An Angler for All Seasons

Hugh Tempest Sheringham was born into a clerical family - his father was a Vicar in Tewkesbury - and yet he was never drawn to the church. He won a scholarship to Westminster and then he took a classical tripos at Cambridge.
In 1903, while fishing on the Lambourn, he met William Senior, the Editor of The Field, and was offered the job of Angling Editor of that magazine. It was a job he held until his death in 1930, at the age of 54.

Besides his regular magazine articles, we wrote several novels and six fishing books, including An Angler's Hours, An Open Creel, Elements of Angling, Coarse Fishing, Trout Fishing: memories and morals and Fishing: its Cause, Treatment and Cure.

He wrote with passion about the pleasures of coarse fishing which, unusually for his generation, he rated as highly as trout and salmon fishing.

H.T. Sheringham ranks among the finest fishing writers of the twentieth century. Here is a collection of the very best of his angling experiences, taken mainly form his six fishing books and from The Field, for which he was Angling Editor.


No fish escaped his interest, even if it did sometimes escape his creel - carp, tench, chub, pike, roach, salmon and trout all were pursued with equal gusto.


He takes the reader on a journey without frontiers, from the reservoirs (Blagdon in its opening years) to the finest chalkstreams in England, from overgrown canals to Welsh salmon rivers. No snob, he knew only the joy of the sport.


He is funny, he is moving and - most rare - he is modest about his all-round skills with rod and line.


If you are new to Sheringham, An Angler for all Seasons will surely convert you into one of his many admirers.


The essays in this anthology have been chosen and introduced by Tom Fort, former Angling Correspondent of the Financial Times.