Bing and I

nr WREN

By LORD EGREMONT

1 AM an amateur. I come of a long line of dis- tinguished amateurs. Sev- , eral of them were so dis- tinguished and so ama- teurish that they either got their heads tut off or languished as prisoners in the Tower of London year

ll after year.

As an amateur I have worked for five govern- ment departments and one opposition depart- ment—the Conservative Research Department. That was a nice place at 24 Old Queen Street. When I joined it in 1947 I found some tough professional characters already present: among them Reggie Maudling, lain Macleod and Enoch Powell. They were all very nice to me except Macleod when he had gout—he would then be cross, for a footfall could cause him a dreadful twinge. He has since conquered the giit—as he conquers any trouble or obstacle that he meets.

We would all talk and argue together and write papers (and some of them were very good in those days) for the greater edification of the Conservative front bench and the Conservative party in general.

The solid, charming, clever, worldly Reggie Maudling; the imaginative Celtic lain Macleod; and the abrasive, argumentative, kind and con- siderate Enoch Powell; they were all of them a. daily joy to me, then a young man of twenty- seven. And they were all so professional. Pro- fessionals to their fingertips. I am not.

At the age of forty-six I am too old, I sup- pose, to become a professional man. I have a wealth of amateur interests. I comfort myself with the thought that anything that is worth doing is worth doing badly.

The difference between the amateur and the professional—if the amateur is a proper ama- teur—is that the amateur dabbles.

I was reminded of this distinction the other day when Mr Bing Crosby was fishing one of my rivers in Cumberland. Mr Crosby is the most delightful of men and it was such a pleasure to have him and his charming wife Kathy with us.

He is also, as I quickly discovered, the most professional of men in the best sense of the term. There he is, with that great and glittering success behind him, and now we find him giving a lot of his time to one of his favourite sports, fishing. Hence his appearance on my property in Cumberland, where I have some rather good salmon fishing.

I was struck from the first by Bing Crosby's careful and meticulous way of going about his sport. On this occasion he was doing it for a film about fishing. He was surrounded by pro- fessionals—a professional producer, director and cameraman and so forth, all of whom were splendid. He showed himself an extremely able fisherman. Salmon abounded, leaping about in the river like billy-ho—sometimes over Crosby's line—but they just wouldn't take his fly. And so it went on day after day. Any salmon fisher- man knows that this is the sort of thing which may happen. Crosby fished on, day after day, going out at 7 a.m., making four thousand casts a day. The camera crew stood by (at a cost of £1,000 a day) waiting for Crosby to catch a fish. He could not have fished the river better. I was deeply impressed by his own professionalism, and by his calm and patience.

He would quietly croon to himself in that famous and charming voice, making up the words as he went along—for example:

The river Derwent Is in a ferment With fish.

But they won't bite.

I am not qualified to speak about the mind of a professional. But Dr Johnson said: 'It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.' I wondered how Bing's mind had been employed day after day with all those four thousand daily fruitless casts. Thinking of Kathy, I shouldn't be surprised.

Not only the expected bunch of amateur spec- tators appeared on the scene, but also a sizeable number of professional journalists too. Mr David Leitch reported to the Sunday Times that Mr Crosby was fishing for trout. My river, Mr Leitch, is a salmon river, if you don't mind.

I am, as I have said, an amateur. I am a par- ticularly amateurish and clumsy fisherman. I do not particularly enjoy the sport. The day after the Crosbys left, however, I allowed myself to be persuaded to go down to the river to fish. 'What time?' they said, 'The same as Mr Crosby's?' I said no—at noon. I finally turned up nearer one o'clock. They said, will you start fishing now? I said that we had better have lunch first. So we had lunch. When we had finished lunch, they said, now 'will you start fishing? I said no. I had not read the news- papers, and for all we all knew there might be something of great pith and moment in them which might affect us all. So I read the news- papers. After which, and unable to think of any further excuses, I had to go out fishing. I blindly made a cast and caught a 161b. salmon.

Dear Bing, will you ever forgive me?

PS. I've just heard that everything worked out in the end; Bing went back a week later and caught some spectacular fish.