No hiding place from the Tackle Monster

Fishing lines

The great thing about fishing is that you can be eccentric, even totally batty, and nobody seems to mind. Imagine trying to get into your local golf club if you talked to an imaginary pet badger. In angling, such behaviour is not just tolerated but encouraged.

My friend David Hall runs a magazine which has a section, Snide Rumours and Dirty Lies, devoted to the oddball behaviour of fisherfolk. Filling the space has never been a problem. Stories abound of people talking to spiders, using paraffin to treat sexually-transmitted diseases, painting their boots different colours to avoid the hassle of wearing a left boot on a right foot, eating worms for a bet.

You would imagine people would be profoundly embar-rassed to find their deepest secrets revealed in print. On the contrary: it got to the stage where they had T-shirts printed boasting: "I've been in Snide Rumours".

There are shades of eccentricity. But few would argue that Jamie Maxtone Graham was at the head of the queue when the unconventional genes were passed out. Jamie, who died last week, was a collector of old fishing tackle. Not just any collector. He was the godfather, the first to realise that old rods and reels could be worth serious money.

But being Jamie, he went about it in an offbeat way. He wrote to anyone in Who's Who expressing an interest in fishing or sporting issues, offering to buy their old tackle. He bought a full set of Ordnance Survey maps, the one-inch-to-one-mile chaps, and circled any large house with parkland. Then he went cold-calling.

We are talking about the 17th Laird of Cultoquhey here, a former Scots Guard who went to Eton and Gordonstoun. He ran the family estate for some while, then got interested in agricultural journalism. He was pretty good at it. He got commissions from the likes ofSports Illustrated, the New Yorker, Reader's Digest.

He also ran the smallest restaurant in Scotland, in the front room of his house in Peebles. The Thirty Nine Steps had a capacity of eight people, and Jamie, an exceptional chef, did all the cooking and waiting on tables. I'm told it was an interesting experience eating there, because Jamie liked to be in bed by 8.30pm.

But it was in the tackle field that his quirky approach really came to the fore. It started when he sold a reel that had been given to him by a great aunt. From that moment, he travelled the world seeking old tackle. He collected some of the rarest reels, but though he knew their value, he stored them in ice-cream containers.

Jamie drove a hard bargain. In Germany, he was known as "The Tackle Monster". One of his closest friends collected a reel for him one day, and expressed an interest in buying it. Jamie had paid £50 for the reel, but told his friend: "That will cost you £200." And he wouldn't budge.

But for all his quirkiness, people liked him. Every yarn is told with affection. It's great what you can get away with when you're a fisherman.