Terry Eustace Memories

So saddened to hear of the passing of Terry Eustace. We were very friendly through the Seventies and Eighties, and I remember him as being droll, great company. And an achiever.

My first encounter with Terry was via a TV screen. He had been enlisted for the second series of the Fishing Race on TV in the mid-70s and our first sighting of him was an introductory one, seeing him fishing at Spaghetti Junction. He drily commented that his wife couldn’t understand why he preferred to spend cold nights by the water instead of warm nights in bed with her, hardly original, but Terry had a way with words. He was understated, dry and instantly likeable.

He also had a reputation for making desirable carp rods in an era when they were still fairly hard to come-by. Fishing at Roman Lakes you were thrown in at the deep end, long-range wise, so to speak, and word was that his long range LR1s were the tools for the job. I visited him, ordered a pair, and they lived up to their reputation. I later purchased a pair of T24s from him, from memory the only 11ft 6in rods available at that time in an era when carp rods were a ‘mandatory’ 10ft in length.

I became a frequent visitor to his incredibly untidy original shop/workshop and there it was that he demonstrated the water knot to me. The water knot was the shock-leader knot recommended by Dick Walker, so you used it, although it was a bugger to tie. (As it happens it soon became evident that the double grinner did the job just as well, and was far easier to tie!) There is a lot of loose line around when you are tying the water knot and I recall a paper punch became part of the equation at one time, provoking the dry comment, ‘Of course you don’t encounter too many of these on the bank when you are trying to tie this knot,’ amid much hilarity.

I think it is fair to say that the first time most of us heard the expression ‘abrasion resistance’ in connection with fishing lines was when Terry introduced Berkley’s Big Game to the marketplace. To quote A Century of Carp Fishing, ‘Called Big Game, made by Berkley and introduced to us by Terry Eustace the line would simply blow Maxima and Sylcast away.’ ‘Terry’s abrasion resistance tests and knot strength had us completely blown away.’

Terry and family formed Gold Label Tackle, and they used to hold some entertaining evening trade get-togethers where you were guaranteed to be assailed with at least one of his protracted shaggy-dog stories.

Carpers who go back a bit and have long memories will recall that it was Terry who first noticed, and publicly commented, on the repeat-capture syndrome. The identification of fish is a cult area of carp fishing now, but it was Terry Eustace who first brought it to the attention of the world of carp fishing through the capture of some mirrors whose scale pattern made them unmistakably identifiable fish.



He was a successful businessman, all-round angler, writer and carp angler. His capture of ‘two twenties and a big ‘un’ from Canwell in 1968 was quite outstanding, and was the eventual outcome of a protracted series of blanks at the daunting venue. He was one of the earliest published writers about fishing, and an entertaining one at that. in fact if I were to pick one word to describe the droll Terry it would be ‘entertaining’. He lived life to the full and made a significant contribution to the world of carp fishing via his writing, TV work, rod-making and the formation of the Gold Label empire. He was a Carp Fishing Hall of Famer and a long-term President of the British Carp Study Group. He was special, contributed massively to the world of carp fishing, and will be remembered with sadness, and affection, by his many admirers from the world of specialist angling.

John Nixon Remembered

Sadly, Hall-of-Famer John Nixon has passed away in his early nineties. John was an angling- and carp-scene fixture from the early Fifties onwards. His association with Redmire Pool went back to the early Sixties, when he aspired to the first recorded capture of the Redmire mirror which he and Dick Kefford named Raspberry. The name stuck and the fish survived into its sixties, appearing on the cover of the Society’s Carp Fisher magazine in the hands of no less a light than Society co-founder Greg Fletcher.

John was an all-round big-fish angler, as his book A Carp to Begin With bears witness, but it is his association with Redmire through the Sixties for which he will be best-remembered by carp anglers. By the early Sixties John was a regular contributor to the carp press, and the Editor of Creel magazine, and, following the big freeze of the winter of 62/63, went into print on advice received -  with the assertion that the Redmire carp had perished in the freeze-up and Redmire was no longer a carp water, let alone a Mecca. He actually went to Redmire and was pictured out in the punt looking for carp, of which he found few traces. And so the matter rested until Bob Rolph and Graham Igglesden visited the pool in early 1966, saw it was still heavily populated with carp, and informed John of this.

The upshot was that John reached agreement with the owners for him to lease the fishing week-on-week to specimen-group anglers, the first time since the start of the Fifties that access to fishing the pool had been available to anglers other than members of The Carp Catchers’ Club. The Nixon arrangement lasted for two years and witnessed the re-emergence of Redmire as a Mecca in the wake of the now-historic big-carp captures of Roger Bowskill and Jack Hilton, Roger with his capture of the famous ‘38’, and Jack with his first capture of the mid-thirty known as Pinky.

When the Nixon arrangement was terminated by the owners Jack Hilton went into negotiation with them and in 1968 formed the syndicate which ran until 1985 under the leadership of Jack himself, then Tom Mintram, and then finally John Carver.

In his book John devotes a chapter to Raspberry, named because of the prolific crop of the fruit he and Dick Kefford were given access to in owner John Maclean’s garden. Here is a quote from the chapter: ‘This famous leather carp was easily recognisable by a small rash of red spots on one flank, and was caught year after year, finally passing to the great pond in the sky in the summer of 2001 when she was nearly 70 years old, probably the oldest carp in Britain. But her very first capture (as far as I know) was to my rod in June 1961; she weighed 23lb and is still today my biggest carp.’

John was part of angling’s and carp fishing’s history going back to his friendship with the Carp Catchers in the early Fifties right through to the publication of his own book, and contributing to Tony Meers book this century. His memory will live on: he has earned his place in the Hall of Fame and the record books.