LAWTON NYMPH FISHING
Rick Keam retraces nymphing history in Terry Lawton's new book
Today, fishing a nymph is a routine matter not requiring a second thought. It seems impossible to imagine that it was ever surrounded by passionate debates about angling ethics. Yet pausing for a while to learn about those debates, and how modern nymphing has evolved internationally, adds a lot of interest to the art. As far as we are aware, Terry Lawton’s book Nymph Fishing: A History of the Art and Practice is the first systematic account of its kind.

Well-told histories tend to challenge a number of things we take for granted, and Lawton’s is no exception. He presents evidence that on some northern English streams at least, simple wet flies were deliberately fished to represent emerging nymphs (with a dry fly as a dropper) a century before Skues became the ‘father of nymphing’. He also tells how the High Priest of the dry fly, Frederic Halford, and his mentor George Marryat experimented with nymphs in the 1880s on southern chalkstreams, but for various misguided reasons stopped fishing with them.

But if this leads you to expect a book heavily focused on chalkstream fishing or on the crowded modern UK stillwater scene, you will be surprised.

Lawton’s focus is the world. He moves beyond modern nymphing’s English origins to consider its development in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. His material on Dick Wigram, drawn (with due acknowledgment) from the work of Michael Stevens, Andrew Braithwaite and Alan Shepherd, will not be news to Australians but performs an important service in putting Dick’s achievements on international record.

Brief fragments and footnotes of people’s informal recollections add spice to the narrative. These include the sad tale of how Oliver Kite’s ostentatious new white Jaguar destroyed his trusted relationship with the Sawyers, of how Robert Bragg (before emigration to New Zealand) sold Ogden Smiths commercial nymph patterns to an unimpressed Skues, and how Ted Trueblood’s wife used both ends of his trusty old silk fly line to truss a Thanksgiving turkey!

There are one or two omissions—the American tradition of woven ‘realistic’ hardbodied nymph imitations originated by Franz Pott and extended by George Grant, and the unique development of emergent dragonfly nymph (mudeye) patterns and techniques in Australia since the 1960s—but in total perspective, Terry Lawton has managed to encompass a vast amount of information in a book of manageable size. He has performed an important service to fly fishing history.

Nymph Fishing: A History of the Art and Practice by Terry Lawton (2005) is published by Swan Hill Press (UK) and distributed in Australia by Peribo. Price $65.