"The Life and Times of John Beams - and a trip to the moon.

Tom Sutcliffe

When all is said and done, we don't really know a great deal about the early, or even the middle days of trout fishing in South Africa.

Andrew Levy TCFF Magazine, December 2015.

John Beams was a powerful force for change in the history of South Africa fly fishing yet his life remains largely unrecorded. Mark Mackereth, an angler from the same era and from the same crucible of streams in the Western Cape has had more recognition. I fished with both during my student years, grew to like and respect them, learned from them, and after I had left Cape Town for KZN in 1968 I sent each a regular fishing letter, like a soldier on a distant battlefront sending dispatches to High Command. In my regular reports I naturally went on a bit about KZN's big stillwater trout.

Mackereth was little impressed. After all, these weren't big trout taken from quick streams on dry flies. But my letters caused Beams a serious itch, which he eventually had to scratch, and did, on a famous visit to Natal in 1970, when we fished the Old Dam and one or two other cosmic spots, caught heaps of trout, some large, even a few browns, and he was smitten.

A 'Fra Diavolo' tied by Gordon Photo by Tom Sutcliffe

Like a piscatorial undertaker

Beams was a great fisherman, a good fly tier (no more than), a very competitive angler, an artist, an excellent writer and an accomplished photographer. So far, so cut and paste. Just to add that I once said if I had to fish for my life against anyone in South Africa I'd fear John Beams most. I have never changed my mind. He was very much the thinking angler to whom competition came not as a daunting challenge, but as a galvanising elixir.

Early on in John's KZN days I realised that faced with the prospect of catching fish he demonstrated a number of mental deficiencies. Not least was his determination to catch as many as possible, no matter how, especially big fish, and especially big bags of big fish. And that was when it was still PC for anglers to squat behind their assembled corpses for an ego-drenching photo shoot. Magazines treated you to countless pictures of live anglers and dead fish, the angler being the one smiling at the camera with shameless pride, like a smug piscatorial undertaker. That vogue lasted until the tree-huggers found us out, or maybe until we discovered the obvious benefits of catch-and-release, and though pictures like this are no less common now, they nearly always have an unwritten text that tells you, release imminent.

But let's rather talk about the man behind the pictures.

First, I remember John in many ways other than as an angler. I remember him as superbright and knowledgeable, despite an ultralight formal education and, perhaps as a consequence of his scant education, a man who found the need to prove himself on every run and pool in later life. For example, he was uncommonly well informed on subjects you would least expect; like astrophysics, classical music, literature and chess. So much so, that I sometimes thought of him as a man possibly hovering on the edges of undisclosed genius, and I choose my words very carefully here safe in the knowledge that no person outside of his family knew him better, or fished with him more, or was more in his social company than I was, from 1971 until he died in 1984, by when, to me, he was entirely that genius.

Which is not to say he was perfect. Insecurities easily broke through his outward veneer of confidence, causing him to snap a sharply sarcastic tongue at even slight provocations, most especially when people got things plainly wrong, or when they showcased unwarranted virtues, like plain snobbery. So, naturally, he was less popular in some circles than in others and, again to word it carefully, he was a man never short in his life of a few committed detractors. So naturally we used to joke among ourselves that with his social unpredictability and his total absence of airs and graces he was always going to be a very risky guest to invite to a tea party with the Queen.

John was born in the Midlands of the England and, at just eight years old, in September 1940, was sent overseas by steamship to escape the bombs raining down c/o Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. As it happened he was one of 212 children sent to New Zealand, where he was prepschooled for five years at Nelson College in the city of Nelson, South Island, until his return to the UK in 1946. That was the last formal education he had.

Back in London he got work as an apprentice signwriter, mindlessly painting Eskimo Pie ice cream logos on countless tea room windows, until he eventually rose to the rank of commercial artist. Thus equipped he immigrated to South Africa in 1964, got a job with a Cape Town ad agency, lived happily in a small rented house in Tamboerskloof with his wife Hilda and daughter Hedda, (where I

occasionally visited him), and joined the Cape Piscatorial Society. He spoke of how warmly Mackereth had welcomed him to the club and how he'd introduced him to the liquid temples of the CPS High Church, rivers like the Smalblaar, the Molenaars section of the Smalblaar, and the Holsloot. He recalled too the immediate respect and fondness he felt for A C Harrison, the CPS's iconic secretary of the time.

From then on (like a lot of us back then), John was consumed with mastering the art of dry fly on fast water and was the first person to mention the word drag to me, in the sense of it being a technically contrary event in dry-fly fishing, referring to it at the time as 'the dreaded skate.'

Mark Mackereth on the Smalblaar

wherein he said, '...one of the country's best anglers and an articulate and at times provocative writer.' (I'll just add, you know then, Bob!)

In his writings John's grasp of semantics was unsurpassed and he never lost a chance to police my stumbling prose, especially my misuse of pronouns and my often casual disregard for commas. But I learned a lot more from him than just semantics; I learned about the creation of the universe and black holes in space; the music of composers like Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Mahler, Rachmaninoff; the Sicilian Defence and countless other gambits in chess, and, importantly, I learned about fly fishing from him, just at a time when I was most receptive to instruction and at a time when instruction wasn’t yet a commodity.

One of the defining features of John's approach to fly fishing (aside from the fact that he was very good at it) was the time he spent carefully reading a piece of water before fishing it; down to studying each run, or each fish, long enough to think he might have a touch of OCD, anyway long before thinking of lifting his fly rod. That has stayed with me forever.

Then, often just when I was thinking he should give up fishing a particular run, it became clear that he had only just started! At the time I couldn't pace myself down, only up, so that lesson also sunk into my DNA. I recall his frequent intonations, 'So what time does your bus leave?' What bus? I ask, begging his dry reply, 'The one you're trying to catch right now.'

There was nothing cold, robotic or dreary about Beams, least of all in his angling. Bob Frean, a Pietermaritzburg journalist of the time, wrote the foreword to John's book, Introducing Fly Fishing in South Africa, We all noted how little store he placed in pattern as opposed to purpose. Meaning if it was a nymph he fished it exactly like a living nymph, never mind what pattern of nymph; ditto for emergers and dry flies.

So a certain five words stayed have with me for all time; pattern is less than purpose. Which is maybe why he never was a great inventor of flies himself. To him a dry fly was a dry fly, no matter if it was an Adams or a Wickham's. What did matter if it was a dry fly was whether it was a sedge or a mayfly, and if it was, say, a sedge, that you fished it like a sedge, with moments of skitter across the surface and always in short, staccato-like drifts.

Mike Harker on the Old dam

On KZN streams, especially brown trout streams, he favoured small, as in size 12, unweighted, wispily-dressed Black Woolly Worms, of the sort Tony tied back in the 70s, flies that hovered anywhere between a dark-coloured, sunken Wickham's Fancy and a well-hackled nymph. And he fished them, as he describes in his book, as free-drifting or swimming, but always as living insects. Pattern, purpose.

On stillwaters he was drawn to structure like a nail to a magnet; to a line of reed beds, or to a drop-off, or to some long-submerged streambed, or to the shallows. Never without a plan, he consistently out-fished everyone, even on the Old Dam in the testing company of notable stillwater sages of the time, like Tony Biggs, Hugh Huntley, Neil Hodges, Mike Harker, Taffy Walters and Bill

Old Dam Grandads foreground with the Blockhouse behind

Two notable stillwater sages at the Old Dam

You could never fish with Beams and be far removed from his humour. One day we fished a pretty mountain pond set in the fringes of a natural forest when bugs were hatching like a small rainstorm and nothing was taking our dry flies. In fact, the fish were not taking our flies with such intent that they seemed to be making a point out of not taking our dry flies. Fishless over coffee I asked John if he had any bright ideas and he said we should revert to Schwiebert's Second Strategy. Puzzled, I asked what Schwiebert's Second Strategy was? And he said, 'the eeny, meeny, miny, moe one'. (I later remember asking him what Schiebert's First Strategy was and he said, 'Haven't you read Matching the Hatch yet?')

It might well have been in similar circumstances when we were again fishless that he suddenly turned to me with a look of high wisdom on his face and announced, 'There are only two vitally important things in fly fishing. The first is Faith,' then added, 'Sorry, I can't remember the second one.' You may have noticed that through some weird twist of anthropomorphic distortion a monster fish can at times look a lot like the angler who just caught it. This once prompted John to send a photograph to AC Harrison for the Piscator journal, with a caption that read, 'The angler is the one at the back ...'

John had been a keen coarse fisherman in England from the age of six. He once told us he was fishing a small pastoral pond in the dead of a moonless night when he hooked (and for a long time fought) the fish of a lifetime. It turned out to be a very pissed-off moorhen.

There were a few characteristics to John's fishing that he never so much spoke about as slowly gleaned, or just came to understand. Here follow what you might call Five Commandments roughly extracted from the scriptures according to Beams, at least as we got to understand them:

Beam's Five Commandments

One: If you were out there to fish with him then that's what you did. To the exclusion of all else. Including randomly intrusive sexual fantasies. He hated any slacking or idleness on the water. Two: You banished any hint of self-doubt. He hated that more.

Three: You morphed your determination to catch fish into a belief you will catch fish, no matter the odds.

Four: You never doubted a barometer. Falling, and you stayed home. Rising, and you called in sick and headed for water.

Five: You respected the fish and you respected the land. Full stop.

But in one instance, despite all the above, Beam's default catch-as-many-fish-as-youcan setting nearly brought the great Tower of Babel down on his head. Here is a synopsis:

It happened one day that John kept 'x' number of trout from a well-known Natal Fly Fishers Club stillwater. Problem was it was 'y' number over the bag limit – and he got caught by the riparian owner.

Trouble. Serious trouble. Biblical-sized serious trouble.

His detractors, thrilled at the prospect of this incoming bonanza leapt with Orwellian haste to steer his ship to the rocks. The word going round (in a few circles, anyway) was expulsion. They might also have wanted the government to declare a day of national mourning, I can't remember, but either way it was going to be a disaster.

Beams had argued that he was technically under the bag limit because his fishing companion hadn't hooked a fish all day, which was a fact.

The committee meeting that followed was the most extraordinary I have ever been in. For a start it was unusually stilted and ceremonial, a lot like you'd imagine a Pope's funeral to be. But remember this was the founder of the club and its first chairman we were sitting in judgement on. And so the committee presided and pondered back and forth, and then pondered back and forth some more, and finally agreed on a brief period of suspension only, rather than expulsion.

At this point, member 'z', a known Beams detractor, got up in a huffing pique and making for the door, announced with extravagant flourish that if that was the case he was leaving the meeting! Whereupon member 'w', (alright, Taffy Walters actually), stood up and with equal flourish told him to fuck off to the moon. A stunned silence fell across the staid gathering and for a moment I saw the secretary (Edith Combes), pen poised in midair as if about to faithfully commit the statement to her minutes, possibly even wondering how to spell the word, then she suddenly realised what had just been said, sheepishly dropped her pen and folded her arms as if to say, 'Now what?'

This account will never appear in any pages of the NFFC's written histories. But now you know it, and one or two members of this illustrious and wonderful club who were there that night, and who are still alive and who may read this, will certainly remember it – with a smile, I hope.

It was said, in some circles anyway, that Beams had effortlessly risen above a bunch of people who he considered too dumb to help themselves. This was not the case. Beams was very sobered by this event, very contrite and very indebted to the people who had stood by him. To some though, it was strangely as if he gained a sort of added bohemian appeal from the saga; almost the aura of a fly-fishing dictator-for-life, especially among younger anglers whose default position is anyhow nearly always set to anti-establishment. This wasn't anything like a prevailing sentiment at the time and most of us just saw him as a great angler with his own peculiar orthodoxies and certainly a man still worthy of great respect. He prevailed.

So there he is. John Beams. Undoubtedly among the very best minds I have ever known; an angler so focused, so committed, such a master of detail and persistence that his presence on any trout water was always influential, no matter the company; a man with an insatiable appetite for the sport; a

And so it is that among my most valuable treasures is a photograph that Tom Burgers took of John at his tying desk. On it, he inscribed: To my Guide, my Philosopher and my Fishing Friend. John.

J o h n r e t i r e d f r o m b u s i n e s s i n Pietermaritzburg and moved to his new home, Gone Fishing, in the lovely hamlet of Nottingham Road where he and Hilda lived until he died.

Sketch of the Old House on the Old Dam

Together with Mackereth and Biggs, Beams helped to develop and popularise fly fishing on Western Cape streams in the late 60s.

Cover artist for many Piscator journals and contributor of the very popular 'Natal Letter to A C Harrison' from the early 70s until AC died.

Founder of the Natal Fly Fishers Club (1971) and founding member of the Hogsback Trout Angling Club.

From 1982 the first South African trout fishing guide (to my knowledge), operating from his home in Nottingham Road.

Author of 'Introducing Fly Fishing in South Africa'. Edited by RH Frean. Top Farmers Publications. 1974.

The angler depicted on the Transkei First Day Cover: 15 January 1981.

Developer of the Red Butt Woolly Worm (sometimes referred to as simply as a JB Woolly Worm - Piscator 79, Sping 1970, page 61), a few stillwater snail patterns and the Snipe Fly .

A man who was offered honorary life membership of the Fly Fishers Association (FFA, Durban) and turned it down, saying he had not earned the award.

Heaviest river fish: Rainbow hen 6lb 1 oz, Belmont Pool, Dwars River Ceres.

Heaviest bass: A one-time record for the largest South Africa smallmouth bass caught on standard fly tackle. Vogelvlei Dam, Western Cape.

Favourite game: Chess, with an extensive library on the latter. Favourite player, Alexander Alekhine (Russia).

Influenced by:

South Africans: A C Harrison, Mark Mackereth, Tony Biggs.

UK anglers: John Goddard, Frank Sawyer, Tom Ivens, Oliver Kite, John Veniard;

US anglers: Al McClane, Lee Wulff, Winslow Homer (artist); American Fly Fisherman and Fly Rod and Reel magazines (he was deeply influenced by both).

Favourite fishing spots and places

Glenfern, The Bend and Riverside, all upper Mooi River beats. Stagstones on the Little Mooi. The lower Mooi River in mid-winter above the village of Rosetta. Stillwaters: the Old Dam and Highmore.

Granddad's Cottage, the Blockhouse and the Old House on the farm Heatherdon alongside the Old Dam.

Ernest Hemingway, Roderick Haig-Brown, Negley Farson and South African satirist Robert Kirby.

Favourite music:

Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on Themes of Paganini, Variation 18. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjqkkuhRt_M)

Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, often described as a right of passage for every concert violinist.

https://houstonsymphony.org/mendelssohn-violin-concerto/

John once said, ' Come the revolution and both these compositions will be compulsory listening for all citizens'. I suggest you listen to either, preferably both.

Postscript:

In August 1984 I did an interview with JB. It was two months before his death, at a time when his brain carried the metastatic bullets of advanced cancer and he was bloated from cortisone. It was filmed by Dr Rob Buley at John's home. It was also shortly after his last sojourn to the Old Dam, when Mike Harker and I literally had to prop him up so he could cast. He died barely three months later.

Some excerpts taken from that interview;

'If you haven't got the determination to come out tops when you are fishing with any bunch of anglers, you are never going to make a top fly fisher. '

'If you don't eat, dream and read chess, you are never going to make it as a player.'

'Fly fishing has helped me to enjoy my life.'

'My most memorable waters are the Smalblaar and Mick Kimber's Old Dam. That is a place I will never forget.'

'Mark Mackereth was the first person I ever saw using a nymph. He taught me to tie flies. He taught me to really look at a river. He was an artist with a fly rod and fortunately he had a genuine enthusiasm to teach.'

'The English mystique and cult around fly fishing is now dead.'

'Your skills as a South African angler likely come on the back of knowledge borrowed from, sadly, mainly not-South-African-masters. The rest must come more painfully, from your own blood, toil, tears and sweat, as Churchill put it.'