My memories of Terry Lampard, by Chris Paris
I first met Terry Lampard in the late 1960s when I was a
student at Southampton
University, and he was
just starting out on his specimen-hunting career. I’d been pre-baiting a swim
at the top lake at Stoneham
where my university mate Bill Branch had a 20 lb carp the previous year.
Unbeknownst to me, however, somebody else had been baiting the very same swim.
A plump scruffy young man of about my age, wearing a silly woollen hat, had his
rods already ready set up when I arrived on the evening of 15 June. ‘Bloody noddy’, I thought. Cursing my luck, I
moved into an adjacent swim in the hope that the fish might come to my baits
anyway after the magic start of the season at midnight. But I blanked that
night, while Terry caught the first of many carp – and other species – that I
have seen or heard him catch.
My bait of choice for carp at Stoneham then was the same as Terry’s – par
boiled potatoes. I’d considered using sausage meat because I’d had my first
doubles at a lake in Essex the previous summer
using that bait and it seemed to be more effective than spuds. But Bill Branch
had much more carp fishing experience than me and he’d explained that sausage
meat was OK for ‘easy’ waters in Essex but the Stoneham carp needed more sophisticated bait.
He was a scientist so we believed him at the time. Later, of course, Terry went
on to use sausage and other higher protein baits at Stoneham and other waters with great success.
With the benefit of hindsight, I am amazed at some of the
daft ideas and theories that were floating around in the late 1960s about bait
and fishing methods for carp. We mainly free-lined our baits in the belief that
carp would drop them at the slightest hint of resistance. We also believed that
you should hide your hook inside the bait so the carp wouldn’t feel it, and
that you shouldn’t put too much bait in before fishing because the carp would
become full. All of those ideas have been overturned since that time, of
course, with the widespread use of bolt rigs, hair-rigging and massive
pre-baiting campaigns.
Terry and I had a chat that first evening together over a
cup of tea and something stronger while waiting for the magic ‘opening time’ at
midnight. We got to know each other over the next few days, swapping stories of
fish caught and fish that we hoped to catch; at that time, of course, there
were many more of the latter than the former! I’d done a lot more fishing than
Terry at that stage, and had picked Southampton
University as it was near
the Hampshire Avon, especially the Royalty Fishery, with its massive barbel and
chub. I’d already had some success there before meeting Terry and he was keen
to catch barbel and chub, so we swapped addresses – no emails or mobile phones
in those days – and agreed to meet up after I got back from my summer vacation
with my family in Suffolk.
Our early trips to the Royalty were the first of many trips
together, nearly always in his part of the world. We kept in touch by letter
while I was a student at Glasgow University from 1969 to 1971 and swapped stories of
big pike – his from Hampshire and mine from Loch Lomond
– as well as his growing tally of big carp. I was gradually getting into an
academic career while Terry was becoming almost a full-time angler. He was a
roofer by trade but he developed unusual back problems around mid-June every
year just before the coarse fishing season started and had to take a few months
off work!
I moved to work in Birmingham
in 1971 and had many trips to fish with Terry at various carp lakes, including
Charlton, Embley and other lakes in Hampshire and Dorset. I didn’t drive until
the mid-70s so I’d catch a bus or train from Birmingham
to meet Terry at Winchester
railway station, where we’d load my gear onto his scooter, at first, then in
later years into a three-wheeler, and eventually into his first real van. I
have NO idea how we managed to get the gear on his scooter, nor how I managed
to carry it all on buses and trains! At other times I was driven down to
Hampshire by my Brummy mate Roger Baker and we teamed up with Terry. We had
some good fishing and much agreeable socialising in local pubs and Indian
restaurants. By the late 1970s I was working in London and I visited Terry a few times when
he was fishing at Yateley, usually taking him a tub of my homemade curry, which
he appreciated hugely. (Actually, come to think of it, he wasn’t just ‘fishing’
there – he was more-or-less living
there!)
We didn’t see much of each other during the 1980s as I was
living in Australia,
but we kept in touch regularly by letter, swapping stories of fishing and
pictures of fish. Younger readers should please remember that there were no
emails or electronic copies of images in those far-off days. I’ve got lots of
those pictures in my scrapbooks and will always treasure them. We resumed our
trips together after I moved back to the UK
in 1992, to a job at the University
of Ulster. Terry found it
very amusing that one of his best mates was a professor, but then lots of
people think it’s amusing that I’m a professor, including me. I tried to talk
Terry into coming to fish with me in Ireland, but that never worked out
so I usually visited him in spring or autumn in Child Okeford. I even stayed in
his house once – his first and only overnight guest - but once was more than
enough, as I had to sleep on the lumpy cushions off his old couch on the less
than spotlessly-clean floor and was woken up by mice investigating my beard
during the night. It was strictly B&B after that.
My last few trips with Terry included a brilliant day’s
piking at Milton Abbas when we each had a 20+ fish, a trip to the Dorset Stour
where I had my biggest perch, and a couple of days on a local lake where I had
my biggest carp. Our very last trip together in October 2011 included a couple
of days at Longleat where I finally managed to get Terry to use his fly rod –
on carp that we’d chummed up with dog biscuits and using an imitation dog
biscuit ‘fly’. We caught shedloads of carp up to about 8 lb on the lower lake
before heading to the next lake up the chain and I went on to catch my PB carp
on fly at that time, around 16 lb.
We chatted a lot on that trip about how fishing had changed
over the 40-plus years that we’d been friends. Carp fishing had changed most,
of course, which was why neither of us had much interest in it any more. Or,
rather, we enjoyed carp fishing the way that we still did it - which was
light-hearted, short sessions and often stalking individual fish. We had our
usual friendly disagreements over bait, especially boilies and the possibility
of near-perfect baits and the ethics of ‘trapping’ fish with bolt rigs - he
took great delight in setting up a helicopter rig for me to trap fish with. I
was a true believer in Fred Wilton’s arguments and ideas about bait but Terry
never accepted those arguments. He believed that the best bait for big roach
was bread flake – and who could possibly argue that he would have done better with any other baits?! He
considered the best bait for pike to be a fat roach and loved using natural
baits; he even suggested that boilies had become a ‘natural’ bait on the Stour
by 2011 because so many were being thrown into the river. He was a great fan of
Trigga paste, so I called him ‘Trigga’ and he called simply me ‘Prof’.
I didn’t get over to fish with Terry in the Autumn of 2012
as I had too much work to complete before heading back to Australia on a 2-year contract at Adelaide University. Terry had just retired and he was looking
forward to going fishing more often, though I wasn’t sure that this would be possible! We had a long chat on the
phone in January 2013, just before I headed down’under, and we agreed to have a
trip together when I got back in a couple of years time. But Fred Wilton
contacted me in early February to say that Terry had died after a short
illness. So our trip together in early 2015 never happened, but I was able to
sit quietly with Tim Norman on the first of March that year on the bench
dedicated to Terry’s memory and look across that lovely lake where his ashes
were scattered.
Terry Lampard was a natural, intuitive angler with a great
love of fish, fishing waters and the countryside. We were good friends, living
very different but overlapping lives. Terry rarely strayed far from his native Wessex, feeling little desire to travel, whereas
I’ve spent more of my life outside England
than in it, with fourteen years in Australia
and over twenty in Northern
Ireland, as well as travelling widely for
work and pleasure. Terry remained a passionate coarse angler all his life and although
he took a great interest in my other enthusiasms - saltwater game fishing as
well as fly-fishing in both fresh and saltwater – he never had any inclination
to stray into those areas. I’ve lived two lives, one as a professional academic
and the other as an enthusiastic amateur angler; Terry was verging on being a
full-time professional angler, though he did the odd bit of roofing work to
keep the wolf from the door. He became an angling legend in his own lifetime,
though he neither sought nor wanted fame. In fact, he was a shy and rather
reclusive man, who lived a life of gentle self-indulgence and never harmed
anyone or anything. His fishing was the most important part of his life, but he
was an extraordinary good friend to a small number of people, and I’m
privileged to have been one of them. I’ve also been lucky enough to get to know
a couple of his other closest friends since his death and to share our memories
of Terry and the times we had together.
Our long friendship came about because two young blokes
happened to be chucking potatoes into the same estate lake at the same time,
with neither knowing that the other was doing exactly the same thing. The only
things we had in common were our working class backgrounds and mutual love of
fishing and the countryside, but our shared enthusiasms proved to be the basis
of the longest-lasting friendship of either of our lifetimes, and I miss him
very much indeed.