Photo: Peter Brigg
Heritage Flies - Part 10 The flies of Harry Stewart. Peter Brigg I first met Harry Stewart in the nineties when I happened to be in East London and able to visit him at his home to collect an order of flies for the small retail business, The Fly Fishing Shop, that the late John Wheatley and I ran for a number of years in Westville. I spent an interesting few hours learning about the flies and the man behind them.
immigrated to Zimbabwe in 1951 and for the next 30 years he flyfished for trout in the Nyanga district.
Harry started fishing when he was seven years old on the Gryffe River in Scotland with home-made rods. He got his first proper rod a year later. It was made of greenheart and had a spliced joint and he would bind the two pieces together with insulation tape. At ten he started tying flies for trout. By the age of 15 years he was tying flies for pocket money for Alex Martin Ltd in Glasgow.
In 1968 he started Stewart’s Trout Flies in the backyard of his Salisbury home having trained five young men. At the same time he was a partner in a transport and civils company and in the evenings his wife, Doreen, and his four children would assist in packaging the day’s fly production for postage, mainly to South Africa but also for local use.
Two of the happiest years of his life were between1964 and 1966 when he and his wife Doreen ran the estate at the Troutbeck Inn in the Nyanga mountain range of the then Rhodesia.
After six years in the British army he www.saflyfishingmag.co.za
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