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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
A book of trout-fishing, fencing, archery and more, celebrating the 175th anniversary of The London Library One would hear considerably less of hysteria, of morphine-mania, and of other regrettable characteristics of fin-de-siecle existence, if women were to take to fencing as one of the regular occupations of their day Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, said in 1896: "No matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks." Women competed in the Olympics for the first time in 1900. Lady Greville, the editor of The Gentlewoman's Book of Sports, hopes that reading what each female expert sportswoman has written about her particular sport or pastime "may encourage other women, as feminine but more timid, to imitate their achievements, and to acquire a keen zest for and sympathy with outdoor pursuits." The Gentlewoman's Book of Sports is part of 'Found on the Shelves', published with The London Library. The books in this series have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over 17 miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.
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PUSHKIN PRESS — THE LONDON LIBRARY
It was not easy to be a sportswoman at the end of the nineteenth century. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, said in 1896: “No matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks.” Women competed in the Olympics for the first time in 1900.
The “white sailor hats” and the “confusion between you, your hat, and the ball” in Lady Greville’s book may now seem charmingly old-fashioned—until we remember that in 2015, more than a century later, more than 40% of elite sportswomen in Britain were reported to have suffered sexism. Which suddenly makes the bold gentlewomen of 1892 seem far more pioneering…
The books in “Found on the Shelves” have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over seventeen miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.
From essays on dieting in the 1860s to instructions for gentlewomen on trout-fishing, from advice on the ill health caused by the “modern” craze of bicycling to travelogues from Norway, they are as readable and relevant today as they were more than a century ago—even if contemporary sportswomen no longer have to “thank Providence and one’s tailor for one’s knickerbockers”!
THE GENTLEWOMAN’S BOOK OF SPORTS
Contents
THE GENTLEWOMAN’S BOOK OF SPORTS
EDITED BY LADY GREVILLE, 1892
LADY VIOLET GREVILLE (1842–1932) was an author by profession who became, in the 1880s and 1890s, the writer of a ladies column in the Graphic. She joined The London Library on 19th October 1897, giving her occupation as “Lady”.
Preface
A keen love of sport is inherent in the breast of all true Englishmen; and the desire of adventure, the disregard of comfort and danger, that it encourages, have gone far to make them the conquerors of the world. In times, like the present, of morbid self-analysis and diseased introspection, a return to nature, to wholesome healthy amusement and field sports, cannot be too strongly encouraged. The sportsman is not cruel, as has sometimes been wantonly asserted: he loves animals, birds, insects, flowers and all the beauties of nature. In his lonely wanderings face to face with the glorious aspect of sea and sky, of the bleak mountain side and the luxuriant valley, he studies the habits of wild beasts, the ways of feathered fowl, the lore and knowledge of herbs and plants. He learns to love the country for its own sake; to appreciate its poetry, its glamour, its healthful peace; to admire and enjoy “the broken sunlight glinting through copse and gleaming on fern, the woodland sights, the woodland sounds, the balmy odours of Nature, and all the treats she provides for her votaries.”
In like manner, many women have cultivated habits of endurance, of observation, of activity, of courage and self-command, of patience and energy. The record of some of their adventures and pastimes will, I venture to think, be favourably received by the public, and may encourage other women, as feminine but more timid, to imitate their achievements, and to acquire a keen zest for and sympathy with outdoor pursuits.
Each of the ladies who contribute to this volume may claim to be an authority—so far as her own sex is concerned—on the subject of which she treats; and it is thought that these reminiscences and suggestions may be of service to other ladies who are merely beginning to interest themselves in the sports discoursed upon.
VIOLET GREVILLE
TROUT-FISHING
BY LADY COLIN CAMPBELL
LADY COLIN CAMPBELL (née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood) was best known for the divorce scandal which shocked Victorian society. After four years of marriage, she sued for divorce on grounds of her husband’s infidelity and cruelty. Lord Colin alleged that his wife had committed adultery with at least four men. No divorce was obtained, and she became a successful writer and editor (see “Fencing”).
In the majority of sports and athletics, the question of the surroundings amongst which they are pursued is an all-important one; and, perhaps, in none is the question more obstinately to the fore than in Trout-fishing. The inexhaustible charm of that delightful sport does not by any means solely depend on the number or size of the speckled beauties one returns home with, fagged, wet, but triumphant, after a long day’s fishing. To catch a 60-lb. salmon in the Serpentine would not be worth crossing Hyde Park for; and it is the surroundings of moorland or copse, babbling brown mountain stream, or purling lowland brook, as well as the knowledge that only art and patience will enable you to get the better of your wily prey, which give you that sense of intense satisfaction and triumph with which you wend your way homewards, proudly conscious of the weight of the well-filled basket that is the best testimony to your knowledge of this so-called “gentle art.”
No one who is a blood-thirsty hunter, as the average Englishman is popularly and incorrectly supposed to be, would care much for a sport which he would probably designate contemptuously as “mild”; but, after all, any given moment can only hold a certain measure of excitement, and to the true trout-fisher it is an open question whether that measure is not as surely reached when she pulls a monster that weighs three-quarters of a pound out of a mountain stream with the aid of a tiny American 8-oz. rod, a hair-gut line, and a fly little bigger than the familiar midge, as in that supreme moment in a Terai jungle, when a tiger rushes out from his lair amongst the waving canes under the very nose of the sportsman’s elephant. Size in sport is only relative, and success and surroundings are everything.
To the artistic sense the surroundings of trout-fishing—the river, large or small, with its bubbling eddies, its broken boulders, rocky bed, and stony runs, the trembling shadows of the black poplars or alders, the wide stretches of moorland as one climbs to the upper waters of the stream—offer an endless attraction; while the artistic features of the sport itself, the delicacy of hand, the unerring aim and quickness of eye, the necessity of knowing how to take advantage of every passing cloud, of every corner or boulder of rock, keep the faculties of the sportswoman for ever on the alert, banishing all consciousness of fatigue or wet garments. Who is there that has ever fished a river, whether it be the broad and majestic Tay or Namsen, or a little mountain stream one could almost jump across, with that ever-present and persistent hope of catching a bigger leviathan than was ever caught before, that will not admit with me that trout-fishing has an inexhaustible charm that even the slaying of the mighty salmon does not quench the enjoyment of? Innumerable, too, are the ways whereby we may attempt to beguile our prey in trout-fishing. The salmon is often a sulky beast; he may have been long in the river, have lost his bright, silvery scales, and become a red, torpid monster; the water may not be of the approved height which will prompt his peculiar taste for taking notice of your fly or bait; the wind may be in the wrong direction, or the perpetual “Heaven knows why!” may be the only possible explanation of his irritating contumacy; but it often happens that you may fish patiently all day, expending a zeal which you end by thinking worthy of a better cause, flaunting the most tempting flies the mind of Farlow can conceive and create, watching the salmon jumping perpetually all around you, and yet not getting a vestige of sport from a single fish. Not so with the game little trout. Tell me of a mountain stream of clear brown water, deep black pools, and rocky bed, that has not been visited that spring by that person of one’s detestation, a brother sportsman who fishes one’s favourite pools before one gets a chance of doing so; let it be a nice mild day with a cloudy sky, and a slight tendency to drizzle, “a wee bit saft,” as they say in Scotland; give me my fishing-basket, landing-net, small 8-oz. rod of split cane, and a little pocket-book of different coloured midges; and dressed in a pair of tweed knickerbockers, kilt skirt, loose, many-pocketed coat, woollen stockings, and thick, hob-nailed shoes, out of which the water can “squelch” as easily as it enters, I will begin my fishing with a delightful certainty of not returning home bredouillée after my day’s sport is over.
I begin at as low a point down stream as is convenient, and otter-wise I proceed to wade up-stream, fishing pool after pool right up into the lonely moorland above (from whose peat the stream derives its lovely clear brown colour, as well as the animalculae that trout love to eat so greedily), until the burn becomes so narrow that you would hardly think a trout could turn round in it. At one moment I am standing at the lower end of a pool with the water coming bubbling down a little cascade in front of me. The pool above me I can hardly see, yet I know that by an intelligent cast with a long line over my left shoulder I shall avoid an ugly black poplar-tree on my right, which the wind, that is blowing in my face, might well hang my line up in; and I drop my fly, some twenty or thirty feet ahead, behind a big boulder where the water is boiling. It is a hundred to one that I shall get a trout there. The trout are taking a little short; I drop my fly with the greatest caution in the spot required. The little monster of the pool rushes promptly to the surface; but I have withdrawn my fly with such rapidity, and with such care not to splash the water, that the trout leaps angrily into the air after the bait that has vanished. This is a form of strategy that holds good in many encounters in life; and having thus raised his expectations and baulked him in his first attempt (which was probably only intended to drown the fly, not to take it), in my next cast I leave the line upon the water. He dashes furiously at it, and the next instant he flies across the pool, making the little rod bend as if he were a 60-lb. salmon; but the struggle does not last long, and he is presently transferred to my basket.
A little further on, my progress up-stream is apparently stopped by another cascade between two high walls of rock that enclose the little river in a gorge; but obstacles of this kind should never stop a trout-fisher. Clambering over boulders, and jumping from stone to stone, I gain the bank. Once there, I see I can scramble through some bushes and fir trees, and over a heathery knoll whence I can look down on the secluded little pool below into which the little waterfall is falling with ceaseless bubble and song. I know the trout must be lying either right under the little white tongue of spray, or else further down the pool where the water begins to thin out and the stones can just be seen at the bottom. I try the former place as being the more likely. T trout rise at the same time, and both are wo hooked. Now begin the difficulties of the situation. The trout, beautiful monsters of half a pound each, are rushing wildly around the pool. I am thirty feet above them. What can I do? I cannot get at them with the landing-net, and I certainly cannot haul them up with my little rod and my hair-gut line. I survey the surroundings, and almost decide to lower myself past an alder-bush on to a rock, when I fortunately perceive another bush below again which would infallibly catch my line; so I give that up, and turn my attention to the possibilities of a little ledge below me. If I can reach it, I can from thence get right down to the stone over which the little cataract is pouring; and by getting my trout into the side eddy, and by tiring them out completely, I may succeed, with great care, in reaching them one by one.
