I was born on 3rd April 1954 but I’m not fishing for a birthday card. On 2nd April 1817 the Salford Anglers’ Society was founded and they have been fishing for almost two hundred years, so save your card for them next year.
Obviously I’m not going to write about them – I have no idea where Salford is for a start, does the BBC live there (?) – but there is a more youthful gang of fishermen with a spring in their carbon fibre rods called the Tyburn Angling Society, started in the 21st Century to fish in a river that, frankly, disappeared years ago. (It ran from Hampstead in a southerly direction until it joined the Thames near Whitehall.) What does this tell us? That hope springs eternal when fishing? Or that fishermen are bonkers?
I would really like to describe the dinners that the Tyburn Anglers enjoy at the Fly Fishers’ Club but I haven’t been invited. Instead I will remind you of Tyburn, the place. It is where Marble Arch is today and in the 12th century it was a small village. A triangular gallows that came to be known as the Tyburn Tree was erected here. The condemned were taken from London prisons to this westerly extremity of London to be executed, three at a time. Their journey west led to the phrase “going west’ meaning going to one’s death. Executions were slow, prisoners taking anything up to an hour to die and after that they were drawn and quartered. Such grisly scenes were immensely popular spectator sports, I’m sorry to say.
Many of these unfortunate souls in the Reformation were Catholics who died for their faith and became known as Tyburn Martyrs. Today they are still remembered by Benedictine nuns at the Tyburn Convent and Shrine, on Hyde Park Place close to Marble Arch.
