Sporting auction will lure fishing fanatics

A UNIQUE and fascinating record book from the golden age of angling will be sold at an auction of sporting antiques in the Cotswolds later this month.

The log book records catches by the Usk Valley Casting Club between 1917 and 1954.

Compiled by female angler Dulcie Bailey, it records the type of fish caught by she and her well-heeled friends, the weight of fish, and how long the fish took to land.

The location is also recorded, with salmon and trout being landed as far from the Usk as Scotland, Norway and the Himalayas.

But what makes the book really fascinating is that it is annotated with sketches, magazine illustrations, newspaper articles, hand-drawn maps and letters, along with postcards and photographs.

Many of the newspaper cuttings are dedicated to The Honourable Mrs A Cooper who, at an Usk Valley tournament in 1933, beat the ladies’ world record for distance casting, throwing a line 39 yards and nine inches.

Among the associated ephemera is a letter from R B Marston, editor of Fishing Gazette, to Lord Ganusk congratulating him on a successful tournament, and from C Farlow of angling specialist C Farlow & Co congratulating Mrs Cooper on her world record.

“There was a marked improvement in your style, your back casting was perfect in every way, and I felt that you were then building up to return the good distance that the result shared,” he wrote. He was also particularly pleased that Mrs Cooper had used a Farlow rod.

The book, which carries an estimate of £500 to £800, is just one of the lots in an extensive fishing section at the auction, to be held at Moore Allen & Innocent in Cirencester on Friday, February 12.

Sure to lure serious collectors is an extremely rare Hardy Pomeroy West Indian brass tarpon reel with horn handle on nickel silver handle plates, which carries an estimate of £3,000 to £5,000, and an equally rare Hardy pre-lettered trout fly rod with spliced cedar and cane handle, together with a Hardy brass Birmingham reel and Hardy net, cased in a shaped Hardy travel box. Dating from around 1873, the lot carries an estimate of £800 to £1,200.

Fish also dominate the taxidermy section: a 5lbs 12oz trout landed by T/Sgt R H Burneson of the United States Air Force on the Thames at Radcot on May 3, 1952, and mounted by the renowned taxidermists J Cooper & Sons, is expected to achieve between £400 and £600.

Another two Radcot trout – a 9lbs 8oz specimen caught by Joe Stallard on 3 June 1963 and a 7lbs 7oz fish landed by Mr R Belcher on 12 August 1958 – command estimates of £300 to £500 and £200 to £300 respectively, while a pike caught on the Wye in 1899 should make between £200 and £300.

In the pictures section, an oil on canvas of two black greyhounds – thought to be Waterloo Cup winners – by James Armstrong, dated 1884, is expected to achieve £4,000 to £6,000, while a 20th century oil of a huntsman and hounds in a woodland setting by Richard John Munro Dupont carries an estimate of £1,500 to £2,000 and a 1990 study of the Heythrop Hunt in oils by Heather St Clair Davis should secure bids of between £500 and £800.

For a full auction catalogue, log on to mooreallen.co.uk/auction-house