IMAGINE, if you can, a book about the clergy written by someone who has no interest in Christianity or any knowledge of the Church, but makes up for this with a monomaniacal focus on fishing. Perhaps the true fisherman would respond that a book that considered only that portion of its subjects’ spiritual life which took place inside church buildings was every bit as lopsided and misleading and might not even contain any useful fly patterns.

So, to redress the imbalance of conventional clergy lives, we have Keith Harwood’s book The Fishing Vicar. There is something rather splendid about a book that treats Archdeacon Paley solely as a fisherman, regrets that he never wrote anything about angling, and mentions only in passing his works on natural theology.

Sadly, it lacks any consideration of the first attested Christian fishermen, but I imagine the entry on St Peter would be something like this: “Simon, who nearly drowned while attempting to walk on a lake, was born and raised by the sea of Galilee, where he fished for tilapia, barbel, and kinneret sardines with nets. His most memorable day came when he was fishing with Jesus Christ as his boat companion, when they drew up net after net of fish. Later, Reverend Peter accepted the post of Bishop of Rome, where he will have fished the Tiber. He died around 64 AD.”

AlamyA clergyman and a group of friends inspect a catch of fish in a garden in Pembrokeshire, in 1910

St Peter is too early for a book as reliant on printed sources as this, which starts with an Elizabethan bishop, but contains mostly Victorian biographies. It brings to life an age when the rivers of Britain abounded in wild fish, available to anyone with the leisure, the physical strength, and the social connections to catch them.

There is a wonderful anecdote of Charles Kingsley being roused by a friend from his chambers in Magdalene College, Cambridge, at two in the morning to walk to Duxford, nine miles away, in the pouring rain. There, his friend caught almost immediately three large trout, while Kingsley caught nothing. It did stop raining, though, but then the fish lost interest altogether. Such are the trials of a real fisherman’s life.

I used myself to fish the Cam upstream of Duxford, and it would be extraordinary now to catch even one fish a year the size of the smallest of the three that fell to Kingsley’s friend that morning. But it not just the fish that this book causes me to mourn. It is the lost world in which fishing had not been marked off as a hobby — which is to say, an occasion to spend money — but as a necessary form of spiritual refreshment, in which a contemplative man could be recreated.

Andrew Brown is a writer and journalist. He is the author of Fishing in Utopia (Granta Books, 2008). He owns only 14 fly rods.


The Fishing Vicar: The story of Britain’s angling clergy
Keith Harwood
Medlar Press £26*
(978-1-915694-08-9)
*available from www.medlarpress.com