Shhhhh…don’t tell anyone, but as an English chalk-stream fisherman there was once a time when I got schooled by a Scotsman.

He was a ghillie by the name of Gregor Mackenzie and over a lifetime of fishing he kept hundreds of pages of notes. They were scribbled and scrawled, in no definable order, on myriad scraps of lined paper. My job was to turn them into a book.

By then Mackenzie was in his seventies and spent summer afternoons watching horseracing on TV. Outside his bungalow – built for him as a retirement present by his grateful boss Sir George McAlpine – a small stream passed through his yard.

Immediately upon my arrival, MacKenzie took me outside and handed me a rod, “Let’s see your casting laddie.”

I knew if I fluffed it, I wouldn’t get the job – and this was to be my first book. My cast was passable – just – and I got the job.

In the months to follow I learned a lot about the man – and more about fishing.

MacKenzie was the epitome of a ghillie – deferential without loss of dignity, patient and friendly, but capable of a look whose sternness shrank your soul. He had learned to fish from his father who, like his father before him, had been head deer stalkers for a local Laird.

His first job was as a bailiff for the Peebleshire Angling Association, followed by a post on the Inverlochy water – his first away from home. It was a vintage period, foreign princes arriving on their own trains to rent both the castle and the river for the summer.

Then, like all true Scotsmen, he became exiled in England, to Walton’s Dove in Derbyshire, a haunt of the rich and famous, like Wallis Simpson, the then-future Duchess of Windsor. So generous were members of the local community that one gentleman even offered MacKenzie his old Rolls Royce after purchasing a new one.

And those were drinking days – MacKenzie once found 24 drinks lined up for him on the bar one evening. Each of the locals had bought him a pint and a whisky chaser. Fearful of offence, our man drank the lot.

After six idyllic years, he relocated to Hampshire Avon and found a job teaching new anglers to fish. One of those new anglers was David Niven.

It was 1939, and the film star reckoned the war could get along without him for a few hours, so he decided to have his first salmon lesson. He was mortified when, after days of effort, he hooked and landed a fish – a kelt which MacKenzie promptly threw back. Niven’s revenge came later; as MacKenzie gaffed a salmon for her Ladyship, the hook came adrift. He dove into the river, landed on the fish and managed to insert two fingers into the gills. Hauling it ashore he heard Niven yell, “Tell me Mackenzie? If this how you usually land a fish?”

There, at that time, the salmon would congregate in their hundreds immediately below the nearby power station at Ringwood. Desperate to carry on, the salmon literally knocked themselves to death trying to jump the hatches. Hundreds of dead and injured fish littered the river. Over the years MacKenzie managed to get a fish pass built to drive salmon into the upper reaches. At that time those salmon averaged 22lb.

MacKenzie then started breeding salmon, and later trout, before World War II ended a way of life.

After the war came his biggest challenge – what he described as a mile and a half of black, slimy, smelly mud – a stretch of river for which Sir Malcolm McAlpine, in June 1945, had just paid a world record price of twelve thousand two hundred and fifty pounds.

MacKenzie was tasked with putting put back into order what was later dubbed The Golden Mile. It was a colossal job. Two years later, having used an army of navvies, bulldozers, built a light railway for the spoil, and planted the river with ranunculus, MacKenzie finally allowed Sir Malcolm, now 70 years old, onto the river. They caught one fish.

Soon, the site became a haven for the rich and famous – Sir Charles Forte and his son Rocco being constant visitors. But for colour there was little to outdo actor James Robertson Justice. Touring the valley in one of his two Rolls Royces, one sporting a live eagle on top, he would convince people that he was broke. He’d borrow MacKenzie’s dog to go on shoots with the Queen, then come home to help with the weed cut, pedaling an adapted cycle round the river.

Gregor’s past may have been rich, but he feared for the future of fishing.

“In my time fishing has become a vast commercialized sport,” he said in 1978, “and the countryside has been turned into an outdoors factory, drenched in chemicals to boost food production. Never before have towns been so thirsty for water, and so ruthless about acquiring it. Yet in all this there is, perhaps, a blessing. The mistakes of our generation have now become so obvious that they are beginning already to prick the national conscience. Talk of restocking the Thames with salmon and sea trout, the establishment of scientific research projects, the planned prohibition of salmon netting at sea, the scare brought on by the 1976 drought, all these, by perverse quirk or otherwise, are favourable signs of public concern.”

Sadly, the national conscience was only pinpricked. And, by involving authority in letting the salmon run free into the upper Avon he had unwittingly signed its death warrant.

He wrote, “Until then, riparian owners had each looked after their own stretch. Now the board had a foot in the door…”

A year after the salmon pass went in the river authority dredged and straightened twenty miles of the river – to help drainage. Shallows, redds, and bends all went.

In the end Gregor was bitter.

“While the rest of the country was fighting for its life, they got on with the job of ruining one of our finest rivers.”

With the water table lowered, farmers started using more and more nitrogen, and fish catches dropped. What fishing there was had been taken over by anglers arriving by the coachload wanting the countryside as a playground. The fishing couldn’t stand it anymore.

Anglers’ numbers diminished, hotels closed, jobs were lost and a huge, swift, and increasingly sterile canal carried away at an ever increasing rate the water needed for the increasing number of washing machines and the like.

What had been “fisheries” boards became regional “water authorities”.

Mourning the loss, MacKenzie wrote, “Just imagine what would happen if one were to be found, a man whose knowledge could never again be discovered. He’d find himself in some glass palace inhabited by suited officials. He’d be asked to come back only when they’d invented the right form. And there would, of course, be many meetings about it. Committees would spawn subcommittees, each giving birth to files and memos and minutes. Then they would decide that he was either or both (a) not budgeted for or (b) not familiar with the administration – and in any case he has no written qualifications. And, soon enough, there were more officials than fish.”

He concluded “The damage that has been done, even if every effort is made to repair it, will take years to achieve. But it must be done, for what has happened to the Avon is on its way for other rivers and has, indeed, already occurred elsewhere. Just don’t let it happen to your river…”

MacKenzie is gone now, but should we ever meet on some celestial bank, I think I’d be ashamed to tell him things aren’t a lot better. Yes, we are more environmentally aware. Yes, we have a whole government agency devoted to the environment. Yes, there are more ecologically friendly washing machines.

And, yes, some of us are still fighting MacKenzie’s fight – to ensure that Scotland’s rivers remain a healthy home for the country’s finest fish. ~ Graham Mole