Big Fish

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A Fishy Tale at High Noon

“Do not forsake me, oh my darling,

On this, our wedding day . . .”

The filling station, like the film in which that song was sung, is called the High Noon. It stands just outside the hamlet of White Mill, on the A40, about three miles east of Carmarthen. You can park your car there. Now let us walk together until we see below us the River Towy, flowing through water meadows full of buttercups. Just a hundred yards downstream, in one of the river's massive coils, a man had his ashes thrown 25 years ago.

The request startled his friends, who tried to recruit a minister of religion, any minister of religion, to take part in the little ceremony, but in vain. Everyone they contacted backed away, suspecting there was something pagan in the man’s invitation as revealed in his will. And there was - something so old about it that it went back beyond all organised religion. Alec Allen, once a commercial traveller, was making amends. He was having himself put into the river he had fished in all his adult life, at the very spot out of which he had pulled the largest living creature that had moved in it since the dinosaurs.

See that farm across the water meadows? On July evening in 1933, with Hitler the new Chancellor of Germany, men went to that farm to ask whether they might borrow a horse and cart, and when the farmer asked why, Alec Allen found himself explaining that he had just caught a fish. The legend was beginning.

There is a photograph of that cart hanging above the bar of a nearby pub, the Cresselly Arms in Nantgaredig, only of course, you do not notice it on account of the fish tail lolling out of its back which dwarfs the people in the picture. Leviathan is in a farm cart.

Alongside this photograph is another, showing a man posing beside his catch. He is a short man in Fair Isle sweater and baggy trousers, smoking a cigarette, as all men seemed to in photographs taken in the 1930s. But at first you will not notice him either because of what is hanging from a trestle beside him.

All right, some of you will have seen pictures of a fish this size before, but you will have seen them taken in a marine landscape as some big-game fisherman in Florida exhibits his latest trophy.

What makes this photograph unique is the background of whitewashed wall, tree and gate. A fish the size of a basking shark, towering over the man by a good four feet, is in a Welsh farmyard.

It was on July 28 1932, that Alec Allen, then in his early forties and a bachelor who lived for angling, caught a sturgeon in the River Towy. Nine feet two inches long from tail to snout, with a girth of 59 inches and weighing 388 lb, it has to be the biggest fish ever caught without a net in any river in Britain. Am I right, Mr Fred J. Taylor?

All I know is that I grew up with this story which at the time went unreported in any national newspaper, and it was a small item even in the Carmarthen Journal, where the report began,

“Two anglers had an exciting time while fishing in the river Towy . . .”

Gordon Bennett, they had caught Leviathan!. But then the Carmarthen Journal would probably cover the end of the world as “Day of Judgement, Many Welshmen Affected”.

Still, to give the paper its due, if it were not for that single mind-prosaic but contemporary account, and for the pictures which survive, the tale would have been wrecked in the shallows of folklore. A hundred years earlier, and nobody now would believe it.

I was also fortunate enough to meet a man who was there, an old friend of Alec Allen’s. Alderman David Price of Nantgaredig died a few weeks after we met in 1976, aged 74, but three years earlier he had been charged with the disposal of his friend’s ashes.

“I called on David Price one day,” said Ronald Jones, formerly Chief Constable of Carmarthenshire, and another angler. said, ‘what a pity it was about Alec’.”

“Aye,” said Dai. “I’ve got him up there on the mantelpiece.” It was the casket, you see. We were all surprised. Nobody had ever heard of anyone wanting that done before.”

Alec Allen was a well-known sportsman and hockey referee, who in later life was even entrusted with Olympic matches. But his main delight, amounting to an obsession, was fishing. All they had ever talked about, Alderman Price recalled. It can be quite reasonably said that in the Thirties, that low decade as it has been called, with dole queues lengthening and Europe one vast tinder-box, there was one happy man.

Allen was a traveller for a firm of fishing tackle manufacturers. His father, also a great fisherman travelled on behalf of a wallpaper firm, but the two had somehow wangled it that they could travel together in a car full of fishing rods and wallpaper. Their beat was West Wales, but it was a West Wales wonderfully crammed between the rivers Wye, Teify and Towy, their itineraries perfectly arranged so that each day ended at an inn beside a river.

It may have been a bit tough on you if you had a wallpaper shop which was nowhere near a river, but nobody seems to have complained. The son, in time, succeeded the father as a wallpaper salesman but the itineraries never changed.

The two had rented a stretch of the Towy since 1928. This included some of the deepest pools in the river, but the summer of 1933 had been a dry one and the water level was very low. You must remember this one fact.

There is also one moment you might like to consider. Walking by one of the pools Alec had noted enormous ripples crossing it. They puzzled him, but it was no more than that: – it did not enter his head that they might have been made by a living thing. This stretch of the river is 15 miles from the sea and tidal water ends two miles lower down.

A few days later Alec returned to the pool. It was evening and he had a friend with him – Edwin Lewis of Crosshands. There was also a third man, whose name nobody remembered, watching from the bank. But remember him, for he has his part to play. In a few minutes he will run off across the fields shouting because of what he has seen coming out of the water.

Alec Allen began fishing. Then he felt a tug on his line, just a tug, but when he pulled this had no effect whatsoever. The late Alderman Price was fond of telling what happened next, and had told it so often it had acquired the patina of perfect narrative.

Alec told me he thought he’d hooked a log. He could not see what it was, except that it was “something huge in the shadows”. Then the log began to move upstream. A smile at that point slowly crossed Price’s face.

Now Alec knew that logs didn’t move upstream. Alec had no idea what he had hooked, and a more imaginative man might have become terrified, for his line was jerking out under a force he had never experienced. Something was moving in the darkness of the pool with the force of a shark.

He played it for 20 minutes, letting the line out when it went away, and, when it came back, retreating up the bank. Had there been a channel of deep water leading from the pool no salmon line would have held his catch, but there was none. Then he saw it.

The creature leapt out of the water and crashed into a shallow run so for a moment it was under them, threshing in the shallows, and Allen was confronted by a bulk that was just not possible. It was then that the sightseer ran off, shouting for his life.

Lewis ran forward with the gaff and stuck it into the fish, but the fish moved and straightened the gaff in one convulsive heave. The great tail flicked round and caught Lewis, throwing him into the air. It was at that point that Alec dropped the rod. It had been a freak catch anyway, the hook snagging in the fish’s head.

Now, grabbing a large rock with both hands, Alec waded out and dropped it on the fish’s head, lifting it again and again until the creature began to die. The two men still had no idea what it was, and stared down in bewilderment. There had been reports of a sturgeon caught at the turn of the century by coracle men in Carmarthen, but that had been a smaller fish and in tidal waters. How something of this bulk got so far upstream is still a mystery.

“I can remember it now,” said Alderman Price. “Alec came running to my house and all he would say was, I’ve caught something this time that you’ll never beat.”

By the time they got to the farm the news had spread across the Valley. The fish had been pulled up on the trestle, and people had arrived in cars and carts. Some had ferried their children across the river in boats.

“It had these big scales, I remember, and slimy,” said David Price. “It was a sort of black and white in colour. No, I wasn’t frightened.” He smiled, and it was a slow, long smile. It was dead.”

They had guessed by now that it was a sturgeon, and at that point old memories stirred. Was it not the law that a sturgeon was the King’s prerogative? So they sent a telegram to Buckingham Palace. I would give my eye teeth to know what they actually wrote, but so far as I can gather it was a polite inquiry as to whether the King was in residence. A stiff little reply came the same day that the King was not.

That would have been the day after the catch, or the death, call it what you will, and, faced with the problem of what to do with that much fish in high summer with no refrigerators, they sold it to a fishmonger from Swansea for £2. That works out at a penny ha’penny a pound in the old currency, and 40 years later Allen’s friends, who helped load the fish on the train at Carmarthen, were still bitter about the deal. Scotch salmon at Billingsgate was then fetching 2s 6d [15p in decimal coinage] a pound wholesale.

But it is what happened after that is so curious. David Price only heard Alec talk about it a few times. And then it was usually when he heard anglers going on about their catches. He wasn’t a boasting man but sometimes he couldn’t resist saying, “Well, I suppose this would be the biggest fish I ever caught.” And then, of course, they’d say, “Good God.”

For life went on, Alec Allen fishing until his death at the age of 77, stockier in the photographs and with spectacles. Catches were held up regularly to the camera, something he could not have done when that July evening he was content just to pose beside his fish.

“I think he saw the incident more as a joke than anything else,” said Brian Rudge, who later ran the fishing tackle firm for which Allen had meandered through West Wales. “I think that as far as he was concerned it was a bit of a nuisance. He was out salmon fishing, and the sturgeon had got in the way.”

Allen died suddenly in March, 1972, in the home he shared with his spinster sister. And it was then that his friends were confronted by the will. It was a grey, wet day when they gathered on the river bank, a dozen or so of them, contacted by phone or by letter.

“We said the Lord’s Prayer,” said the Chief Constable, “as we committed the ashes to the waters he’d fished for 50 years. But then as the wind carried them I saw a trout leap into the air just where they were drifting. And I said to Dai, ‘Look, Alec’s there’.”

So let us stand here for a moment, looking down on the river beside the High Noon. Some of you may already know the Angler’s Prayer you can still come across it on old mugs. Let us say it together.

Lord, grant that I may catch a fish so big that even I,

When speaking of it afterwards, may have no need to lie.

And let us remember a man, “an excellent angler, and now with God,” as old Walton put it, who did just that.

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