The Royal Coachman

As a novice fly fisher, I fell for the legendary Royal Coachman. I bought my first batch at the old Orvis store off Union Square in San Francisco, an appropriate choice, since the Orvis family played a significant role in the fly’s history, though I learned that only later. Like other literary types, I was captivated by the Royal Coachman’s air of romance. Even its name set it apart from the ordinary. There was no poetry to be found in the Muddler Minnow, while an Adams merely suggested the banal. As for the Ant, Mosquito, and Leech, I wasn’t sure I wanted them in my fly box at all.

I soon became curious about the Royal Coachman’s origins. Tom Bosworth, a coachman to Queen Victoria and two other monarchs, created what amounted to a prototype in 1830. He called it simply the Coachman, a wet fly — dries weren’t yet widely used. It’s possible that Bosworth presented a few to the queen. The crown holds the rights to some of the finest trout and salmon water in the UK, and that’s what convinced Ted Hughes, an avid angler, to accept the post of poet laureate.

Bosworth, too, was avid. He transferred his precise use of the coachman’s whip to the fly rod, often taking fish from “awkward and most unlikely-looking spots” that others passed over. His Coachman had a body of peacock herl. To increase its visibility for night fishing, the wings were white pinion and slanted backward, with a bit of brown hackle in front. Later, Bosworth tied a variant with gray wings, the Leadwing Coachman. The fly, still fished today, became very popular across the Atlantic, but fly tyers are inveterate fiddlers, always trying to adapt or reinvent a pattern, and they couldn’t leave well enough alone.

That was the case with John Haily, possibly the first merchandiser of fly-tying materials in the United States, who operated on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A customer came to him in 1878 with a request. The fellow thought the Coachman was effective, but too fragile; the herl tended to unravel after a strike or a hookup. Could Haily tie a sturdier version? Haily rose to the challenge and secured the herl with a band of red silk. He also added a tail of wood duck feathers, presumably for aesthetic appeal. He counted it a “very handsome fly” — in essence, the Royal Coachman, although it hadn’t yet been named.

The name was bestowed in Manchester, Vermont, where Charles Orvis had set up the C. F. Orvis Company with his brother Franklin. Born in 1831, Orvis spent his boyhood exploring the Battenkill Valley, still wild and thickly forested, with lots of streams for pursuing the trout fishing he loved. He was apparently a bait slinger until the day he encountered a genial old man whose graceful fly casting entranced him. The old man took evident pleasure in Orvis’s admiration and loaned him a fly rod until he could afford one.

While still in his teens, Orvis began building his own rods. In 1853, he and Franklin opened a hotel to cater to a tourist boom in Manchester, and in 1856, they opened an Orvis Company sales room in small stone building next door. By 1861, the company was doing a brisk mail-order business. Charles was such a fly-fishing enthusiast that he reached out to his angling pals around the country, asking them to choose a favorite fly with an eye to compiling a book from their replies. His daughter, Mary Orvis Marbury, became the author of Favorite Flies and Their Histories (1892), an acknowledged classic. Marbury has left us a charming account of how the Royal Coachman got its name. John Haily sent her a sample of his rejiggered Coachman, and she showed it off to some friends and family who were “disputing the fly question.” It’s not hard to imagine a few bearded, pipe-smoking men grouped around a pot-bellied stove, deep in Yankee cogitation. One gent grew agitated and objected to the “nonsensical names” people give to flies. Wouldn’t numbers work just as well? His suggestion met with opposition, so he tried again.

“Well, what can you do?” he complained. “Here is a fly [Haily’s] intended to be a Coachman, yet it is not a true Coachman; it is quite unlike it, so what can you call it?”

L. C. Orvis, another of Charles’s brothers, leaped into the fray. “Oh, that’s easy enough,” he said. “Call it the Royal Coachman, it is so finely dressed.”

The Royal Coachman, suitably named, was not yet a dry fly. Theodore Gordon, the greatest tyer of his era, affected the transition, as he’d done with other British wet flies, swapping patterns with G .E. M. Skues in England, the inventor of modernday nymphing. Gordon lived a solitary life in the Catskills devoted to fly fishing. He was no fan of the Royal Coachman. He called it a “lure” and thought it resembled a glorified ant, too conspicuous-looking to fool a trout. Yet in 1909, as part of his pet project, he tied a dry variant with fan wings of wood duck feathers, the Fan Wing Royal Coachman.


Around the same time, Carter Harrison created another variant quite by accident while a guest at A. S. Trude’s ranch in Idaho. Harrison, a fiveterm mayor of Chicago, believed Chicagoans wanted only two things — to make money and to spend it — so he encouraged gambling, saloons, and prostitution, even providing a map to the city’s brothels. He joked with Trude about his host’s penchant for small flies on the Snake River and, as a gag, gifted Trude with the biggest fly he could tie. He clipped some red worsted fibers from a rug and wound them around a gaff hook for the body, then cut a few hairs from the family’s dog, a red spaniel, to fashion wings. Cocktails may have been involved.

This fly was the A. S. Trude, Harrison proclaimed. The joke went over well, but the huge fly “looked so darn good” Harrison tied two similar flies on size 4 hooks with his regular materials. The first had a body of red yarn wrapped with silver tinsel, wings of squirrel tail hair, and a red rooster hackle, while the second substituted green yarn for the red. “The next day,” on the Snake, Harrison wrote, “no trout would take anything except an A. S. Trude,” later known as the Royal Trude. It’s still a useful attractor on Western streams.

Over the years, the Royal Coachman has lost some of its allure, forced to the margins of the sport as innovative tyers saturate the Internet with a daunting array of new patterns. Keeping up with the ingenuity on display can be a full-time job, but it isn’t one I applied for. Just when I figure how best to fish a Chubby Chernobyl, I’m made to feel a dolt for not owning a Winged Yellow Boy or a Bashed Hippie. That tends to make a traditionalist hunker down. Though I’m in awe of the skill and dexterity online, I like to believe I catch as many trout sticking to the old standbys, even the banal Adams. In the midst of a hatch, pass me an Elk Hair Caddis, and I’ll be satisfied.

The Royal Coachman may be nearly obsolete, but I continue to carry a few in my box. Nostalgia plays a part. I remember the good times we had together in the past. I recall in particular a bright, warm autumn day in Downieville, and my frustration while fishing the North Yuba. Autumn is when the big browns lose their caution and feed eagerly, and I had hopes of landing one, but the trout ignored every fly I tried until I switched, in desperation, to a size 12 Royal Coachman. To this day, I haven’t a clue why it worked. I skipped the fly over some riffles and let it drift into a pool, and seconds later, I hooked the brown of my dreams.

Magic plays a part in fly fishing, of course, and that’s probably a good thing. When you hold a rod in your hand, you’re in the grip of a mystery. I imagine I’ll give my Royal Coachmen a whirl this summer, but even if I don’t duplicate my luck on the North Yuba, I’ll feel a pleasantly friendly connection back through time to Theodore Gordon, Charles Orvis, John Haily, and Tom Bosworth, a coachman to the queen.