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My sister recently had a bit of a clear out in her loft and in the process she found some old things of mine, probably acquired in error circa 1972 when she got married and moved out of the family home. The items included half a dozen books that I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager and one in particular that I have been looking for since I moved to my present home, which is near Penton Hook on the Thames. The “Lower Thames” was one of the Fishing Famous Rivers series.
The book, actually it’s a booklet of only 47 pages, was written in 1960 by John Burrett and at two shillings and sixpence was quite an expensive purchase, probably the equivalent of around £10 today. So I guess that I probably nicked it!
Re-reading it is a very short but pleasurable experience that left me wondering where it all went wrong. I was ten years old when this book was written. Each weekend would see us visiting the East End of London on a Green Line bus, catching up with the family and friends my parents had left behind after moving to an Essex new town, after the Blitz had decimated half their old world. As a ten year old child I can well remember the freezing cold of those winters. I have a memory of standing on the bomb ravaged East India Docks looking out over the river; my eager–beaver antics restrained by the grip of my father’s hand on my hood, ensuring that I would not fall in. Dressed in duffle coats and home-made knitted balaclava helmets and matching fingerless mittens, we watched the river-traffic lumbering through the heavy yellow smog. The many barges and craft of all sizes were competing for open water with what looked to my eyes to be vast white ice-floes drifting down the stream. I remember my father explaining that these were not rafts of ice but rafts of detergent foam. Vast mats of bubbles, each mat the size of a bus, standing four foot proud of the water as they were swept downstream. It was the first time my ears had heard the word ‘pollution’. I wish it were the last.
That river stayed filthy all though my teenage years and John Burrett’s book was a young teenager’s guide to the accessible portions of it on the other side of the city. These were fairly limited to where the railway stations would give my friends and I access to the river. Few people owned cars then so trains were the way. Richmond was our favourite simply because it was the end of the tube-line. Beyond here, one needed specialised knowledge to navigate up river – or better, a coach trip with the local fishing club. We had lots of these, mainly fishing the London Anglers Association stretches of the river. It could get a little hard in the winter but I don’t ever remember a blank session. In summer though, it was a fish a chuck; quick dace, blue tinted gudgeon, red-eyed roach and stripy stocky perch. These were the mainstay but the odd bream or hybrid usually showed up too. The fishing was fantastic with even, although I never caught one, big trout being regularly caught, especially in the Chertsey/Penton Hook/Staines area – as John Burrett’s book reminds me.
“Bell weir will always have its share of trout fishermen and a number of six or seven pounders are on record”. Chertsey weir was considered even better for the big spotties. Livebaiting small bleak was the recommended way to take these trout but it also accounted for lots of quality perch and the odd pike too. Silkweed or hempseed was the favoured bait for the silver fish; the correct use of loose feed would ensure the larger specimens were caught. Which probably explains why I only caught the smaller fish – lots of them though.
The fishing in the 50s and early 60s was so good in fact that it was hard to get a swim in the more popular areas. Writing of Canbury Gardens, Burrett says “I have seen at all times of the season anglers sitting almost shoulder to shoulder so that it is impossible to get another rod in between”. It was busy on the tidal too, where ‘”…five hundred to a thousand anglers are quite normal”. No wonder, with fishing like this: Burrett writes of a Mr Green who used to fish at Sunbury in the evenings, taking vast bags of barbel, once taking 76 barbel in one week of evening sessions and on another session landing three chub for a total weight of over 15lbs. These were massive fish in the fifties and sixties.
The Thames pollution then of course was at a higher level than at any time since. Whilst I watched those rafts of detergent in the East End, Mr Burrett was writing of the river on the western side of the city. How very high tides brought a “certain amount of polluted matter” from the reaches downstream, making the fish “sick”. Otherwise he gave the pollution very little space or credence. The river might have been a ‘dirty, mucky flood’ with rarely more than 18 inches visibility, but in the main, it was a healthy one, making for an abundance of fish. At least, it was down as far as Kew. Burrett considered the tidal fishing was as at least good as pre World War One when Sheringham wrote of it “The angler may travel further and fare very much worse” and 50 years later, Burrell still thought it was improving with every year. Who can blame him when the river was full of roach where the usual size was ‘in the region of half a pound’.
So what happened? Why don’t we catch big trout in the lower Thames any more? Why are there no longer 500 to 1000 anglers fishing on the tidal on any given day? Why has the fishing on this river steadily declined to the point where it is today, a mere shadow of its former self? And how could this have happened when at the same time, in the very same half century, the city lost it's industrialisation and cleaned up it's act to the point where the water is today so clear we can often see the bottom of the river in 10ft depth. If it was pollution that had been the problem then the river Thames should be heaving with fish, and its banks heaving with anglers trying to catch them. But it wasn't and it’s not. So what happened?
It would be nice if we could ask the appropriate authorities and then rely on the answers we are given. However this is 2008. My experience of the authorities is that any answer – assuming one is lucky enough to get one - would be spun out of all recognition in an attempt to make themselves look better than they are. Spun politics seem to make up at least half of every official statement these days and trying to get truth and sense from some of these people is like talking to a character from Alice in Wonderland. Hardly a single year has gone by since I learned to read that the relevant authorities of the day have not tried to make political capital from the cleaner-than-ever river Thames. Every year we read that the TV washing-powder miracle has happened, that the salmon have returned to the river and that it is all due to the all-new, whiter-than-white, improved, cleaner River Thames ; now with power balls! Cleaned up by some corporate geezer in a suit, or so they would have you believe. And then, there will be a photo of some fat-cat getting a big pay-cheque as he retires or a half page obituary when he dies where we will read of his non-existent accomplishments in returning the salmon to the Thames. Yawn. I think we’ll have to work it out on our own.
Here’s how I see it. The industrial pollution that we are all so fond of quoting when discussing the Thames is and was only a serious issue at the point of pollution and downstream. Tidal effects might have played a part in affecting the areas upstream but only in a comparatively minor way. Most of the river upstream of Kew was an angler’s paradise. The real reason for the decline in the Thames as a great angling river since 1960 is that its entire nature has changed.
Abstraction has played a massive part. Burrett noted that in recent years “so great is the water abstraction that the flow over Teddington Weir has been reduced by a third”. This was something different from Sheringham’s day. Burrett was a little off the mark however. He thought that running-off was down to localised poor management of the weir gates; he had little idea that abstraction and running off all excess water as soon as possible was to become de-rigour policy for the next decades. Channelling and canalisation were to become the order of the day. The once mighty flow of the Thames reduced to a comparative trickle. The suspended particles in the water fell to the bottom, coating the clean gravel with a layer of silt. The cloudy, muddy coloured water cleared, making small silver fish easy prey for the sight-feeding predators. At first these were the perch and pike (a somewhat unusual catch in Burrett’s day) and later, cormorants.
Despite politician’s tales that the salmon are returning to the river, it is patently obvious to everyone that today the Thames is nothing like a salmon river. For much of the year it more resembles a series of slowly moving lakes. If we want to catch salmon in the Thames, we need to try stocking it with a landlocked variety, Sebago or Hutchen. While we are at it, let’s try restocking all those lower Thames feeder streams with their native brown trout, rather than wasting money on 1/4 million Atlantic salmon parr every year. It’s ecologically sound and would make for much better economic sense. The Colne and Colnbrook are just two of several perfect trout streams just screaming out for some fish and Staines moor would become a fantasic fly-fishery.
What of the coarse fishing? The Thames was still fishing reasonably well right through the 70s with huge dace catches being recorded in the tidal but these too faded out and the river has never really recovered. The fishing has probably bottomed out now however and we all live in hope that Nature will attempt to fill the gaps, but it could be a long wait. Today there are far fewer fish than in my youth. Large areas of river have few or no fish and what we have now is what we have to play with. It probably won’t get any worse though and I’m sure, without considerable stocking policies from someone more concerned with doing the job rather than their photo ops and pension plan, it won’t get any better. One thing is for sure, John Burrett’s Lower Thames has gone forever.
Geoff Maynard Jan 2008
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