My friend Frank Guttfield, who has died at the age of 75, was an expert angler, columnist and author, known to many fans of angling. Frank was a weekly columnist for Angler’s Mail for many years – and also wrote, contributed to or edited a number of books. His account of a year’s angling, In Search of Big Fish (1964), was well received far and wide. Richard Walker, who was for years Britain’s number one angler, wrote that when Frank gave him the manuscript, “I finished reading it at 3am. I could not put it down.”
Frank’s parents sold antiquarian books in Berlin, but chose to escape to London in 1939, where Frank was born in Whitechapel. A year later the family was evacuated to Cambridgeshire and they subsequently settled in Arlesey, Bedfordshire.
Frank started fishing when he was nine, mostly on local ponds and lakes. In his early teens he made the acquaintance of Walker, who became his mentor, encouraging him to put pen to paper. He soon became the youngest ever contributor to Angling Times.
In the late 1970s I was editor of fishing books at Ernest Benn publishers, where I met Frank. We became lunch companions. At the time he was working for a pulp and paper company. In 1977 I had the pleasure of collaborating with him on a book, The Big Fish Scene, for which he had assembled a team of contributing authors from among the leading specimen hunters. Frank’s chapter was about a method he had carefully developed by observation, which involved the detection of very small, delicate bites by very big fish.
Frank appeared many times on Jack Hargreaves’s weekly television programme Out of Town, on Southern TV. He also made live fishing sequences with Johnny Morris for Animal Magic.
In his last few weeks he caught one of his biggest ever chub, at 8lb 2oz, in the Thames near Marlow, Buckinghamshire, his home town.
He is survived by his wife, Jackie, and his children, Richard, Linda, Lisa, Robert, Max and Fred.
