Welsh Journals

Pike Fever DAVID REES CLIVE GAMMON'S first book, Hook, Line and Spinner (Heinemann, 15s.) is firstly, of course, a fisherman's autobiography. The author, the senior English master in Pembroke Grammar School, is now thirty and his story begins with the rudd he caught in the Swiss Cottage pond, Singleton, Swansea. His skilfully written book goes on to discuss his expeditions to the 'acid little rivers' of east Gower, the Clyne, the Bishopston Valley stream and the Penard Pill which enters the sea at Three Cliffs Bay. From there it was a few miles to Oxwich Marsh, that strange, lonely secluded area of pools, bulrushes and dead trees between the limestone cliffs of Crawley and Penrice and the sweep of the bay. Tired of his apprenticeship on perch and rudd the author developed an interest in pike and the story of this obsession, as he calls it, is really the story of the book. The first catch came in the abandoned Jersey Marine canal, a relic of the Industrial Revolution, just outside Swansea, for he caught a ten-pounder here in 1947, the year of the great frost. But his interest in pike was first a literary, romantic one. It was associated with Yeats and Synge, and the writers of the Irish literary revival, for Connaught had its remote loughs, Corrib and Conn, NaFooey and Cullen, which were also great pike lakes. 'Even now I cannot read the beginning of Yeats's poem, The Wild Swans at Coole without remembering the early passion and the visions of those vast, mysterious fish that I'd never seen Another important writer was Alfred Jardine, the great Victorian fisherman who wrote Pike and Perch. Jardine was a fisherman in the grand manner, usually taking a hamper of roast chicken and a bottle of sherry to sustain him on his adventures. But soon the Jersey Marine canal was drained and Gammon discovered an ox-bow lake about two miles east of Carmarthen, the Bishop's Pool, taking its name from the adjacent Bishop's Palace. One can see the Pool from the Llandilo-Carmarthen Road, for it's just fifty yards down a track where the railway goes under the road. Half a mile away across the fields lies the Towy which is tidal to this point near the Bishop's Pool. The author learned a great deal in fishing the Bishop's Pool and pike fever raged here during 1947-48; early on he caught a nineteen-pounder and his biggest pike to date has come from the Pool; this was twenty-four pounds.