That big!
James Hughes-Onslow
An lncompleat Angler Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (Michael Joseph £4.25)
People who oppose bloodsports on grounds of cruelty really ought to grapple with the notion, generally put about by the perpetrators of the alleged atrocities, that they're not cruel at all. No-one, it seems, is brutalised by all this killing. Indeed, anyone who shoots or fishes will claim that they, rather more than anyone else have the secret *of living in harmony with the countryside.
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst is a publisher of crime books who is quite familiar with the unkind things human beings get up t° while trying to kill each other. Now he has written his fishing autobiography, recording the civilised part of his life. There are one or two incidents which give him ethical qualms —like the salmon he hooked on LoUgh Corrib which kept taking refuge under his boat. Or the drunken day at the Ards Friary in Donegal when fourteen Francis' cans fired at one pheasant, finally winging it and chasing it, their habits tucked round their knees, knowing that it would be the only one they'd see. What would St Francis have made of it ? For a fisherman, Lord Hardinge tells. his story in an unassuming way with hale moralising and none of those exaggerations which call for outstretched arms. But he no maggot-in-the-canal operator. father, who didn't like fishing, was PrinCiPa; Private Secretary to both King Georges an to King Edward, so that young Hardinge
had the run of the Dee at Balmoral, which he says was under-fished.
Needless to say, he took his tackle with him when he went to war, on one occasion doing a nine-mile run with a fully-extended fishing rod during a brief spell off-duty in Iceland. He caught a fish in five minutes: 'Rarely, in my naval career, was I held in higher esteem by my fellow-officers than When I boarded the battleship clasping my sea-trout.' Although Lord Hardinge is a director of Macmillans, his book is published by Michael Joseph. I understand this is normal practice. It could irritate prospective writers if the directors were publishing their own fishing stories. But I hope it doesn't mean they've heard too much of Hardinge's fish at Macmillans.
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