Some background to the book:

I was born in Lancashire in the North West of England in 1949 where, as a small kid, I used to wander the adventure of the rough land behind our house trying to catch frogs, toads, newts and sticklebacks in the ponds that were dotted around.

At the age of five I graduated to the bigger ponds out on the Fylde where I would sit for hour upon hour watching a float for any sign of movement, under which bread paste lured unsuspecting roach and rudd that in the main I was inept at hooking.

My first visit to Scotland to fish for Brown Trout came at the age of ten when I was taken to the river Tay, a river that seemed like an ocean to me. There, amongst one of the finest wild brown trout fisheries I have known, I began to clumsily hone my skills.

There were Brown Trout, Grayling and Sea Trout, although the latter always seemed to break off so violent a fish were they. Occasionally I would see a big splash away out in the middle of the river, the King lived out there and one day I was taken out in a boat to fish for him, but it would take two further visits over the next two years before, on the   10th April 1961, I would catch my first salmon, an eleven pounder, and quickly follow it with another that same day, a ten and a half pounder.

The hotel always seemed to be full of elderly professional people, many of them ex-services, and one of them gave me an old Hardy Silex reel he was no longer using. I had never seen anything like it and looked upon it as something to be treasured.

When I was nineteen we bought the hotel.

Dunkeld House Hotel nestles beside its 1¾ miles of the river Tay and, as I recovered from serious illness that had stopped my athletics career, before long I would be fishing day in and day out on some of the finest beats this phenomenal river had to offer as a guest of people staying in the hotel. Whenever they had a spare rod available they would ask me to fish and they would keep my catch, an arrangement I was more than happy with in order to be able to fish the very best places the Tay had to offer at the best times.

And so, amongst massive runs of Tay salmon, my knowledge developed with the assistance of many ghillies and countless fishing experiences and so too did my interest in fishing tackle.

I used to visit local auctions and if I could find old tackle I bought it.

In the early 1970’s I met Jamie Maxtone Graham who would become the biggest dealer in vintage fishing tackle in the UK. I was the second person to ever buy a reel from him (Hermann the German got there first!), which was followed by many, many more. Jamie was an irascible character but we got on well and met up at auctions all over the UK as I became more and more interested in collecting vintage tackle.

At the end of the 1960’s beginning of the 1970’s fishing tackle wasn’t worth anything, but with Jamie developing the market there came a rise in prices that would prove continuous to this day.

Many years later I took the decision to refine my collection into the best of Hardy and the result would become known as the Dunkeld Collection.

In 1987 I published a large format catalogue of my collection to try and stabilise a market that was unfortunately being sold to on its ignorance. The result was that Jamie and I fell out as many of his clients came back to him, realising that some things he had sold were not quite as rare as he had made out.

He promptly blacklisted me on his tackle list and I ended up having him served with a writ and in court he was admonished by the judge.

Those of us who managed to get ourselves onto Jamie's blacklist regard ourselves as a unique club amongst tackle collectors !

Jamie has passed on, but he more than any other person was single-handedly responsible for the development of the British vintage fishing tackle market.

In the end what really put me off were the ruthless antics of some of the people involved with vintage tackle as the values rose. I found much of this behaviour unacceptable and eventually decided to break up and sell my collection, after which, for a number of reasons, I decided to leave the UK.

I found two years of pressurised living and fishing for Blue Marlin in Madeira (winning the World Blue Marlin Championship in 1995 with a 953 pounder) quite enough and I ended up down on the South African Cape, where I ran into problems of the most serious nature, was relieved of most of my money and am extremely lucky to be alive.

It took me four years to recover physically.

Today I enjoy every single day and believe me when I say there are no bad ones.

Eventually in 2003 I returned to the UK where people like Neil Freeman, Roger Still and John Ayers urged me to reprint my catalogue. I knew how much work it would be and the financing it would require, but managed to work out ways to do it. Together we decided that as no one had yet analysed Hardy Lures a study of them would be a good idea and that Price Guides to all the items in the book would be of even more help to collectors.

The study and photography of the Hardy Lures took 14 weeks working round the clock. I had no lures nor a camera of sufficient quality. So I borrowed lures from collectors and had them photographed. I was amazed at the attitude of some collectors who wouldn't let me photograph lures they owned. Of course subsequent to publication everyone declared they had Hardy lures I could have photographed. Perhaps some of these will be for an updated, limited edition book, however I don't tend to support people who looked down their noses at me at a difficult time when they could have volunteered their help.

John Drewett, Roger Still and I re-edited the reel information and added to it and the Price Guides were carefully constructed by myself, Roger, Neil Freeman and John Ayers independently of each other.

Therefore they are representative of the middle line of values.

The printers were excellent and did a lot of design work at reasonable cost. The original photographs of the reels had been taken by an elderly gentleman from Perth who did such a tremendous job, but the negatives had been in various attics and storage facilities ever since and had somehow become dirty with ingrained grime. We had to clean and scan the negatives and on top of that clean, enhance colour and enlarge many of the computer images. I stayed with the printers all through the night they printed the book, signing off sheets every hour and I was glad I was there as they got the colours wrong from time to time.

All the hard work turned out to be worth it as 'The Dunkeld Collection – Hardy Reels, Lures and Price Guides' is being extremely well received. People are genuinely appreciative of having a pictorial guide with a huge amount of concise information to hand to help them identify, date and value vintage Hardy Reels and Lures.

So despite the fact that I no longer have the collection the benefits to others of my having taken all those years putting it together will surely last for a very long time.

                                                                                                    Jess