— Lake
From the first moment of Friday 16 June, until the last stroke of midnight on Thursday 14 March 2024, it will be "open season" for coarse fishing on the Common. The shorter balance of the year — the end of March, April, May, the start of June — is the "close season", which helps protect fish such as roach, bream, tench and carp while they're spawning, and to give young fish a chance to develop so that they too can go on to breed.
At the start of June, I was walking around the lake when realised with a start that nobody was fishing, and that seemed strange. But then I quickly realised that it was still early June, and therefore in the "close season".
I found myself thinking about fishing on the Common, about my own obsession with it in the 1950s and early 1960s, about the almost complete absence of fishing on the Common today — particularly by children. Indeed, does
I wondered how the "open/close" seasons had ever been agreed upon, and you will not be surprised to hear that there is a Wandsworth Common connection, albeit slight.
The open/close season was established in 1878 by the "Mundella Act", so-called because it was promoted in the House of Commons by the radical Liberal MP Anthony John Mundella (1825—1897). He's probably best known as an educational reformer (though much else besides) but cherished by us as the author of the Introduction to his friend (and our local hero) John Buckmaster's autobiography, A Village Politician.
Here's a fine caricature of Mundella by the great French painter James Tissot:
— Wikipedia: A. J. Mundella.
— Canal and River Trust: History of the coarse fishing season.
"Fishing . . . of the most lawless type is openly and continuously carried on in the ponds . . . At Wandsworth Common, for example here are no restrictions as to methods, bait or season. The pond is hooked and netted every day of the week by crowds of children . . . "
There are rules and regulations which govern the practice of angling. At times we ask ourselves why these laws of the ponds and rivers are enforced by the London County Council. Fishing — if it can be so termed — of the most lawless type is openly and continuously carried on in the ponds that are supposedly under the Council's jurisdiction.
At Wandsworth Common, for example, there are obviously no restrictions as to methods, bait, or season. The pond is hooked and netted — we hope these terms are correct — every day of the week by crowds of children. True sportsmen and sportswomen if they catch a fish below a reasonable size and weight — they carry a tape measure and a scale to determine these matters — return it to the water.
But the youthful anglers at Wandsworth Common scoop up everything they can get, irrespective of age or anything else.
The wonder is that a single finny creature is left in the pond. Nothing of edible size has ever been taken out of it to our knowledge and nothing ever will unless the County Council give the fish a chance to grow up.
[BNA: Link]
"No restrictions as to methods, bait, or season"? Hmm, that was the 1930s. It couldn't be more different now. Here are some of the do's and don'ts in current regulations:
FISHING TACKLE
1. Magnet fishing is not permitted.
2. Fly fishing is not permitted.
3. Rods without tackle must not be left in the water at any time
4. Rods may not be left unattended (with or without tackle)
5. Only “fish safe” rigs or leads are allowed. In the event of fish breaking free they must not be tethered by parts of the main tackle.
6. Micro barbed and barbless hooks only, minimum of size 6. No long, curved shank hooks or 360 rigs to be used.
7. The use of boats and drones (including model boats) is not permitted.
8. No plugging, spinning or bait boats allowed.
9. All spods must have a float. Spod sizes should be limited and excessive spodding will not be tolerated.
10. No live bait to be used.
11. The use of a catapult is not permitted.
12. No leadcore or lead-free leaders
13. No braided reel lines or shock leaders allowed, including fluorocarbon and mono shock leaders (with the exception of spod/marker rods).
14. No zig rigs allowed
15. No plastic baits allowed
HANDLING FISH
16. Landing nets must be used.
17. No keep nets, keep sacks, or tubes are allowed. abl
18. To ensure fish welfare, wet hands must be used whilst handling fish and wet unhooking mats must also be used.
19. Fish must only be weighed using a wet fit for purpose weigh-sling.
20. All fish are to be returned to the water as soon as possible after weighing, using an unhooking mat or landing net.
21. Carp welfare/care kits must be used.
[You can download the complete rules and regs from Enable: Fishing-in-Wandsworth-Terms-and-Conditions-2022-2023.docx.]
Even to get started, would-be anglers need two licences or permits: an Environment Agency rod licence — £33 for an adult but free for under-16s. And a local Wandsworth Council permit — £112 for adults, £76 for Seniors, and £55.50 for Juniors (up to 16 years). Applications also require form-filling, proof of Date of Birth, two passport-sized photos, and so on.
That's a lot of money and effort.
So in answer to my question about whether any child goes fishing on the Common, given all the rules listed above, and the cost of rod licences, it would be a wonder if any ever did.
It was very different in the 1950s, when we all fished. (Actually, when I say "we", I mean boys — I don't recall any girls fishing, though some may have done. I hope someone can tell me I'm wrong.)
Even before I hit my teens I had a Saturday job, of sorts, at Mr Parker's fishing tackle shop towards the bottom of Earlsfield Road. (There was also a local rival — Stabler's, I think — near the station.)
My principle function was to fill angler's bait boxes with "gentles" — wriggling fly maggots. In return he gave me a little money to buy tackle — hooks, fancy plugs and spinners, lines, lead weights and gorgeous fishing floats. Nice man, Mr Parker. Does anybody remember him?
The use of the word "gentle" for maggot is pretty old. Izaak Walton uses it in his marvellous Compleat Angler (1653), which was a favourite book of the great local poet Edward Thomas.
Like me, Edward Thomas (1878—1917) was obsessed with fishing. His first experiences, even before the age of eight or nine, were on Wandsworth Common, which lay a short walk away from his home on Wakehurst Road. He spent much of his spare time on the Common, which he writes about more vividly and more precisely than anyone else I have ever read. (See The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography (publ. 1983).
For him, the "long pond on the far side of the railway" is our "lake" — "long" because the main stretch of water still had no island in the middle.
"The gravelly shore of the Long Pond on Wandsworth Common was confused in my mind with the sea sand where Robinson Crusoe saw the cannibals' footprints."
I fished for sticklebacks and gudgeon in the long pond on the far side of the railway, which owed its name of "Backaruffs" or "Pack of Roughs", so I always thought, to the poor ill-dressed boys who used to swarm to it from Battersea on Saturdays and bank holidays.
[Some of the notes I wrote some years ago on the correspondence between the naturalist Arthur Gardiner Butler and Charles Darwin about sexual selection among sticklebacks made it into The Wandsworth Common Story. I'll add something more on this eventually, but feel free to ask if you want to know more. You can read a transcription of Arthur Butler's letter of 29 June 1871 here.]
Back to Edward Thomas:
I fished with a worm either tied on the cotton line or impaled on a bent pin, and put my stickleback or my rare lovely spotted gudgeon in a glass jam-jar. Once at least I did as I had seen others do, hauling a heavy fruit basket out into the pond and dragging it in full of weed and mud and the little 'blood worms' that breed in mud, and sticklebacks, even a red-throated one, but never a gudgeon.
The gudgeon was so attractive, partly for its looks, perhaps chiefly for its comparative size, that many times I willingly paid a halfpenny for one and let it be believed that I had caught it.
Even when dead it was hard to part with, so smooth and pure was it. I liked even its smell, yet never dreamed of eating it. There were carp, too, in this pond and in the roundish Box Pond that lay half-way between the top of our street and the railway.
By the longer pond I once saw a carp many times as big as a gudgeon in the possession of a rough: he had torn its head off to make it fit his jar. Much larger ones were talked about, caught in the Box Pond by the elder brothers of one boy. I saw them fishing there once or twice without a motion of the float in the motionless water. Once I tried there myself all alone. My expectations were huge: that I failed completely only increased my respect for the sacred pond.
He continues:
Bigger boys used to fish in the Penn Ponds at Richmond Park and allowed me to buy from them a perch of four or five inches long, which looked magnificent with its dark bars, standing almost on its head in my little round bowl. There in spite of worms and breadcrumbs it shortly afterwards died.
I was pained at coming down in the morning and finding such a magnificent, uncommon and costly creature dead. Nor did I ever like the perch's stiff hard prickly corpse, faded in death, and looking much smaller out of the bowl than inside.
As you can see, there is no golden-age glow of nostalgia in Edward Thomas's writings about childhood.
Some references to fishing in previous Chronicles . . .
1. Pike . . .
Edward Thomas doesn't mention the notorious killer pike of Wandsworth Common, but others have — including the nineteenth-century writer and historian Walter Besant (with particular reference to the Black Sea). And me.
2. Restocking the ponds . . .
"5000 tiddlers for restocking the ponds of Wandsworth Common" (February 1930)
[Note to self: It would be good to explore local people's recollections of fishing on the Common as posted on social media sites such as Battersea Memories and Wandsworth and Battersea Memories Live On (Facebook), or Nostalgic Memories of Wandsworth's History (Francis Frick). See also specialist anglers' groups (particularly perhaps those devoted to carp fishing).]
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