For the past twenty five years or more, I have worked in the film and tv industry, primarily as a cameraman, a Director of Photography or Cinematographer but also more recently a director, depending on who’s asking, or even interested. I have to admit it, I have been very lucky to have traveled the world with it, and occasionally with a stowaway rod. I did also, way back in 2006 (in the days when Youtube was still in nappies and the world did still contain some people who weren’t film-makers) get to shoot and direct a fishing series for broadcast on Discovery too. For many years before that, I worked in advertising in Soho, London, but that was another me, another life and a story of excess and misadventure, best told elsewhere, or maybe not at all. But this site isn’t about all that, and like so many millions of others around the world, I like to fish. Perhaps being born one sunny July morning in a hospital room as close to the river Thames as you could get without actually getting wet feet, I was predestined to be connected with the water in some way.
My family moved when I was six, from suburban Teddington, to the countryside, the rural Surrey hills to be precise. It was lovely, from memory I’d even go so far as to say quite idyllic, but it was the early 70’s so there wasn’t a huge amount to do initially, or so I thought. So it was perhaps only a matter of time then before the fields and woods beyond the borders of our garden beckoned and I soon discovered on one of my many forays outside, that the old Edwardian house we’d moved to, was only a cornfield or two away from an old disused brickworks. The main factory building which would have at some point been a hive of production line activity, belching out a continuous stream of freshly baked clay goods, now stood there, sad, dilapidated and derelict, its windows a defenceless target for anyone one with half a old brick and an adolescent’s destructive streak. However on the surrounding land were two lakes and after my deleterious tendencies had been satisfied, I became far more curious about them. One lake was smallish, pretty and reed-fringed, shallow and silty, maybe no more than three acres if that, but it was broken up by reed spits, snags and the odd button island, so it felt much smaller and intimate. The other lake which had been used for clay excavation, was much bigger, more open, much deeper and bluer in colour with an island in the middle and I remember from talk of its significant depths, it felt perhaps slightly ominous back then. The lakes were duly named, perhaps somewhat unimaginatively, the small lake and the big lake.
My first experience of the lake’s inhabitants, in fact of any wild aquatic creature apart from the newts and frogs resident in the overgrown pond at the bottom of our new garden, came one Summer afternoon walking around the smaller of the two lakes. In a small, finger shaped bay stood an angler, with a rod hooped over, doing its best impression of a horseshoe. I stopped and watched, captivated as he battled against whatever mysterious creature was on the other end. It charged up and down for a few minutes, the line slicing through the water, by which time a couple of other equally enthralled passers-by had stopped. Eventually, after what seemed seemed like an eternity, he drew a shiny, golden creature up from the depths, over the net and up on to the bank. I was captivated and asked excitedly what it was. “It’s a carp” the jubilant captor replied. It was indeed a carp, a wild carp probably no bigger than 5lb, but to me, a wide eyed ten year old, at that moment in time, it was immense, monumental, pretty formative stuff, and the rest as they say, is history.
After a significant health challenge in 2019, that more than likely started way before I was eventually, and very luckily, no longer able to ignore it, I was faced with the prospect of open heart surgery and a complete ‘re-plumb’. During the subsequent slow physical and emotional recovery that inevitably comes with nearly eight hours on a surgeon’s table doing a passable impression of a spatchcocked chicken, and the subsequent realisation afterwards that I was not actually immortal after all, I had a lot of time to reflect on the things that really mattered to me; fishing and all it has given me over the years being one of those things. The aim of this site is to be a distillation of memories, curated content from myself and maybe others, stories of travel, adventure, old and new, reminders of the enduring friendships I’ve made from nearly fifty years fishing. And although I don’t consider myself a writer by any means, perhaps maybe it’ll even be a book at some point; there is after all a book in everyone as the saying goes.
Fishing for me has always been a mix of mystery and magic, the same things that have drawn so many others to it. Sadly a lot of that mystery seems to have given way to predictability, certainty and commerciality. Trying to touch that magic again has become so important to me and in amongst the extraordinary commercialisation and commodification of it all, I have found those rare moments still profoundly beneficial; calming, comforting and rewarding for so many reasons other than the strange obsession with fish weight, catch numbers, or the ubiquitous trophy shot. I’m not an angling name, and although I have flirted with the idea, I have never really courted the attention. So either by design or default I have spent the vast majority of my fishing life totally under the radar and off the beaten track predominantly on private, non publicity waters. Much of what I do catch won’t be shown or written about here out of respect for other’s privacy and publicity restrictions, which is fine as I like to keep those quiet, lesser known places, exactly that. So then why bother with any of this. Perhaps a mixture of natural curiosity and boredom, a new creative challenge and a desire to record things at an age when I find myself reflecting more over past experiences, particularly having been faced with my own mortality. This is certainly not a vanity thing or a cry for attention. I hold no records, trophies or exhaustive lists of exotic captures. And who in the ‘celebrity’ obsessed world we live in, who’s going to be in the least bit interested in an unknown? Well maybe no one, but I’m not overly concerned and if I was honest, if I had been then maybe I might have done something about it years ago. So maybe a bit like painting perhaps, creating this is probably more for my own amusement and cathartic pleasure than anything else, much the same as my fishing.
But if anyone does by some miracle stumble across this site, and stops to browse a while and read a story when I do actually get around to writing them, or watch a film or two, when I actually get time and inclination to make them that is, maybe there’s something here to inspire, encourage and possibly even share, but hopefully not plagiarise. Inevitably there will be those that don’t, and if that’s the case, well there’s a surfeit of other fishing content out there to enjoy.
Everything else I do can be found at https://matthewbeecroft.com
And for still photography at https://mattbeecroft.com
Matt