This is another piece that I wrote on the course…
A river runs through Martin Salter’s life. It’s the Kennet. A keen angler, he bought his first house on its banks so that he could fish from his garden. The Kennet also brought him into politics “Reading council banned fishing and I thought that was wrong, so when I stood for county council, the first thing I did when I got elected was to un-ban it.” So began his 24-year career in politics.
“I love the river, and I love the Kennet valley. I was bought up on the banks of the Thames, in Ashford, Middlesex. When I was old enough I was taken on trips to the Kennet. It was a prime chalk stream habitat. I got married on the banks of the river, at the old mill at Aldermaston, but not the bit where they make the atomic weapons.”
Salter is still fighting the river’s cause. He began the Clean the Kennet campaign to improve the river. “Chalk streams are a very precious, very diverse habitat. They are under threat all the time because of abstraction points, pollution, habitat degradation, low flows.”
There have been setbacks. “When the Kennet and Avon canal was cleaned and reopened in 1990, it dumped water that had been lying stagnant for 50 years into the river, which used to be crystal clear. This obviously had an impact on the turbidity of the river and the ecology of the river system.”
Salter comes from a family that has never been afraid to stand up for what it believes in. “My grandfather was a conscientious objector during the First World War. He was locked up for his beliefs, beaten, tortured and wrote his first book on toilet paper with a pencil smuggled in by my grandmother. It was called The Soul of a Skunk, because you got a bad deal if you were a conscientious objector in 1916.” There is a copy of the book currently listed on Amazon at £233.25.
“I’m one of those gabby little people that speak up when something is wrong, Politics gave me the opportunity to be a professional gobshite.”
Politics has also allowed Salter to be the voice of his chosen sport. As the special advisor for shooting and angling, he relishes the opportunity to represent the concerns of three million anglers and three quarters of a million shooters in government.
But, perhaps surprisingly, his greatest fishing experience has not been on the Kennet “The best place for fishing is the River Cauvery in Southern India. Fishing for the Mahseer; which is the largest of the carp family. I caught the biggest one in the world, it was 92 pounds.”