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.