Jim Smith, who has died aged 75, devoted his entire adult life to the River Ouse in Sussex. In his role as head bailiff for the Ouse Angling Preservation Society for 55 years and a trustee of the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust, he sold and checked fishing permits, policed the fishery, supervised the work of volunteers and helped monitor sewage and pollution.
With his battered tweed trilby and deep Sussex brogue, Jim was the archetypal river bailiff. I first met him some 20 years ago when I began fishing the Ouse for its elusive sea trout. In 2015 Jim was interviewed by the Guardian for a feature headlined The Old Man and the River, highlighting environmental problems facing the Ouse and other rivers throughout Britain.
He served on his local parish council and had an active role in the Cliffe Bonfire Society in Lewes, one of the groups that stage the town’s annual parade.
Born in Brighton, East Sussex, the only child of a farming couple, Jim spent his early childhood in Uckfield. Armed with just an improvised garden cane, he first cast a line into the River Uck at the age of 10 and was soon “hooked for life”. Following the death of his father, Arthur, when Jim was 12, his mother remarried and the family moved to nearby Isfield, where Jim remained throughout his life.
He went to Uckfield school, leaving at 14, and worked as a garden boy on Lord Rupert Nevill’s estate in Uckfield before joining the East Sussex River Board, where, among other things, he worked on the early Lewes flood defences.
During the 1960s, he was asked by the preservation society to take on the role of head bailiff: he managed the fishing both on the Ouse and at nearby Barcombe reservoir. He also took part in a pioneering hatchery programme initiated by the river board, restocking sea trout smolts into the Ouse, Adur and Arun rivers to make up for losses caused by disease and indiscriminate dredging. The project continued for 20 years, eventually falling victim to the cuts that preceded water industry privatisation.
During the 1990s the closure of Barcombe reservoir fishery, followed by the society’s decision that it could no longer afford a full-time bailiff, came as a huge blow. It says much for Jim’s determination and commitment that he continued to fulfil the role on a largely voluntary basis, at the same time playing a leading part in defeating plans for a huge landfill site adjacent to a vital Ouse tributary.
Jim’s enduring love of the countryside was evident through his regular writings in the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust newsletter and the Freshwater Informer magazine. He was featured in numerous publications and appeared on ITV News Meridian in a series of three reports, Tales of the River Man, in 2015.
In recent years, despite declining health he still enjoyed getting out whenever he could, talking to his anglers and generally keeping an eye on the river.
