There are anglers who fish, and there are anglers who change how a whole country fishes. Lionel Walker, “LM” to the many who knew him, was one of the second kind, though he would never have said so himself.
He came from New Zealand. As a young man he learned his trade on the Tongariro River and Lake Taupo, where big trout teach patience and punish carelessness. In the early 1940s a young South African exchange teacher named Isabelle crossed his path. When she went home, Lionel followed her. They married, farmed in the Bulwer district through the war years, and in the early 1950s retired to Currie Road in Durban.
That house became something like a pilgrimage site. A steady stream of visitors came to talk about fly fishing and fly tying, and Lionel gave his time freely to all of them. Jack Blackman was one, and he credited Lionel with shaping his own trout fishing and tying. Many others could have said the same.
He fished the way he lived: quietly, carefully and with close attention. Every September and April he and Isabelle went to Underberg. In winter he worked the lower Mooi River, where he took some fine trout. Every few years he went back to Taupo and the Tongariro. He was a founder member of the Underberg/Himeville Trout Fishing Club and an active member of the Durban Fly Fishers’ Club.
His lasting gift is the fly that carries his name. The Walker’s Killer did not come from fashion or luck. It came from years of watching water. Lionel had noticed that big trout keep to secluded places: deep pools near boulders or overhanging banks, and backwaters where food comes to them with little effort. They want a good mouthful, and they feed mostly on nymphs, larvae and tadpoles. He was uneasy about fishing a winged fly underwater, because, as he put it, “a winged fly does not swim underwater.”
So he designed a fly that looked like something trout actually eat:
- Body: red chenille, to give a fat body and help it sink.
- Tail: a bunch of black hackle fibres, for balance and movement.
- Sides: eighteen partridge tips tied in three overlapping layers, so the fly held its shape however much it was cast.
- Head: shaped like a torpedo, so the fly came through the water upright and natural, without fuss.
He fished it across and down on a sinking line, never more than about 18 inches deep. If the trout were feeding, he said, they would come up for it. More than sixty years later they still do, and the fly remains one of the best-loved patterns in South Africa.
The people who knew him remembered the man before the fly. He was gentle, always willing to help anyone in difficulty, and content with a quiet life beside Isabelle and the water.
Cancer came in 1964, when he was seventy. In the spring of 1965 he made one last trip to Underberg to fish the Springburn beat of the Umzimkulu. In the rapids under the road bridge he took a two-pound trout, an unusually big fish for that river at the time. It was a fitting last cast for a man who had always gone looking for the bigger fish.
He died at seventy-one
