Mr. Crabtree Goes Fishing: A Guide in Pictures to Fishing Round the Year

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John Bailey takes a new 'Peter' under his wing teaching him everything he needs to know to catch all the main coarse species using a mixture of traditional and modern techniques and tactics.

My brothers and I had discovered fishing and we would spend numberless luckless hours on the river banks and pools. Subsequently the Mirror's gardening guru was Mr Digwell and (not many people know this) at one time Paul Peacock, Jack Hargeaves' biographer, was Mr Digwell. The Crabtree and the Mr Cherry series of books inspired my childhood , Yes the Royalty is still there and as popular as ever I was in Christchurch at easter and enjoyed a walk along it and gazed longingly at the parlour pool, I was also able to fritter some hard earned away in Davis fishing tackle which is a few hundred yards away.Even though the tackle is a little dated since it was written in the 50's, the tactics and info on how to catch fish year round are still just as valid today as they were back then. I would much rather watch a float and the nature than sit in a bivy reading a book and waiting for a carp run. Crabtree, in his fishing adventures with his son Peter, passed on not only his knowledge of angling, but his love and reverence for this great sport of ours. Secondly, what is the casting technique he details and was it largely rendered obsolete with the coming of monofilimant lines and modern casting or spinning reels?

His weekly articles in the Mirror were not just a snap shot of angling but encompassed the passion, the excitement and the thrill of angling and the countryside.He co-founded the Angling Times in 1953, was founder editor of Creel magazine in 1963, and wrote over 20 books. This, added to the endless rereading which Mr Crabtree was/is always subjected to means that copies in good condition are hard to find - especially earlier editions. Wallis angled in the Nottingham style ie long trotting with an 'Avon' rod, the most famous example being The Wallis Wizard and a centrepin exactly as B.

Now John Bailey has teamed up with illustrator Rob Olsen to recreate and perhaps, dare I say, put a modern day spin on Bernard’s inspirational work ‘Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing’ and have named the title quite aptly ‘Fishing in the Footsteps of Mr Crabtree’.OF course, as any sensible person knows, angling is a far more productive use of time than gardening, and within a year Mr Crabtree was going fishing.

Peter is shown how to read the water, how and why a specific fish might be caught, and all the while the reader feels it first hand. With a centrepin reel the best way of casting such a rig a long way, under control, is the F W K Wallis cast (Nottingham style).

SIZE IS 10" X 8", 96pp WITH SEVERAL FULL COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS, THE TECHNIQUES NEEDED TO KEEP FISHING THROUGHOUT THE YEAR ARE TOLD IN PICTORIAL STRIP PICTURES, AS MR. The method that JohnH describes is known as a Nottingham cast and is absolutly fine until you are required to cast any sort of real distance, that is when you wish you had learned to Wallis/Avon cast. I get a kick out of taking out the old fiberglass rods every now and then, and I keep the first reel my dad bought me, a Zebco 202 as well as an old Mitchell spinning reel all oiled and ready to go. Grouse is English so to make sure my boy grows up with the proper sense of his English roots, I bought Henry a copy of Bernard Venables Mr. Crabtree explains what cast to use, but what I'm wondering is why was that casting technique advantageous?