From Trout & Salmon dated February 1975

 

DR H. A. BELL, OF BLAGDON

 

By Lt Col Esmond Drury

 

It was sad to hear of the death of Dr H. A. Bell, of Blagdon. In the annals of angling he must be ranked with Halford and Skues, and although he did not write, except in correspondence with friends, about the tactics and techniques which he pioneered, his influence on fly-fishing on stillwaters has been as significant as theirs in their own spheres.

 

I first met Dr Bell in 1930, and for the next several years until the war I often talked with him when I went to fish at Blagdon. He was not an easy man to know, quiet, reserved and shy, and few were on Christian name terms with him. He was a true countryman and an enquiring observer of the countryside in which he lived and it was this basic interest that led him to question the then-accepted tactics and techniques of stillwater fishing, and find them unsatisfactory and illogical, and to produce and prove, with his own fly patterns and his own method of fishing them, that the accepted methods were wrong and his were right.

 

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He was incapable of boasting or laying down the law, and it was by his fruits that we knew him. He, using his own flies, tried to imitate the creatures which he found in the stomachs of the fish he caught, invariably caught two or three times as many trout as any of the rest of us, using the traditional lake patterns, such as Peter Ross, Dunkeld and Invicta. And he often produced a good bag of fish in conditions that we regarded as impossible.

 

The flies, which he originated were the Midge Pupa (buzzer nymph), the Amber Nymph (sedge pupa) and the Grenadier (blood worm) and any developments and modifications to those patterns which have taken place since the 1930s are merely variations on a theme of Bell. The Corixa, which he used so successfully in what we then regarded as hopeless conditions, was not an original Bell fly, but he modified an existing pattern and made it effective.

 

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Dr Bell’s technique of fishing his nymph team of flies was original and has become standard practice today. He greased his line to make it float, cast a long line, gave his flies lots of time to sink and drew them in very slowly indeed. Some were sceptical and called his method float-fishing with flies, which in a sense it is, but results proved the method to be much more effective than the traditional one, and the sceptics were quickly converted.

 

Dr Bell’s patients in Blagdon, who were often visited by the doctor with a rod sticking out of his car, will miss him, as will those who benefited so much from his thoughtful approach to fishing his beloved Blagdon. Behind his reserve was a warmth and charm which always made one feel better for having talked to him.

 

I passed through Blagdon recently and saw that the little square where Bell had his surgery had been named Bell’s Close. I was glad someone had recognised in a simple and lasting way the debt which so many anglers owe to this charming man.

Reproduced by kind permission of Trout & Salmon