I’ve never been fussy about my fly box. As a beginner, I relied on a tin that once held little German cigars. It fit snugly into a back pocket, but the flies got tangled up, and I fumbled during a hatch. After that, I switched to a Richard Wheatley box from England, a birthday gift from an angler pal. Wheatley started out as an apprentice button maker and sold his first box in 1860. Mine was attractive, durable, and well made, but like any finely engineered item, it demanded a delicate touch. I failed on that count, and the spring-loaded compartments no longer stay closed.
So I set out to buy a new box online. A floating foam one from Orvis held some appeal due to my butterfingers and a tendency to drop things into a river and watch them float away. I doubted I’d ever own enough flies to fill a Tacky Double Haul, where there’s space for 287 of them. The wood boxes from A. L. Swanson were works of art and priced accordingly ($349–$379), but in terms of luxury, they didn’t compare to a vintage box called a Kelson’s Cabinet that I discovered in an 1895 advertisement for the tackle dealer B. R. Bambridge of Eton-on-Thames.
I came across the ad on a website devoted to George Kelson, the cabinet’s designer. Born in 1836, he was a controversial figure in fly fishing, variously described as a “fiery, red-headed gamecock, a ruthless self-promoter and boundless egoist.” As a young man, he excelled as a billiards champ and a cricket batsman and later earned a fortune in London by being the sort of “pushing, thrusting, get ahead fellow” that the Victorians abhorred. Kelson seems to have violated every social nicety, always wearing a bowler hat, rather than the top hat favored by gents. “If people behaved that way nowadays,” his son once quipped, “they’d be locked up.”
Despite the bad press, Kelson had a gift for innovation. He designed a reel known as the Patent Lever Winch, a marvel of technology that incorporated the first adjustable drag. When the patent lever was fully tightened, the reel could “stop a runaway brewer’s dray,” although it could also be adjusted to play a trout gently. Farlow & Co. of London still carried Kelson’s reel well into the 1920s, until Hardy developed its Perfect reel and set a new industry standard.
But Kelson’s greatest glory was as a tyer of salmon flies. He wrote the first definitive book on the subject, The Salmon Fly: How to Dress It and How to Use It, published in 1895, and it made him famous. Salmon fishing had entered a boom phase in the UK with the advent of the railroad. The initial tracks were laid in 1825, and forty years later, most of the country could be reached by train. The pristine spate rivers of Scotland, formerly open only to locals and wealthy club members, could now be fished by anyone. All you needed was a special angler’s discount railway ticket.
Kelson took full advantage of his fame. Never shy about making a buck, he gladly dispensed advice. He established his name as a Trump-style brand and promoted such products as the Kelson Cabinet. It was a leather case packed with every streamside necessity, longer than it was wide and secured with two buckle straps. It opened to a tray of hooks, herls, and hackles in glassine and parchment envelopes. Beneath it was a second tray with a dubbing book and a panoply of salmon fly materials in small cardboard boxes. Almost any popular fly of the era could be tied on the spot. You had on hand, for instance, the hackles of ariel toucan, gray jungle fowl, and nankeen night heron, as well as ample tail sections of golden pheasant.
Kelson spared no expense on his flies, and the same was true of Major John Traherne, his rival, in a sense. Traherne had fished every salmon river in Norway, Ireland, and the UK and set a world record for distance casting in 1884. His patterns were regarded as masterpieces. They were intricate, beautiful to look at, and fiendishly difficult to tie. Take the Chatterer, a pattern that required at least fifty blue chatterer feathers for the body alone. The flies Traherne displayed at the Great International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 were a sensation. Though he and Kelson had little in common beyond their love of salmon flies, they became lifelong friends. Kelson caught the eye of Robert Marston, the editor of the Fishing Gazette, who hired him to contribute a series of articles on salmon flies, the first of which celebrated the skills of Major Traherne. The journal, a weekly, had just limped along until Marston took over in 1879, but he turned it into the most widely read and influential angling publication in the world. An avid angler himself, Marston cared about protecting rivers and founded the Fly Fishers Club of London in 1884. He helped to introduce brown trout to American waters (and thus to California), donating 10,000 eggs to a hatchery in Cold Spring, New York.
The Gazette afforded Kelson an ideal bully pulpit for spreading his views and pushing his brand. With his own best interests in mind, he encouraged his readers to abandon their tried-and-true patterns and embrace the fancy new ones he advocated. “Is it not notorious,” he wrote, “that in several of our rivers the fish have been educated to persistently snub old patterns in favor of the new?” His statement had no basis in fact, but such was Kelson’s authority that few questions were asked, at least at first. He made enemies, too, by laying claim to patterns that others had invented.
But he didn’t get away with it for long. Salmon anglers took their sport seriously. They wrote countless letters to the editor, arguing over such fine points as the proper feather count for a particular fly or the right color for its hackles. Bit by bit, they chipped away at Kelson’s authority, and he didn’t like it. He became defensive, quick to anger. If a reader complained that a pattern didn’t work as promised, he blamed the reader for not following his instructions and tying the fly incorrectly. It was always the reader’s fault.
Kelson’s ultimate fall from grace involved a “wonder fly” called the Inky Boy. He bragged about how effective it was, but his readers objected, finding it “totally useless” when they fished it. They even sent samples to prove they’d tied it right, but Kelson again accused them of deviating from the original dressing. Not only that, he insulted them. Their flies, he wrote, were only fit for catching chubs.
His attitude didn’t sit well with Robert Marston, who suggested that there wasn’t any reason for a fly to fail because of a slight variation. Kelson flew into a fury and took on his boss, always a bad idea. What could be more important, he asked, than being careful and accurate when preparing a fly for use? Marston replied by printing a cartoon that showed a stick-figure Inky Boy bursting into grateful tears under the caption, “I hope I am correctly dressed at last!”
Marston went for the kill next. He published an attack on Kelson’s book, citing its flaws and bogus claims, and destroyed the last of the author’s credibility. Kelson beat a hasty retreat. Deaf and in fragile health, he settled in Middlesex, where he joined a Masonic lodge and contributed writing to magazines other than Fishing Gazette. His book has the status of a classic now, and some of the flies he invented are still in use, even the Inky Boy. He died at 85 and was buried in Surrey, his own worst enemy.
I suppose I could still find a Kelson’s Cabinet if I put my mind to it. Somewhere there must be one for sale, but even if I got lucky, I’d likely flinch at the price tag. A single color plate from Kelson’s The Salmon Fly sells for $200 on eBay, so you can guess what the cabinet might cost. I imagine I’ll either wind up splurging on a new Wheatley or fall back on a standard-issue plastic box, since I’m fairly certain I’ll never be the proud owner of any nankeen night heron hackles.
