Clive Gammon
"The first thing I was entered at was snaring rats, which gave me the greatest enjoyment. There was a very fine show of this vermin and my father promised to give me a penny for each rat I caught ... " So, in Cheshire in the 1850s, began the sporting life of Charles Henry Ackroyd on his father's estate at Doddington. It was the start of eighty years of expert dedication to the task of thinning out the fauna of the Northern Hemisphere. Bear in Canada, salmon in Norway, red deer in Scotland, snipe in Ireland fell in great drifts to his rod, rifle and shotgun. Sometimes he played golf at Sandwich, but not often, and at the end of his life he was reflecting that the two most demanding forms of field sport were coarse fishing on the Trent and shooting rock pigeons flushed from the sea-caves of Orkney from a boat rolling in an ocean swell. His other main conclusion was that bridge had spoilt country-house life. "There is hardly a thing," he wrote in the last chapter of his memoirs, published by the Inverness Courier in 1926, "as the men sitting round the smoking-room fire, swapping yarns and going to bed in decent time. It is impossible for men to sit up until the small hours, drinking whiskies-and-soda, and shoot well the next day. In the late Lord Leicester's time at Holkham, the guns after dinner were allowed only one glass of port or claret, whichever they chose, which were handed round in glasses, and soon after 10.30 they were sent to bed."
If ever his A Veteran Sportsman's Diary were republished, it would be recognised as the most insidious kind of sporting pornography. For example, there was his expedition to Iceland, a country which now has landing strips beside its best salmon rivers for the convenience of rich Americans but which, in 1817, was utterly unknown to fishermen. Ackroyd heard of the great salmon runs of the Laxa River from a sulphur prospector he met in the smoking room of an Edinburgh hotel (it all sounds straight out of The Island of Sheep or Prester John, yes?). He took passage, with two of his friends, on a Leith steamer to Reykjavik, having engaged three Tweed boatmen, a black cook, and ordered three Tweed harling boats to be delivered at Leith. He had two rounds of beef placed in giant tins and soldered up. "The purchase of wines I left to my friends. I, however, ordered a nine-gallon cask of whisky."
When they reached Iceland via the Faroes, they found they had to manhandle their boats upstream through icy rapids, unassisted by the men of Tweed who had broached the whisky cask and were dead drunk, "but our black cook came to the fore and worked like a Trojan." It took fifteen hours to haul the boats five miles, and in the end they slept on an island amongst a mass of eider-duck. Later they found quarters in a church, sleeping on the altar steps, warmed by a fire made of dried sheep's dung.
In three weeks they caught 103 salmon averaging 18 lbs and innumerable large trout and arctic char, leaving on July 28 (" our men having again taken the opportunity to get drunk, this time on schnapps which they had got from a farmer ") and picking up the Cape Wrath light at 11 pm on August 3.
Ackroyd, in fact, was a generation ahead of the decadence of field sports. He looked down on driven game, for instance. "How many men," he wrote at the end of his life, "at the present time would prefer a day at the back-end, stalking wild grouse or crawling over wet ground to get a shot at a wild duck, pitting their cunning against the bird's to a big day's cover shooting? Very few, I warrant." If the salmon of the Never, in Sutherland, would not take, he was happy to net or even spear them. The huge complex of artificial rules that were created in the sophistication of the last decade of the nineteenth century never troubled him. He preferred to stalk his deer alone, although once he had hooked his salmon, he gave the rod to the ghillie to play the fish, on the grounds that the real excitement was in the take and the first run. And at the end of his life he still set aside a time each year, directly after the spring salmon fishing, to go down to the Cothi in West Wales and fish it and its tributary brook with a worm for small trout, just as he had done in the clear streams of Cheshire in the middle of the previous century. The only sport he despised was otter-hunting. He has his memorial in the 'Ackroyd,' a small, dusty-looking salmon fly, very killing in northern streams. Until I picked up his memoirs in a secondhand bookshop, I had no idea of its origin, though I had used it many time. I'll probably use it still more frequently now.
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