Article - General
Fishing Uniform / Which one to wear?
By Robin, added on 20/02/2009
When I was a kid there seemed to be just two styles of dress for
anglers. The gentry wore plus-fours and everyone else made do with old
clothes. This might consist of an old tweed jacket and a trilby hat, and
black wellies. In winter the ordinary man went fishing in a mackintosh
or if it was really cold, an overcoat. Mr Crabtree wore this sort of
stuff all the time. Thus, apart from the man in the plus fours with his
Hardy fly rod who I was unlikely to bump into anyway, fishing was
classless as we all looked pretty much the same. The pike angler, the
match-man and the tench-fisher were all as one.
Things started to diverge in the sixties when the emerging angling sub
species ‘specimen hunter’ discovered army surplus, of which there was a
great deal about. In fact it had been about since the end of WW11,
funnily enough, and along with many anglers I did have one item myself
in the form of a gas mask bag which was suitably subdivided inside for
various bits of tackle. I later replaced this with a US army haversack,
mainly because we all used them for school. Specimen hunters, however,
had loads of army surplus. Apart from all the groundsheets and cooking
stuff, their fishing apparel of choice was the camouflaged parachute
jacket and this set them apart from the rest of us.
Army surplus was the start of the slippery slope but I reckon we must
now be close to the bottom. Trout anglers have their ‘too new’ Barbour
coats and waistcoats, although these in turn are slowly being replaced
by baseball caps and breathable chest waders. Barbel anglers insist on
broad brimmed leather bush hats and carp anglers try to be invisible in
Advantage Timber whilst sharply contradicting this aspiration by
cluttering up their swims with mountains of gear and bivvies the size of
a marquee.
Match anglers, however, seem to have got stuck somewhere about half way
down in a permanent dodgy 1970’s world of PU coated nylon.
So if you, like me, enjoy all these different sorts of angling (apart
from the match fishing) it’s a bugger to know what to wear for the best!
At very least I’ll avoid the Diawa shell suit.