HALFORD, Frederic M.

"the man who gave so much of his life to the development of dry fly fishing deservedly takes his place among the great men of the angle.”

One of fly-fishing’s most eminent authors, Halford was brought up in London, where he learned to fish in the Serpentine and the Long Pool, and in his early 20s was introduced to fly fishing on the River Wandle.  In 1879 he met George Selwyn Marryat, a meeting which had an enormous impact on the world of fly fishing.   Their enthusiasm for the dry fly method resulted in Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, published in 1886 [Marryat chose not to be credited as a joint author] which Schullery claims “took the upper-crust world of British fly fishing by storm”.  In 1889 Halford decided to take up fly fishing and writing about it as a full time occupation, publishing his second book, Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice. A contemporary review praised the book  “as being … the best book on fishing with the artificial fly ever written”. Over the next 25 years  he published four further books on fly fishing  – Making a Fishery, Dry Fly Entomology, Modern Development of the Dry Fly and The Dry Fly Man’s Handbook, as well as his autobiography An Angler’s Autobiography.

By the time of his death in 1914, Halford had changed the way people thought about the sport of fly-fishing, and although often considered [by those who disagreed with him] to be dogmatic and opinionated, his books became bibles for dry-fly anglers and are still in demand today.

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