William's Favourite

[DOUGSDEN]

Excuse me everyone. My spelling us usually very bad. After reading another book this afternoon, his name was William Lunn not "Lund".
Thanx fur under-sanding,
Dugsden

[redietz]

Where was Williams from, though? The heavier hackle might a regional thing, rather than a time-period thing.

[Old Hat]

I must have missed this one. Great fly Andrew. Add a very sparse red wool tag and you have a Reid's Assassin, one my favorites and my go to pattern on #18 for midges.

[mvendon]

Where was Williams from, though? The heavier hackle might a regional thing, rather than a time-period thing.

Hi Bob,

He has Stratford-on-Avon below his name on the introduction in the book. He also listed many of the rivers he had fished. He made one trip to the USA and Canada at one point also. He wrote that he purposely listed all the rivers and streams that he had fished to emphasize that his experience wasn't confined to one particular river, or any one part of the country. He had written Trout Flies: A Discussion and a Dictionary several years before this one was published. He received many comments and suggestions from readers of that book. From those suggestions, he concentrated on the most popular and highly used patterns AND what was considered the correct dressing for each of those patterns (around 400 dressings). It's the only book that has the correct original dubbing mix listed what was used in the Tup's, and the reason that I bought it a couple of years ago now. Since then, I just keep going back to it because it has all of these classic ties with quite a bit of information on how they came about, who came up with what dressing etc.

Regards,
Mark

[redietz]

I guess my point is that he, and presumedly not his father either, were from the North Country, so we can't extrapolate from his opinion to how things were usually done in, say, Yorkshire. For this fly in particular, however, I guess we can pretty much take his tying as the "correct" one.

I need to get that book.