a member of the FlyFishers' Club, and a close friend of its founder R.B. Marston.

Walbran is considered to be an important figure in establishing the North Country style of fly-tying and flyfishing. But he also had experience of southern chalkstreams, as well as fishing with Halford on several occasions in Yorkshire. He clearly admired Halford, and included twelve flies from Halford's 1889 book Dry Fly Fishing-In Theory and Practice in his own work published ten years later assuring readers:  that for the purpose for which they are intended, no better can possibly be obtained   (Walbran 1899 p26). Robert Smith considers that Theakston and Walbran  were the first leading exponents of the use of the dry-fly on the turbulent rivers of the North.  (Smith 2015 p67-9)

Writing before Halford published his first book in 1886, Walbran appreciated that there was a place for the dry fly on Yorkshire rivers:   Owing to the streamy nature of the majority of the Yorkshire rivers, spider flies sparsely dressed generally answer the best, although there are certain conditions of water and weather when it will be found more profitable to employ a winged pattern at the end of a fine-drawn gut cast and floated dry, as in the Hampshire style (Walbran's Preface to Theakston 1883 pxi ).

In a long Note added to this 1883 reprint of Theakston by F.W.W(albran) describes the construction, and use, of dry flies introduced by David Foster of Ashbourne in the middle of the 19th century:  On the more sluggish southern streams, a system which is styled “dry flyfishing” is greatly practised, and on several occasions on the Yorkshire rivers I have taken a good dish of trout by resorting to this plan,...wading carefully up stream, the angler watches for the indications of a rising fish on the smooth gliding water at the head of a stream, and carefully measuring the distance with his eye, delivers his single fly lightly about a couple of feet above his intended victim, very seldom has the cast to be repeated, if your pattern is a correct imitation of the fly upon the water  (Theakston 1883 p120-121).

It is interesting how Walbran's Note contains the essential elements of dry-fly fishing described some years later by Halford: casting upstream to a rising trout with a single dry fly to imitate the natural fly. Walbran drowned in a fishing accident in 1901 many years before Halford published his views on dry-fly purism in 1913.

T.E. Pritt

In later years, Samson Low, Marston & Co published two books that provide contrasting approaches to dry-fly purism: T.E. Pritt's  North-country flies (1886), and in 1887, a second edition of James Ogden'sOgden on fly tying, etc  first published in 1879.

Pritt, like Cutcliffe in the West Country, championed the hackled over winged fly. But Pritt's flies were sparsly hackled and fished subsurface; whereas Cutcliffes's Devonshire flies were heavily hackled to float.

Pritt commented on this evolution in fly design:  In one important matter the fancy of Yorkshire anglers, and indeed of anglers all over the north of England, has undergone a change during the past twenty-five years. It is now conceded that a fly dressed hacklewise is generally to be preferred to a winged imitation.   Nevertheless, Pritt appreciated the need to fish with a dry fly on southern chalkstreams, and on the Driffield Beck, a northern chalk stream: The Driffield fish are not to be caught by a novice ; the angler must have served an apprenticeship to dry-fly fishing  , and (Pritt 1886 p20, 57).

In later years Pritt criticized dry-fly purism by way of defending the skills involved in wet-fly fishing. Pritt died in 1895, and his place as an influential wet-fly fisherman was taken by E.M. Tod who was a much harsher critic of Halford. Hayter considers that Tod's review of Halford's second book  Dry Fly Fishing In Theory and Practice (1899), was the most critical written to date of Halford's books; Tod wrote of the self-satisfied complacency of dry-fly experts: I am inclined to feel that there is a good deal that is rather artificial in the dry-fly business, with all its punctilio  (Hayter 2002 p114, 173-4).

James Ogden: The unwitting father of dry-fly purism?

It is perhaps the followers of a Midlands angler James Ogden who to this day exhibit the most extreme form of dry-fly purism. Ogden claimed that: It is well known that I am the inventor of Floating Flies  (Ogden 1887 piii). Ogden claims to have invented floating flies in 1839: Some forty years ago, when I introduced my floating flies, ... By changing my end fly (not intending to do so) I have occasionally made a cast with a dry fly. In those days it was said this would scare a rising trout and cause him to leave off feeding. On the other hand, I found while my fly was still on the surface, without a ripple, it has tempted the fish to seize it, after I have been throwing a sunk fly over him, in vain, scores of times. (Ogden 1887 p31)

Ogden continued to fish with three wet flies (Ogden 1887 p36), but used a single fly on a short 6 foot leader when using a floating fly;  not allowing it to drag, which is the grand secret of using floating flies   (Ogden 1887 p11, 32-33). Dr. Andrew Herd ties Ogden's Mayfly pattern in the video on this page.

This  newspaper article  reports, with considerable local pride, the reenactment on 5th June 2015 to mark the 150th anniversary of the day in 1865 when the: Derbyshire angler James Ogden cast the first dry fly onto the River Wye [a limestone river in Derbyshire], and ever since that day the famous Haddon Estate fishery has had a dry fly only rule on its rivers – the first river in the world to introduce such a fly fishing technique, and one of the few remaining rivers in England still to preserve its exclusivity.  

Originally Ogden's dry fly represented a Mayfly, and was introduced as a conservation measure to replace the local tradition of fishing during the Mayfly season with the natural insect which the river keeper felt was responsible for depleting trout stocks in the river (Ogden p28-34).

The Peacock, Rowsley Bridge, where Ogden's meeting in 1865 with the Duke of Rutland's steward
led to the introduction of the dry-fly rule on the estate

Nowadays, the Haddon Estate fishing rules involve: dry fly only, catch and release, and no wading. In an acerbic account, Peter Hayes agrees that the dry-fly only rule originated on the Haddon Hall estate in Derbyshire in 1865, rather than on southern chalk streams; it continues to this day with strict rules about what constitutes a dry fly: they have gone even further in sackcloth and ashes than the most purist adherents to the dry fly on the Test and Itchen, since they refuse to accept the Klinkhamer or any parachute-hackled fly as a dry fly.  [emphasis added] (Hayes 2016 p24).

The Klinkhåmer represents an emerger; it sits with its abdomen under the surface supported by a parachute hackle, and thus fails Halford's definition of a dry fly: There is no such thing known as a half-way house between dry and wet-fly fishing; either the fly is floating, in which case it is dry-fly fishing, or it is more or less submerged, and is wet-fly fishing  (Halford 1913 p61).

Apparently, the Klinkhåmer is acceptable on southern chalkstreams. In 2023, Simon Cooper organised a online survey amongst readers of his  Life on a Chalkstream newsletter to find the Greatest Fly of All Time the Klinkhåmer beat a field of possibilities that consisted of the Adams, Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear, Greenwell’s Glory, and Pheasant Tail Nymph.

From 2003, the Haddon Estate stopped annual stocking of 2,000 2lb brown trout, and in-river feeding. I discuss the effects of stocking a North Devon river by Henry Williamson in pursuit of dry-fly purism here.

Marston's defence of the wet fly

R. B. Marston, Editor of the Fishing Gazette from 1879 to 1927

From the earliest days criticism of Halford's dry-fly purism was expressed by influential figures including his publisher and friend R.B. Marston editor of the influential weekly magazine   The Fishing Gazette from 1878 until his death in 1927, and founder of The Flyfishers' Club in 1884 (Hayter 2002 p107; Hayes 2016 p34-5).

Marston  "stood out for the rest of his life against the idea that the dry fly had banished the wet fly from the chalkstreams"  Marston wrote that:  "There is no great gulf fixed between the two systems" (Hayter 2002 p113-114).

This attitude informed R.B. Marston's review of Halford's  Floating Flies and How to Dress Them; he wrote:  There are days - too many of them - when the fish of a Hampshire stream will not look at a floating winged fly; but change it for a hackle fly and fish it upstream in the same way, only just under instead of on the surface, and you turn the tables on the fish  (Hayter 2002 p113). This was the tactic used in North Devon by Henry Williamson who started fly fshing as a Halfordian purist but reverted to a sunk fly when confronted with trout feeding on nymphs.

Like Marston, the West Country authors Cutcliffe (1863,1883) and Soltau (1847) avoided the need to change between dry and wet flies by fishing with two flies simultaneously - a 'bob-fly' on the surface above an 'end fly', or 'stretcher' which fished beneath the suface. Nowadays that arrangement is called a Dry-Dropper.

But Halford would have none of this blurring the line between dry- and wet-fly fishing, and ignored this voice of moderation from his friend R.B. Marston who was well-placed to see the trouble ahead:  "There is no such thing known as a half-way house between dry and wet-fly fishing; either the fly is floating, in which case it is dry-fly fishing, or it is more or less submerged, and is wet-fly fishing."  (Halford 1913 p61)

Francis Francis

Francis Francis and his gillie
Frontpiece - A Book on Angling

Perhaps Francis Francis (1822–1886) was the one person who could have influenced Halford. He was described as cheerful, bright, sympathetic, and independent (Watkins nd) which may have enabled him to deal with the rigid side of Halford's personality. Francis was editor of The Field, had an established reputation as a fishing writer with the publication of A Book on Angling in 1867; he was 22 years older than Halford when they met in 1879 (Hayter 2002 p71). Francis fished wet-fly or dry-fly as the conditions demanded, and continued to catch trout on sunk flies until shortly before his death in 1884.

Francis used a dry fly long before 1857 when he published an article in the  Field  describing the advantages of fishing with a dry fly on the Itchen: "On rough windy days they get drowned, and trout will take a wet fly as well as a dry one, or perhaps better" (Hills 1921b p127). In conversation with fellow anglers towards the end of his life he remarked "I wish the dry fly had never been invented!" (Hayter 2002 p129). This has been interpreted to be a criticism of the way in which dry-fly fishing was moving under Halford's influence. I take it to mean that he didn't understand all the fuss about dry versus wet flies - he had been using them dry since the 1850s - even if they sank they remained effective.

The Marquess of Granby

The Marquess of Granby
8th Duke of Rutland

The Marquess of Granby (1852 – 1925) is the most experienced fly-fisherman listed amongst Fifty Leaders of British Sport by Elliott (1904 p71) because of his knowledge of, and involvement in, trout fishing  "on which he has written a delightful and instructive volume"

Granby (1899) warns against sticking rigidly to Halford's single dry-fly creed; "On a favourable day it is well worth the angler's while to put on a couple of flies instead of one only, and to fish either up or down stream as seems best to him. It would be folly on such an occasion to be tied by any hard-and-fast rule condemning one to use only a single fly or to fish solely up-stream". (Granby 1899 p27). Please do not follow that advice on a chalk stream today unless you have the riparian owner's permission, or the fishery rules allow it ! But of course, it was a traditional method of fly fishing for wild brown trout on West Country rivers.

Hayter describes how Halford ignored these voices of moderation from his chalk-stream peers (Hayter 2002 p113).

Halford and Skues: Inventors or Influencers?

It is clear that Halford did not invent dry-fly fishing from scratch; he promoted fly fishing exclusively with a single dry fly, and perhaps more importantly, developed a code of practice to be followed by 'dry-fly fishermen' on chalk streams. In modern parlance, Halford woud be called an 'influencer' who was very successful in persuading others (by one means or another) to adopt his way of fishing with a dry fly. Maybe he made fly fishing for stocked trout easier by cutting the earlier physical link between the floating dry fly and sub-surface wet fly.

Skues was also an influencer; he championed fishing with a single sub-surface fly, albeit in response to Halford's rejection of wet flies, and the earlier two-fly technique described by, for example, Pulman and Soltau who fished for wild brown trout. Skues was relatively less successful as an influencer because his technique was more difficult to master than Halford's.

Halford's biographer Hayter regretted that:  "The puzzle over Halford and the wet fly has never been resolved"  (Hayter 2002 p127). Taverner put it bluntly:  "Halford throughout his life did not understand the wet fly and as he grew older he wished to understand it less, until he adopted an attitude of hostility to its use on chalk streams ... the wet fly was in his opinion unfruitful, positively harmful, or, illegitimate according to the need of the argument."  (Taverner 1933 p33).

Skues may have realised that Halford had a tendency to display 'concrete or literal thinking', and that he stuck rigidly to beliefs based solely on personal experience. Skues expressed it thus: "Halford was not the man to go back and continually to revise his opinions and to bring them up to date in the light of later experience. Once having established a proposition to his satisfaction it became fact." (Skues, Flyfishers' Journal, Winter 1935 reproduced in Robson 1998 p212). Skues may have found it difficult to sit down with Halford to calmly discuss their different points of view, and explore a possible compromise.

In the foreword to Minor Tactics  Skues (1914) introduced the nymph  "to be used as a supplement to, and in no sense to supplant or rival, the beautiful art of which Mr. F. M. Halford is the prophet."   Soltau's and Cutcliffe's Dry-Dropper combination of 'stream' and 'bob' flies would have been a compromise to solve the subsequent argument between followers of Halford and Skues over the use of artificial nymphs that culminated in a debate organized by the Flyfishers Club in 1938 many years after Halford's death, and the deaths of his earliest critics.

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Did Skues Know About the Dry-Dropper?

The contents of Skues' library (Hayter 2013 Appendix 10) suggest that he had an extensive knowledge of fly-fishing techniques that combine the use of wet and dry flies, including the use of what has been described as a Dry-Dropper rig (Lawton 2005 p18).

Before his death in 1949, Skues corresponded with W.H. Lawrie (Hayter 2013 p67), but most of their letters were lost (Robson 1998 p 199). We don't know if they discussed Lawrie's  The Book of the Rough Stream Nymph which addressed one of Skues long-term interests - fishing a dry fly in combination with a nymph .

Berls records that in 1899, in a short article in  The Field,  Skues recognised that eventually there would be a reconciliation of dry - and wet-fly fishing: In the past, he (Skues) observed, "anglers used to get good baskets on Itchen and Test with the wet fly. Thev will have to come back to it again. Someday they will learn to combine . . . wet-fly science and dry-fly art . . . ".  (Berls 1999)

Skues would have been aware that the use of two flies - a 'bob' or floating fly above a 'bottom' or point fly - was an effective technique on the River Test from the early years of the 19th century (Hills 1941).

In the Foreword to C.F. Walkers' Angling Letters of G E M Skues  John D.D. Evans recalls fishing with Skues on a day when a fish, clearly feeding on nymphs and duns, would not take any of the nymphs and dry flies offered by Evans. With a  curious wicked twinkle in his "good" eye  Skues asked Evans if he had any of his Usk flies with him. Skues found one and told Evans to  Put it on as intended as dropper fly, and keep the nymph you have on as tail fly  Both flies were  thoroughly wetted  . The fish took the Usk fly on the dropper. Skues remarked:  I knew it could be done. After all, they used to catch them that way a hundred years ago.   Skues :  remarked rather sadly afterwards what a pity it was he couldn't put it on record. The nymph controversy was then at its height and he feared that this instance of the revival of an art commonly practised a hundred years ago might add fuel to the flames.  (Walker 1975 pix-x)

Hills make a very good point when considering the reputation of those who fly fished before Halford developed his method of dry-fly fishing:   "It has been the fashion of the early dry fly fishers to speak disparagingly of their immediate predecessors. They are represented as clumsy floggers of the water, monotonously and unintelligently pitching two flies downstream on heavy gut, waiting for a trout more silly than usual to lay hold. They have been described not only as incredibly incompetent, but as lacking in all fishing sense and all river knowledge..I refuse to believe that it was true of all or of most."  (Hills 1941 p34).

Colonel Peter Hawker

In a diary entry for 12th April 1814, Col. Peter Hawker recorded: "Went out fly fishing, and, notwithstanding a bright sun the whole time, I in a few hours killed 36 trout. N.B. — My flies were (what I always use) the yellow dun at bottom, and red palmer bob." (Hawker 1893 Vol 1 p94).

Hawker was an experienced, and successful chalk-stream angler: "The bags of trout caught by Colonel Hawker in the river Test at Longparish are only recorded occasionally, and the entries that are to be found under this head but roughly indicate the numbers taken by his rod. The trout killed in the fifty years of the Colonel's sporting life could not (from the allusions to angling in his Diary), at a low estimate, have been less than twelve thousand "  (Hawker 1893 Vol 2 p374).

The Reverend Richard Durnford fished the Test from 1809 to 1819. "He used a single fly, except on windy days, when he used a dropper. He did not like it, but he says that the dropper steadies the tail fly, and in a strong wind makes it more visible...He kept his line taut, and the dropper on the top of the water...1 imagine that he cast across stream, and then kept his line tight either by drawing his fly or letting the current carry it round. I am pretty sure he did not cast upstream"  (Hills 1941 p29).

Charles Kingsley

In sharp contrast, the Devon born Reverend Charles Kingsley insisted on casting upstream to avoid the fires of Hell: "The next mistake, natural enough to the laziness of fallen man, is that of fishing down-stream, and not up. What Mr. Stewart says on this point should be read by every tyro."   (Kingsley (1858).

In 1858, Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875) gave a wide audience a picture of fishing on chalk streams, and Dartmoor, this was in the years before Halford and Skues developed their separate dry-fly and nymph fly-fishing paradigms. Kingsley continued to use two flies cast upstream when he fished on chalk streams; a 'floating' fly resting on the surface, and the sunk fly beneath (Kenyon 2022b). His article,  Chalk Stream Studies  published in Fraser's Magazine in 1858, was "read and loved " by Skues (1921 p104-106). He was also praised by the Marquess of Granby (1899) for bringing fly-fishing to a wide audience.

James and Richard Perrott

James Perrott in 1862, age 47
From (Devon Perspectives undated) The birth of Dartmoor tourism.

James Perrott (1815-1895) and his son Richard (1840-1936) were fishing guides on Dartmoor rivers from the middle of the 19th to the early 20th century. They fished on Dartmoor during a period of rapid change in fly-fishing philosophy and technical advances.

Unfortunately, like many experienced local anglers, they left very few details on their fishing techniques, but Richard Perrott made a very telling comment about flies for Dartmoor trout to a newspaper reporter in 1932.

James Perrott and Charles Kingsley were close friends in the 1840s when both men were in their thirties; "he was very intimate in the early forties, and he always called him “Mr. Kingsley” in speaking of him. (Doveton 1895). Burbridge (2021) confirms that they were regular companions; it is reasonable to suppose that their fly-fishing techniques were similar, and typical of the mid 19th century (Kenyon 2022b). James Perrott's career as a guide began in the 1840s; he  "was for over 50 years a Dartmoor touring guide, a renown angler and a maker of fine fishing tackle and flies, such as Blue Grizzle, Red Palmer, Blue Upright and Red Maxwell"  Burbridge (2021). Taff Price remarks that "The West Country seems to have a penchant for the hackled fly. .. the Maxwell Red and the Maxwell Blue .. are probably not so popular .. but they do have their adherents in parts of Devon and Cornwall" (Taff Price 1976).

Delicate split-wing dry flies recommended for chalk streams
by Lord Grey of Fallowden in Fly Fishing

Richard Perrott (1840-1936) followed in his father's footsteps, and no doubt benefitted from his father's contacts. His  "finest skill was the making of small, intricate flies for fishermen. Among his customers for flies were, Charles Dickens, Baring Gould, Lord Grey of Falloden [author of Fly Fishing (1899), R.D. Blackmore and Charles Kingsley"  (Burbidge 2021b).

This list of customers shows that Richard Perrott had the skills needed to construct the delicate split-wing dry flies (shown here) that were popular with anglers, such as Lord Grey of Falloden, who fished on chalk streams. It is reasonable to suggest that Perrott used Halford's book Floating Flies and How to Dress Them to construct these flies. On Dartmoor rivers, the Perrotts used larger traditional West Country hackled flies without wings. Towards the end of his life Richard Perrott commented that:  "The modern fly is too small. Fish rise to them but do not take.”  (Western Times interview 1932 )

Walter Gallichan (1861-1946) knew both Perrotts which means that he probably fished on Dartmoor between 1877 and 1895 - the year 'Old Perrott' died. In his chapter  The Rivers of Dartmoor  he wrote:   "In my day Old Perrott, "the Dartmoor guide," and his son Richard, were anglers of great renown in this district. Perrott the younger was a walking encyclopedia of Dartmoor fishing lore and natural history, a capital companion and a good hand with the fly rod. Perrott's flies were always in demand, and I have proved their worth in the Teign and other Dartmoor rivers."  (Gallichan 1908 p46-7)

Before Halford's dry-fly 'revolution', working the 'bob' fly was common on southern rivers (Grey Drake, 1860 p10). "The fact is that only one dropper can be properly worked, the perfect working of a drop-fly consisting in its skipping, or " dribbling " along the surface of the water amongst the ripples, and thus offering a sort of imperfect representation of a half-drowned insect endeavouring to rise from the water."   (Cholmondeley Pennell 1870 p84)

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The 'twitched' dry fly comes of age

To make a dry fly twitch:  "Cast down and across. Let the fly drift a bit. Lift the rod tip slightly[and gently wiggle it] until the fly twitches, then lower the rod tip and let the fly drift quietly again , kicking out line as needed. And though a downstream presentation gives you more control of the fly and makes twitching easier, you can, if you must, twitch a fly with an upstream cast by jerking your rod hand upward as you strip in slack line."  To create the twitch some anglers lift the rod tip, others move it horizontally (Kraimer 2022).

" When you are casting to a rising fish, cast upstream of the rise and twitch the fly subtly just before it enters the strike zone. The trout will usually take after the twitch, as the fly is drifting quietly. When you are prospecting, a twitch or two per drift will usually raise more fish." (Hurteau 2020).

Twitching a dry fly was a technique described by several 19th century authors - Soltau,  Fitzgibbon and 'Hi-Regan' as well as Theakston.   The American fly-fishing historian Paul Schullery (2006) includes a useful chapter  (Skippers, Skaters, Dappers, and Dancers)  that distinguishes between the different ways that artificial flies have been moved to mimic the behaviour of a live insect on, and above, the surface. He quotes Hewett Wheatley's recommendation when fishing an artificial moth to  Add a tremulous of the wrist, and you will communicate that fluttering movement on the surface of the water, which is peculiary attractive.  [emphasis added]. But Wheatley quickly proceeds to express disapproval of fishing after dark with an artificial moth  For myself I love not the sport... Away! ye Elves of Darkness! — Give me daylight and honest angling! — A dear conscience — clear hours — clear water!   (Wheatley 1849 p108-9, 118).

Deliberate movement fell out of favour with the development of dry-fly fishing on English chalkstreams:  "A dry fly, unlike a nymph or reservoir lure, is a static object: it is not fished in jerks or twiches or hops (at least not usually) and so it must attract fish solely by its shape, size and combination of colours"  (Fitton 1992 p94).

In addition,  "The drag-free float is a cornerstone of the dry-fly technique and it is one of the features which distinguishes the dry-fly method from the older floating-fly technique" (Herd 2003 p281).

"There is nothing that will spook a trout and send him running for cover quicker than a poorly cast fly that drags as it approaches him" (Goddard 2003 p90)

I have even read that:   "micro-drag, so minute that we can’t see it, can put a fish off taking our fly." But the same author immediately added  "Yet there are many times when a bit of subtle or even vigorous movement can induce a take from a fish,"

John Goddard (1923-2012)

But in particular circumstances, there is still a place for the twitched dry fly on chalkstreams. John Goddard recommended twitching a dry fly to deal with 'difficult educated chalkstream trout':  "Cast your fly a yard or so above the rising trout, and just before it reaches him give a quick but short lift with the rod tip. This in effect activates the fly on the surface and moves it an inch or so, fooling the trout into thinking it is a fly struggling to escape.

This has to be carried out very delicately - move the fly more than an inch or so and you are likely to spook him. Two of my fishing buddies on the river Kennet, Neil Patterson (author of  Chalkstream Chronicles)  and Ron Clark, are absolute masters of this technique, and I have seen them take many all-but-impossible trout by this method"  Goddard (2003 p93). The need to add a twitch to cope with educated trout justifies this minor infringement of the drag-free drift chalkstream practice.

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Charles Ritz: A challenge to Halfordian doctrine

Charles C. Ritz

Charles Ritz (1891 – 1976) fished the chalk streams of Normandy, and those in Southern England. Ernest Hemingway called him, "One of the finest fly fisherman I know".

Ritz is perhaps best known for his fly-rods designs (Schwiebert 1979). For me, the most interesting sections in his book, A Fly Fishers Life (1972), are his reports that moving a dry fly was a technique used by a variety of experienced chalk-stream anglers.

Ritz makes several fleeting references to moving dry, and wet flies, that challenged the prevailing chalk stream doctrine of drag-free drift. For example: "Once the fly is on the water, you must be ready for anything at any moment. In consequence, it is of advantage to let the fly drift downstream of the fish and then slowly tighten the line to make a very slight drag over at least a yard, still in hope of a rise" (Ritz 1972 p130).

I think Ritz adopted this technique after watching Albert Godart fish the River Andelle in 1947; Godart was a professional fly-fishing instructor (Ritz 1972 p169-171). "Godart, the great expert, often often ends his drift with a delicate drag"  [emphasis added] (Ritz 1972 p146).

Godart "sometimes likes to give an appearance of life to the fly with a slight movement of the rod tip, a speciality of Belgian anglers" (Ritz 1972 p170). This is an abbreviated version of the technique described by Soltau in 1847. Simon Cooper remarks that the chalk-stream angler  Oliver Kite   " believed in stiff hackles that would ride the fly high on the surface, on its tiptoes, allowing breeze and current to give it movement that trout would find irresistible"  (Cooper 2020). At least that would avoid violating chalk-stream rules about deliberate movement.

Ritz also imparts movement when fishing a sub-surface nymph. Ritz relates how he read, without success, the standard texts from Skues to Sawyer on how to fish the nymph: "This went on till the day I watched Sawyer fishing an English river." (Ritz 1972 p132). Sawyer explained :"When I thoght that my nymph had passed the fish without being taken I slightly tightened my line to give animation to the lure, which often incites a fish to take" ( emphasis in original, Ritz 1972 p134).

Ritz also defies convention by fishing two dry flies, three feet apart, during the evening rise on a chalk stream: "The fly is fishing just as much when it is floating as when half submerged. Drag is often an asset" (Ritz 1972 p134).

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Leonard Wright: Surface movement & the induced take

The importance of dry-fly movement was rediscovered by the American fly-fishing author Leonard M. Wright, and more recently popularised by John Gierach (2005), and Tom Rosenbauer (2008).

Leonard Wright was a bold independent thinker,  "sadly little known and appreciated in Britain" (Hammond 1992 p18). He confronted head-on Halford's instruction that a dry fly, representing an upwinged mayfly, must always be fished dead drift without any movement. In his provocative book Fly-Fishing Heresies (1975), Wright commented: "Observation has led me to believe that all but the luckiest mayflies kick and struggle sporadically before they get off the water."

Movement and Educated Trout

Moving the fly is reported to work for American trout that ignore a drag-free drift (Spooner 2018). Heavily "pressured fish have learned to avoid motionless, drag-free flies and will only go for food items that have some life to them"  (Erasmus 2014).

This suggsts that British and American trout can become so educated about the dangers associated with artificial flies that 'movement' must be added to the list of properties (shape, size and colour) before they will accept an artificial fly:  "Green drakes have been hatching now for a month, and as the hatch extends into fall, the fish need extra reassurance before they decide to eat your dry fly. At this point in the hatch, most fish have been stung by a few artificials and become quite distrustful"  (Spooner 2018).

Exaggerated beliefs about the cognitive abilities of trout are not new. They were ridiculed 70 years ago by H.B. McCaskie in his book with the apt title 'The Guileless Trout' (1950 p 78)  : "The belief, or delusion, that the trout is a highly intelligent creature is of comparatively modern origin, since it is a by-product of the development of the dry fly". McCaskie explains how followers of Halford found that when ever more precise imitations "..failed something had to be done in defence of injured pride, and the thwarted angler evolved the theory of a highly educated and shrewdly reasoning adversary ." McCasky realised that the trout's brain is incapable of these cognitive feats based on anthropomorphism. H.B. McCaskie's older brother, Norman, was a close friend of G.E.M. Skues so they were well-aware of Halfordian ultra-purist views.

I discuss the suggestion that 'educated trout' learn to avoid particular artificial trout flies in this essay. One problem with invoking the concept of the 'educated trout' to explain the need for movement of an artificial fly is the lack of evidence about how many times the trout involved had experience of being caught and released in order to learn to discrimate between moving and immobile prey. Here are  my thoughts  on what trout are 'prepared' to learn.

I think that movement together with size and shape are probably important in any trout's ability to recognize food.   "Most predators encounter a large number of different prey species that they have to discriminate from non-prey. The three most commonly used cues are size,  movement and shape" (McFarland 1985 p. 231). Bianco et al (2015) describe brain cells in zebrafish larvae that respond to large, dark, moving spots - the most effective stimuli combination for eliciting their hunting behaviour. Here is my  summary   of their results.

Earlier this century, three best-selling American fly-fishing authors brought twitching a dry fly to the attention of a wider audience.

Ed Engle

Here is Soltau's description of what has returned as a modern technique, the Dry-Dropper with the addition of movement: "Never use more than two flies, one at the end of the collar, called the 'stream-fly', the other about three feet from it, called 'the bob' (Soltau 1847 p38).

Diagram from Soltau (1847)
Trout Flies of Devon and Cornwall and How and When to Use Them

Soltau provides this diagram, and a detailed description of how to fish the 'bob fly' and 'stream fly' across-and-upstream for brown trout:  "Commence by throwing the fly across the tail of the stickle, thus:—A. is the fisherman, B. the banks of the river, C. the tail of the stickle, D. its commencement. A. first throws his fly across to E. then draws it with a kind of tremulous motion to F. then to G. and back to H. A. then moves on, and takes up his position at J. casts over to K. and across to L. tries again at M. and hooks a fish. If it is small, as too many of our West Country fish happen to be, it may be raised instanter, gently out of the water, and deposited in the basket. A. then advances a few paces, and finishes the pool between M. and D."  (Soltau 1847 p51)

Tom Rosenbauer

In 2008 Tom Rosenbauer's article  When Drag is Desirable  (perhaps an unfortunate title!) appeared online in Midcurrent. Rosenbauer uses a 'dapping rig' that recreates, for a modern angler, the advantage of Soltau's method of moving two flies, with one of them acting as an anchor.

Rosenbauer stated that he accidentally came up with this technique: "Tie on a dry that imitates what you’ve seen dipping on the water as usual, then attach a second piece of tippet to the bend of the hook on the dry fly. Fifteen inches to two feet is a good place to start for a length on this lower piece. Then tie a heavily weighted nymph or even a streamer to this piece of tippet. Now make a relatively short cast upstream and across. Let the nymph or streamer sink a little, and then raise the rod tip enough to lift the dry fly off the water. Now, as the whole rig comes even with your position, raise and lower the dry fly so that it just barely touches the surface and then takes off after a quick dip. Keep doing this until too much drag sets in and the flies swing behind you." (See also Rosebauer 2004 p104 & 2011 p183-4).

Rosenbauer described his success with this 'dapping rig' : ...with the nymph acting as an anchor, the parachute could skate more freely because I could lift the dry off the water and just barely skim it across the surface. I also found that, although not many fish took the skating nymph, if I stopped moving the flies and quickly dropped my rod tip to get a dead-drift, they would slam the nymph as often as they took the dry.

Engle and Rosenbauer, as well as earlier authors Soltau, Fitzgibbon and 'Hi-Regan', are using a Dry-Dropper / Duo rig in which the nymph provides an anchor that facilitates control over the dry fly during the 'twitch.

The chalkstream dry-fly angler cannot rely on the nymph to serve as an anchor because the  "dry- fly fisherman never uses more than one fly on his cast at the same time"  (Dewar 1910 p 39). Consequently the Dry-Dropper rig  "certainly is not a method you would even think of using on an English chalkstream, where if you were found fishing with more than one fly you would probably finish hanging from the nearest tree"  (Goddard 2003 p128).

However, several authors have described twitching a single dry fly without help from a nymph acting as an anchor.

John Gierach

This video shows rings emanating from an insect caught in the surface film.

John Gierach addressed a new generation in his 2005 article  Skimming the Surface   published in Field and Stream.  Here is Gierach's more specific advice on how to achieve what Soltau described in 1847 as "imparting to the rod a slight tremulous motion". Gierach advised that the ".. best fly action is an upstream tick so subtle that you almost can’t see it at the end of your leader. Ideally, the fly should move no more than half its hook length. That’s not much more than a hairbreadth when you’re fishing a No. 18 mayfly dun ."

Leonard Wright

Diagram from Wright (1972) Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect

Engle, Rosenbauer and Gierach are not the first Americans to describe moving a dry fly. In 1972 Leonard Wright introduced the 'sudden inch' in his gloriously controversial book Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect.

Like Soltau before him, Wright describes a "simple and effective" method to mimic this behaviour. Wright cast slightly downstream with an upstream mend, and aimed his fly to land "three or four feet" above the fish. He then pulled his fly a short distance upstream"I give my rod a short, sharp, upward twitch which sends the fly darting up current an inch or so. Then I feed out slack line and let the fly float, drag free, for six or eight feet - enough and more to cover the lie of the fish."

There are some differences between Soltau and Wright's technique, both moved their dry flies, but Soltau fished upstream with two flies, Wright downstream with one fly.

Although they lived a century apart, there is a striking similarity between the fates suffered by the ideas and books published by Soltau (1847), and the American Leonard Wright (1975), that promoted the effectiveness of moving a dry fly.

In 2021, when I first saw this video I commented:  "I had to smile when I saw this bang-up-to-date YouTube video that shows that Leonard Wright's ideas, that were seen as blasphemous by traditional anglers when he wrote two books about them in the 1970s, are now mainstream with a much younger generation."

Leonard Wright died in 2001 at the age of 78. In Wright's , obituary "Writer Who Dared to Change Fishing" the New York Times noted that his  "writings about trout fishing were initially seen as blasphemous by traditional anglers". 

This video shows how to create the 'twitch' - a shorter-lived disturbance than that caused by 'drag'.

In my opinion, Wright was wrongly criticized for moving a dry fly in a way that recalled the dragged wet-fly technique so despised by Halford.  "I think that Leonard Wright Jr. is one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked fly fishing authors. Well known to his contemporaries, his works have been “lost” over time"  (Simpson 2020).

However, Wright's insight has influenced a new generation of anglers. For example, Jason G. Freund (2021) was influenced by Leonard Wright's 1972 book . He appreciates an important problem with the prevailing fly-fishing orthodoxy:  "As fly anglers, we all learned that getting a good, drag free drift is the key to catching fish both on dry flies and on nymphs. No doubt there is some truth to that but I think it is an oversimplification and sometimes a hinderance... And we confuse drag - which is bad - with movement which is often a good thing and a way to more accurately imitate natural insects."

The Americans, Leonard Wright and John Gierach, 'twitched' a single dry fly across the surface. In contrast, Soltau, Engle and Rosenbauer fished with two flies; a nymph suspended below a dry fly. The nymph serves as an anchor that allows the angler to lift and replace the dry fly onto the surface of the water, and move the nymph up and down through the water column to 'induce a take', i.e. the sub-surface movement introduced by Frank Sawyer. Soltau's use of an anchoring nymph may improve the realism of the 'twitch'. Soltau described how these bobbing up and down movements of the dry fly on the surface mimicked "the movement of the natural fly, when it alights, rises, and again"

Sea trout

Roy Buckingham - the Head River Keeper at the Arundell Arms hotel from 1969 until his retirement in 2008 - had this to say - in an article he wrote in 2008 - about catching sea trout by day on a 'twitched' dry fly:  "If after two or three casts the fly is refused, cast a little further upstream and retrieve the line a little faster than the current to create a wake on the surface. This will often produce a fish when all else fails." This may seem at odds with the advice to avoid drag when fishing for brown trout.

The author 'Lemon Grey', in his book 'Torridge Fishery', echoes Roy Buckingham's advice about drag  "I believe that a slightly dragging dry fly will bring them in the day-time better than anything. What would put down a trout seems to arouse a peal [sea trout] - but, of course, it must be done artistically." 

In  Sea Trout And Other Fishing Studies  (circa 1922),J.C. Mottram devotes several chapters to tying, and fishing, dry flies for sea trout during the day; he writes:  Sea trout prefer a fly which floats lightly, and buoyantly. They take little notice of the fly when semi-submerged...The fish like a fly which drags without being submerged, and which does not leave a large wake behind it. For this purpose rather long hackles are an advantage... When fishing rippled water a dragged fly should skip from wave to wave, or pass through the wave crest like a silvery ball, and emerge dry at the far side. Such behaviour of the fly is especially attractive to the fish and occurs most often with flies hackled down the body... Unlike brown trout, sea trout take less notice of a fly floated than of one dropped above them, it is an advantage, in fact, almost a necessity, to drop the fly within their field of vision.  (Mottram circa 1922 p108-110, 115).

The surface-tension explanation had been advanced by Hewitt in 1947, several years before Leonard Wright (1952), to explain the effectivess of moving his popular Bivisible flies : "If the dry fly is moved or strikes the water outside the window it causes miniature light explosions which are very visible at long distances. It is these which warn the fish of the approach of insect food and can scarcely fail to attract its attention." He added: "If the fly is moved on the surface beyond the window it makes brilliant light flashes almost like explosions from the point of view of the fish " (quotes from Hewitt, 1947 edition, p 66-7). "

Seventy six years later, a review of research by neuroethogists into the neural circuits underlying prey hunting in larval zebrafish concluded that:  Hunting behavior can be elicited using simple visual stimuli that mimic prey characteristics. The research shows that prey movement, as well as size, is an important cue for triggering hunting behavior (Zhu & Goodhill 2023).

The Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen ( 1907 – 1988) introduced ethological terms - such as sign stimuli / 'triggers'/ key stimuli, and supernormal stimuli - that today give us a scientific framework for understanding instinctive animal behaviours. Recent research suggests that fish are born with a combination of sign stimuli - movement, size and possibly shape - that enables them to locate food items (Kenyon 2020f)

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The Fate of Soltau's book Trout Flies of Devon and Cornwall ..

Soltau's book had no effect on the development of fly-fishing methods outside Devon, but it certainly was of interest to serious collectors of English halieutic literature.

A copy of Soltau's (1847) book was included in Charles Thacher’s gift in 2021 to the American Museum of Fly Fishing. They described his collection of fly-fishing literature in glowing terms:  "Extraordinary. Matchless. Meticulously curated. These are the adjectives which come to the fore in beginning to describe Charles Thacher’s uncommonly generous gift to the American Museum of Fly Fishing of his superb collection of fly fishing literature. Mr. Thacher’s collection is as notable as it is because of two attributes he possesses: first, he is knowledgeable, more knowledgeable in fly fishing literature than a great many book collectors; second, Mr.Thacher is discerning, he knows what merited addition to his collection and what did not."

Another copy was included in the angling library of more than 2,200 volumes in English and French from the 15th to the 20th century formed by Albert Petit (1842-1920) that was bought in its entirety by Jacques de Neuflize (1883-1953) to pre-empt its sale in 1921 after Petit's death. The collection was auctioned by Christie's in 1999: Jacques de Neuflize "was rather better known in the world of high finance and fly-fishing than in bibliophilic circles. He was Regent of the Banque de France and in that capacity negotiated the the Great War lease-lend arrangements with the United States in 1916."  (Christie's 1999).

Soltau's book has been overlooked in the history of fly-fishing literature, and consequently there is very little by way of commentary on its content. However, I did come across this evaluation and context prepared by an archivist Steer to accompany a digitized version of the book which may explain its interest to collectors:

"Fly-fishing in the West Country has a lengthy history. The requisite skills continued to develop in the 19th Century with the emergence of fly fishing clubs, together with the appearance of several books, such as this one, on the subject of fly tying and fly fishing techniques. In Devon and Cornwall, dry-fly fishing acquired an elitist reputation as the only acceptable method of fishing the clearer rivers of the south such as the Exe, Torridge, Mole and Teign. The weeds found in these rivers tend to grow close to the surface, and it was felt necessary to develop new techniques that would keep the fly and the line on the surface of the stream."

"These techniques became the foundation of all later dry-fly developments. This rare and much sought-after book was produced digitally from a copy in the Harvard University Library collection"  Steer (2021) [emphasis added]

Initially I was sceptical of Steer's claim that the techniques described by Soltau were the foundation of later dry-fly developments. But I'm coming slowly round to Steer's view because what Soltau described in 1847 was not his invention - it was a description of existing techniques peculiar to freestone Devon rivers in the mid-19th century that were also described by Pulman (1851) and Cutcliffe (1863). These did eventually give rise to development of the modern Dry Dropper method of using a dry and wet fly simultaneously. This ocurred overseas, independently of Devonians because, in England, attention had turned to chalk stream fly-fishing developments at the end of the century.

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Last revision date: 07/04/2023

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