Bernard Venables
Was the Author of Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, the angling cartoon book that sold millions of copies in the 1940s
BERNARD VENABLES, who died aged 94 in 2001, authored one of the most successful books ever written about sport, Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing; presented in the form of a cartoon strip, it sold more than two million copies in the 1940s and 1950s, but since Venables was employed as the angling correspondent of the Daily Mirror he received not a penny! in royalties, all of which went to the newspaper.
Venables had trained as an artist, and in the years after the Second World War started to draw a series on gardening for the Mirror in which the pipe-loving Crabtree dispensed seasonal horticultural tips,yes that's right Crabtree was a gardener. Come winter, however, there was less for Crabtree to do, and Venables, a keen fisherman, accordingly suggested to the newspaper's editor that the character shift his attention to the riverbank.
Crabtree was provided with a son eager to learn the habits of tench and rudd, and along with the readers, young Peter was soon initiated into the piscatorial arts. Venables laid out and drew all the pictures himself, but the key to the Mr Crabtree's appeal was the skill with which he explained a largely intuitive sport to others. The Mirror was quick to see its success, and in 1949 a compilation of the strips, together with some new stories and watercolours, was issued in book form. Priced at five shillings, it proved to be a best seller.
Fifty years on, the characters possess a quaint but alluring charm: Peter Crabtree wears shorts in all weathers, while his father never sheds his tie. But the advice on fishing remains just as sound and pragmatic as it ever was, while the note of concern for the value of the countryside has become still more topical. For his part, although he saw no financial return from his success, Venables took great pleasure, and no little pride, in having introduced so many people to an idyllic and compelling pastime.
Bernard Percival Venables was born on February 14 1907, the son of a clerk. As a boy of five, growing up near Romney Marsh, he became fascinated by a local pond, imagining the fish swimming below its surface. He soon taught himself to fish with a piece of string and a bent pin. In later years he scorned anglers who relied on technology to make their catch; for him, fishing had to be a contest of skill and wits alone,a true carper.
The family later moved to south London, but his father died when Bernard was 15 and he left school young. He then had a series of menial jobs before entering art school (his grandfather had been a painter). Venables joined the Daily Express as a cartoonist and illustrator in the 1920s, later moving to the Mirror. When war came, and many of the journalists were called up, he was encouraged to turn his hand to reporting and discovered for the first time his ability to write clear and attractive prose.
Following the success of Mr Crabtree, Venables began to devote himself to writing about fishing full-time. In 1953, he co-founded the weekly Angling Times. He then became editor of Creel, a magazine aimed at the top end of the market, including those anglers who, with the growth of air travel, were starting to take fishing holidays in more exotic locations.
The magazine folded, however, when it failed to attract sufficient advertising revenue, and Venables then worked principally for the airlines BEA and BOAC, investigating opportunities for fishing tourism, particularly in Africa. His interest in angling of every kind took Venables all over the world in these years. In 1968, he published Baleia!, an account of the two seasons he spent with the Fayal islanders of the Azores, hunting whales in small open boats with hand-held harpoons.
Venables also travelled to Gibraltar to fish for shark, and hooked a 24-footer which he managed to bring on deck. The creature, he later recalled, then became very active. "The back end hit one of my friends on the leg, so that he had to go to hospital. The front end gave me a wallop on the head and knocked my pipe out of my mouth." When Venables retrieved his briar, he found that he had also lost a front tooth.
Another of his books, Coming Down the Zambezi (1975), grew from Venables's fascination with the newly independent Africa, and also from his interest in David Livingstone's explorations of the continent. Venables, by now almost in his seventies, travelled more than 1,200 miles down the river from its source in the forests of the Congo to the point where it enters Mozambique.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Venables gave much of his energy to the Anglers' Co-operative Association, which helped to clean up some of Britain's more polluted waterways. He was a dedicated conservationist, and came to see fishing as a sort of mystical act, a participation in a natural order of things greater than man.
"I make a very close link between our belonging here and the will to fish," he said. "There is no natural medium in which the sense of life on earth is more evident than in water . . . Most of the things which are least pleasant about life now are the things which are most antithetical to fishing."
He was the author of 18 books, including Fishing (1953), The Angler's Companion (1958), A Rise to the Fly (1999) and The Illustrated Memoirs of a Fisherman (1993). Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing was republished by Map Marketing last year. Venables had a lively, inquiring, analytical mind, but he also enjoyed the more reflective aspects of fishing, particularly the birdsong and the play of light on water.
He himself lived near the Wiltshire Avon, and even in his nineties worked seven days a week. Away from fishing, he enjoyed sculpting and especially painting, which he thought his true vocation. He married, in 1958, Eileen Willmore. They had two sons and a daughter.
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