COLIN HIGGINS: John Sidley - an unsung hero

Having been provoked by Jon’s recent depiction of me as a kind of keyboard Miss Haversham, or perhaps a laptop-wielding stylite, committing marvellous thoughts to the page from lofty isolation and questionable personal hygiene, I’ve been stung into blogging, which was no doubt his intention.

There has been some talk of eels lately so I thought it was reasonable to talk about a hero, from someone who has very few, fishy or otherwise. For a little background on the person in question, and indeed eels, I can do no better than point the reader to Keith Elliott’s old Independent article.
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/why-you-must-feel-for-the-eel-1621445.html

My first knowledge of John Sidley came from picking up a book in the remaindered section of a local shop. It was an unprepossessing item on first appearance, the kind of slim generic volume angling literature in the 80s was full of. Called simply Eels and part of Beekay’s Successful Angling Series, it had a hard cover, which persuaded me to part with £3.50 but little else to recommend it, except the large Anguilla being held by someone best described as having a feral appearance.

While the layout artist may have been untroubled by the problems of aesthetics, the contents were sheer joy. This was an author who knew, loved and had an almost uncanny instinct for catching eels - and lots of them. British coarse anglers - or bottom fishers, to use a derelict term - fall into few easy categories. There are specimen hunters, men who sit behind a pod of high-tech rods and reels for long hours in a bivvy tent waiting for a run to develop on their electronic alarms, and there are old-school types, the sort who’ll pay four figures for a silk-whipped piece of built cane and a bespoke English centrepin reel.

John Sidley was neither. He was utterly dedicated but had a pragmatic approach to his tackle, which I instantly identified with. That’s not to say his eel rigs weren’t ingenious or original; they were both and have been adopted widely, but in a specialism where the terminal end can resemble Asian bridal head attire in its complexity, Sidley was a 'less is more' kind of bloke. Instead of sophisticated bite alarms JS favoured a carefully balanced coin falling into an old hubcap - no doubt the Brummie in him. He swore by his old glass rods and they didn't let him down because his tally of large eels is formidable.

The photographs in the book show an unkempt chap with a baggy jumper, a wooly hat and a prodigious array of home-made tattoos and it’s not too fanciful to draw a comparison with the eels he pursued; over-looked, inhabiting the less frequented places and probably misunderstood. Whatever the homespun nature of his appearance and gear, Sidley single-handedly put respect for eels on the agenda. Until his ‘Put Eels back Alive’ campaign with advice on their capture and humane treatment they were seen as nuisance fish and were frequently mistreated and often killed.

Chapters contain the fruits of thousands of hours of research and practical fieldwork and rarely fall into the didacticism of other writers, even when apparently counter-intuitive, such as his acknowledgement of two distinct types of eel within the species and the fact eels only ever run along one river bank (borne out by Dutch research)

I don’t remember exactly what year I bought Eels but it would be around the time John died in the early 90s, although I didn’t learn that till years later. I haven’t been able to find much out about his demise except he wasn’t very old and I believe it was on the bankside, ‘overdoing things’ as someone noted.

You may ask what this has to do with cryptozoology and it’s a good question. According to the environment agency eels have suffered a 95% decline in the last 25 years and nobody knows quite why. Some blame new weirs and dams stopping small ‘glass’ eels moving upstream, others commercial over-fishing or parasites; a number feel it’s the Gulf Stream moving, which has changed breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea. The bottom line is eels may well become the next thylacine, a familiar creature that will disappear from under our noses without our noticing.

Sidley did his bit to bring these fascinating, enigmatic creatures to our attention. ‘Bostin work’ JS, absolutely bostin.