Angling for support
Sir: Perspicacious though Jo Grimond has always been, he tells less than the whole truth in his review of Charles St John's notes (15 May). He writes: 'A formidable number of voters catch fish.' Make that: 'A formidable number of working-class voters catch fish', and you're a great deal nearer the facts. For every fly-casting lessee of a salmon-rich beat in Scotland there are a hundred proletarian coarse fishermen clustering every weekend round gravel pits and along the banks of the great unenclosed rivers such as the Thames. In fact angling is the most popular participant sport in the British Isles. I've never found out 'why, since it seems to me excruciatingly dull and in many years of walking along the Thames on Saturday afternoons I've never seen an angler make what I believe is called a strike. My only offering of a theory is that to sit and watch the river amble past is comfor- tingly like the mindless tedium of the fac- tory conveyor-belt which the average fisher- man faces all his working week. Be that as it may, the fact is that there is virtually no anti-fishing lobby, despite the fact that even the most unimaginative `sab, ought to be able to envisage what it is like to have a sharp, barbed hook thrust through his cheek. While fish are a good deal less cuddly than seals or otters, the fox has a bad reputation even in nursery anthropo- morphisations for the kiddies.
No, the fact is that the opposition to hun- ting and on a lesser scale shooting is almost entirely a class-based one. The spite and rancour which simmer so unpleasantly In other aspects of politics spill over into the sheer ferocity with which the `sabs' go for the pink- and black-coated fascist beasts. It isn't even the relatively sane electoral calculation of possible Labour votes lost which keeps the anti-blood sports people from attacking the anglers, although I do concede that a plumber's mate sitting mo- tionless at the edge of the towpath while his float bobs away on the surface for hours on end is a more pacific sight than the Quorn in full cry. I am afraid that over and over again the real motives of so many hunt saboteurs is the old pharisaical-cum-non; conformist one, endemic to these isles, 01 preventing other people having fun. This is a great pity because there may be much sense in the anti-bloodsports argu- ment, but until the animus can be directed against the MFH and the hare-coursing scrap-metal dealer alike, I shall enrol myself among the Friends of Venery.
Charles Mosley
5 Mornington Avenue Mansions, London W14
Previous page
