Ian Chillcott: Getting back in the saddle

Once seen, it’s difficult to forget the shocking pictures of Ian Chillcott with fifty staples in his head, in a hospital bed. Things looked pretty grim, would he fish again? Would he even be the same guy that we’d grown to know through a prolific career in the angling media spotlight? It was certainly tough to imagine a guy whose existence depended upon mental sharpness and brute strength while serving in some far-flung theatre of war being… in some way, diminished. So, it was with a happy heart that we were greeted with a huge bear-hug on the threshold of Chilly’s Hampshire home; perhaps there was some life in the old dog yet?

“Has it changed me? Yes, completely, on so many levels. It’s quite frightening actually.”

When you look back to the Ian Chillcott pre-op, does he feel like a different man?
“Yes, completely, on so many levels. It’s quite frightening actually. I actually talk to people now, I don’t growl at them any more; not that I was rude before, I just wasn’t that interested in other people. It was all about Lynn and myself, and how much fun we can get out of life. I think I’m a lot more sociable now, I want to talk a bit more and I definitely want to get more out of life, it’s almost like I’m treating every day as my last now. That might sound a bit amateur dramatic, but it isn’t – you’re bound to feel that way. There’s a lot more to the story and the operation than I want to let on, and I don’t want to do that at the moment. That’s been me, Lynn and Mr. Stapleton, who carried out the operation, but there are definitely things about it that change the way that you feel about life.

“Was fishing that important to do when I was recovering? No, it wasn’t. I wanted to catch a carp because they’ve meant so much to me over the years. That one that I caught from down the road here, Farnborough Angling’s Shawfields; that will be the most special carp I’ve ever caught and it was 15lb. Totally from a carp fishing point of view that’s the way I always want to feel; I don’t want it to be special because it weighs 40lb, or 30lb, or it’s a fully scaled, or a common, I don’t want that; I want them all to mean something.

“I don’t want to ignore people any more, I want to talk to them and I want to get as much out of life as I can. The unfortunate thing is that I can’t drive, so I can’t take my Harley Davidson out, or my 6.2-litre Dodge, and I can’t drive my van to go fishing, but as soon as I can, I’m sure that I’m going to kick the arse out of it all over again.”

It means as much to me now as it did all those years ago

Do you think that you’ll be able to pursue a purer form of angling now and looking back, do you think that your fishing was compromised by the way you were and the way the scene was?
“I’d be lying if I said that my fishing wasn’t affected by the more commercial aspects. I am probably one of the most lucky anglers in that I work for Fox and Mainline, but I’ve never been part of their advertising stream; everything I do is as an individual and they don’t tell me what to write; I write all my own articles and they trust me to do that. All I want my carp fishing to be is honest. I don’t want it to go to the extremes that people do with rigs and bait, changing this and changing that, because it clouds the issue for those reading it. I just want my fishing to carry on as it has, however, your question sums it up quite nicely as I want to get to a more pure environment. The two lakes that I want to go to are one in Essex that I can’t name, and my little estate lake up in Northampton, which is probably one of the most special places that I’ve ever fished, along with Ashmead. Unbelievably, I haven’t caught the two biggest fish in there, which are a 44lb common and a 49/50lb common. Those will be my ultimate targets for the foreseeable future.

“Recovering from the operation, I could have gone to places and caught hundreds of carp, but they just simply wouldn’t be special to me personally. So, I went to a series of lakes that are steeped in history that are 750yds down the road and the lake I fished was the first in those series to be stocked by Donald Leney back in the day. It’s had a lot of its big fish stolen, but there are some old fish still in there and I want to catch them and really, that’s what I want my fishing to be about.”

Although you haven’t said it directly, does your answer point to an admission that you’ve been to places before that you really didn’t want to be at?
“Yeah, and oddly enough it was when I wrote a diary. I wrote diaries in various magazines for 18 years and I only ever missed one month in all that time. Now, when you start to write diaries and you get into the depths of winter, you start having to go to places that you shouldn’t go to. I remember one place where I had seven twenties and three doubles in a night and as much as that gave me something to write about, it did nothing to light the fire in my heart because it was just so easy. They’d been shoehorned into that lake and there was nothing left to eat, apart from angler’s bait. There were several occasions like that when I was writing a diary, but it was never Fox or Mainline that pushed me into that, I did what I wanted to do.

“You’re not going to stay as a diarist if you’re not out there catching a few carp and some of the waters that I wanted to go to I could never have written a diary about anyway. There’s one very good reason why I didn’t go and fish for The Black Mirror, but one of the other reasons was did I really want to be giving up a year of my life, without the financial benefits of writing a diary, or the coverage it gave to Mainline and Fox?”

I may have kicked the doors down, but these two incredibly special people, Mike Heylin and Ruth Lockwood, steadied the ship

Fast-forwarding now, you’re probably never going to be in that situation again, with the clarity that you now have?
“No, I don’t think I will. The recent situation has given me and the people that I work for and write for a different perspective as well. I’m writing articles in magazines that I’ve never written before, that I’ve never felt the need to write before and it’s proved to me that I can do it. I can write them in a way that the reader gets the benefit from, as well as the companies that I work for, but it’s the reader than must come first.”

At 49lb 4oz, Jack from Horton in 1996 was probably the biggest surprise I’ve ever had in carp fishing

You’ve always promoted carp fishing first, and a lot of people perhaps don’t have the comfortable position from which to write about carp fishing, rather than anything that promotes my sponsors.
“I’ll do that, and the companies I work for are always in my mind, of course they are, but when a guy spends £2,500 on setting his son up for carp fishing, 9 times out of 10, that stuff is in the swap shop two years later. I want to encourage people to come into carp fishing, get the best from it and spend a lifetime doing it. If I were the guy who owned the tackle company, that’s the kind of guy that I’d want, because he’d be spending the money for the rest of his life.”

After Horton I was Wraysbury-bound, and Measles was one of the 20 or so carp that lived there at the time

ECHO was a huge part of your life, and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard you explain why ECHO stopped being relevant, or even if it did?
“I’m so glad that you brought this subject up, because I’ve never really talked about it since the day. There are two other people that I’ll mention here, and I’ll come back to my role in it later, but between the three of us, we were a hair’s breadth away from changing it all. Those two others are Ruth Lockwood and Mike Heylin; two of the most incredible people that I’ve ever met. Ruth caught her PB carp the same day that I caught Jack from Horton, and Mike did a bit of fishing, but they were driven by different things. I got thrown out of the offices at Whitehall because of my attitude, but I was the guy that opened the doors. I’ll shout and bawl, I’ll kick them down, burn them down, whatever it takes to get through the door, but you needed people like Mike and Ruth to walk through the door and do the business.

“We nearly changed the shape of everything, but what we did do was brought angling politics to the corridors of power. ECHO was mentioned at Prime Minister’s Questions, that’s how far it got. That was biblical and I was so proud of that moment. What that did was to open doors and people in politics very rarely want to give credit where it’s due. The PAG and the Angling Trust wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for us, yet apart from Tim Paisley, none of those people want to give us any credit. Tim is a great friend of mine and it’s wonderful that he went on to go through the doors with the PAG. The Trust want nothing to do with us, they don’t want to give credit where it’s due, which is why they get no support from me and never will do.

“Why didn’t it carry on? Because they wouldn’t instigate the laws to save carp angling in this country from the infestation of foreign fish. I know where a lot of carp came from into this country, from Holland, from Belgium – they were brought over in the 1950s and 60s; I know the full story, but we were very naive when it came to diseases back then and they were fifty, sixty, seventy-pound fish stuffed into a tank on the back of Transit vans brought back through customs, invariably dead. There was one very, very famous water up in the Northampton area that got stocked and somebody found ten of those carp that had died in transit. Nobody gives a damn about carp dying – all they give a damn about is holding up a carp for the cameras, and they don’t care what had to happen for it to get there, and I have to say that that offends me massively. If we cared so little about carp, why take an unhooking mat with you, or a landing net? Why not just take a gaff?”

I’ve fished with Chris Yates on several occasions. The honour was all mine

Talk us through the way that ECHO’s aims were refined.
“Let’s look at the very beginning, it was called the English Carp Liberation Army and it couldn’t have got any stronger than that. It all started off with a guy called Colin Titlatch… which is an anagram of Ian Chillcott. Paddy Webb had written something in Carp-Talk about whether carp heritage mattered and I had written back as Colin Titlatch, the head of the ECLA. I had to give Paddy ammunition to fire back at me, such as the assertion that all carp were born in this country, because I needed a way to keep talking about it, I wanted to. Keith Moors, and he apologised profusely for it, called us the ECLAIRS, which was funny and I don’t mind laughing at myself, but it made me think more about doing it properly because people took notice. I’m not on about anglers, I’m on about people in politics, people at the EA, and more importantly, people at CEFAS and DEFRA. They were so keen and forced us to change it to the English Carp Heritage Organisation.”

Frimley was a great adventure, and I achieved a lifelong ambition with Charlie’s Mate at 44lb 4oz

I’m sure that you had it levelled at you that this was a vehicle for you? How did you respond?
“I didn’t do anything about it initially because I’m not a pretentious person and I’ve probably done more real things in my life than people would do in 100 lifetimes, and I wanted to catch more fish before I did it. I think it first entered my head at the beginning of the 1990s when I heard about how many thousands of carp were dying just to get one big ‘un in a water. I could give you some examples, but I don’t want to rub people’s noses in it.”

Ashmead’s Single Scale at 53lb 12oz. It was how special she was, not how big

And largely from what you did, that trade was more or less eradicated? People who want big ‘uns are doing it differently now.
“There are one or two people still doing it, but we can’t say who because they’ve got more money than sense and they’d love to take me to the cleaners. One guy that really saved the day was Mark Simmonds; he flooded the market with an easier option and one that wasn’t going to kill carp. Mark is one of my heroes of that era, and he’s partly why a lot of this illegal stuff went by the by.

“There are loads of examples that I could give you where it all came to fruition. One night I got a call from a guy saying that there were 50 or 60 carp sacked up at Chantecoq. I even know the two people who were going to have those fish, although I can’t say, and CEFAS got hold of it, contacted the Garde de Peche out there and all those carp were released. The guys who were set to receive them weren’t arrested, they just had to give statements. All I’ll say is that those fish weren’t going into the South of the country, they were going a little further North.

“It happened again about six-months later, but unfortunately this time there were about 50 carp, up to about 50lb and most of them were dead.”

A PB common of 46lb 12oz from Farriers. It was just being there that really mattered

So, you were able to have a real-world impact?
“If people thought I was in this for my own ends, then I would have said all these things years and years ago, but I’ve sat on them. I wanted people to make their own minds up about carp care. Yeah, you spend £60 on an unhooking mat, but you’re not bothered how many carp had to die for you to get your ego massaged.”

If ECHO were still going, what do you think are the issues that it would be addressing?
“It would never have run out of steam, but I think that from our own viewpoints, we would have achieved what we wanted to achieve. The beauty of it is what it’s done to pave the way for others. The Angling Trust has done nothing for us, other than pay a chairman £65,000 a year, but the PAG is a different matter – Tim is able to keep things in the public domain to a degree. Now, as I said, I’m a ‘kicker-down of doors’, not a ‘sitter-round of tables’ having a pow-wow…”

A day that changed my outlook on life forever

…So there’s no return to angling politics for you?
“No, I don’t think so. If there was a door to kick down, or a noise to be made, of course I’d do it for fishing, and I mean fishing as a whole, not carp fishing. There are more people that go fishing at the weekend than there are go to watch all the football matches across the country. But, fishing is an individual sport, and I think I know the answer, but as an individual why do you want to get involved in politics when you’re trying to get away from all that by going fishing?”

“When this turned up from Fox, Adam Penning was sitting where you are and I cried my eyes out and Adam would be witness to that, it was an unbelievable moment.”

Was there a moment when you thought, “Nobody is doing anything here, maybe I should?”
“Yeah, I felt like that in the early 1990s…”

…Was that down to the fish deaths that you’d experienced personally?
“Yeah, absolutely. Listen, no names, no pack drills, but this is when it all started. I think it was 1989, and a guy brought 72 commons from Holland and they were introduced into two inordinately famous lakes, one of which produced the biggest carp in the whole country in 1974 at 38lb, a fish that had been stocked by Donald Leney. So two of the Dutch commons went in that lake and the rest in the other lake. All the fish in the other lake died and in the first lake where the thirty-eight came from, all but one died. That was when I knew that we needed to stand alone and supply fish for a growing market. I still maintain that the 1980s and 1990s were the most exciting time for carp fishing because Lenny Middleton invented a rig that changed everything. Before the hair, nobody did it; it was reclusive people that did carp fishing. Staring at a piece of silver paper on your line for 24hrs would kill most people!”

I’m still a long way from a full recovery, but this 26lb 12oz common felt like a new PB

The irony was that the guy who changed it all never made a penny from it.
“Lenny never got a damn bean out of it, which is amazing. His wife got a bit balder because he used to take the hairs out of her head to tie his rigs but…”

Leaving aside ECHO, we want to pick up on the fish really. You fished through a time when you had a few huge and renowned fish and now you’d struggle to think of all the lakes that had done fifty-pounders, never mind forty-pounders. How have you refocused your targets?
“I’ve never, ever targeted a fish because it’s popular, because it’s the one; as I said earlier, I never went for The Black Mirror, for a number of reasons, and I probably would have done if things had been different, but that was about the only one. I want to catch fish that are special to me.”

The greatest catch I ever made. Lynn is so special, she’s saved my life!

How do they become special to you?
“Their history, obviously. The first forty-pounder that I ever caught was Jack out of Horton. Now, if you want to catch a fish with a history, then he was one of the top five or ten that have ever lived. I am living proof that it’s better to be lucky than good, because I caught him on the third day that I fished the lake. But, he was a target for me, as was everything else in that lake. There were only probably 12 to 15 forties caught in the whole country that season, it was special.”

You can’t find those special fish now, can you?
“Yeah, there are a couple, but most of the waters I want to go fishing on are no-publicity, which are about as much use to me as an ashtray on a motorbike, but I will get there, eventually. I think the best example would be the Ashmead fish; I knew the history of him, he was born ten miles up the road from my house and was stocked in there in the 1990s. He grew on, did the wild thing and I wanted to get a ticket for Ashmead and I wanted to catch that fish. But, when you consider how many fifty-pounders there are out there, do I want to catch any of them? There’s none I can think of off the top of my head while we’re talking. None. It doesn’t do anything for me, the environment they live in has to do it for me. The 49lb and 44lb commons that I was talking about earlier, they live in such a special place; there are only ten or twelve members and I’ve managed to not catch them, which is a wonderful thing, because I can go back. As soon as I do, I won’t go back. It’s like Charlie’s Mate, which was the biggest dream I’d ever had. Ever since I opened Dick Walker’s book as a six-year-old I’d always wanted to catch a common comparable to his record. It took 41 years to do it, but that fish probably means more to me than any other carp.”

I can’t see any others on the wall?
“Well, there’s a reason that he’s on the wall there. Up at Fox, they were going to send me bunch of flowers after the operation, but luckily most of them said, “Oh no, no, no, you can’t send flowers!” So Lewis got the picture of Charlie’s Mate blown up, and the picture is signed ‘From everyone at Fox’ and when it turned up Adam Penning was sitting where you are and I cried my eyes out and Adam would be witness to that, it was an unbelievable moment.”

You came up from the South-West, and when you moved up onto the big carp scene you found yourself in the company of some fine anglers and good people. You became particularly associated with a group on Horton, how strong is that group still?
“Unbelievably so, still. I mean, I’ve had my moments; me and Keith (Jenkins) had our moments because we went into business together – never go into business with your mates – worst decision ever. But, Keith and I still talk, once a week or so we tend to put the world to rights, and we rarely talk about fishing any more. I would say that, even through all my Army days and everything that I did there, the greatest friend that I have is Keith Jenkins. We were polar opposites but we got on. I met Keith in 1994 at my local Army lake; a very, very special place. Keith got a ticket for it and unbelievably, a few days later I met Dave Lane. Chrissy Pearson, who has caught some unbelievable fish and never publicises a damn thing; he’s an awesome guy, as is Robbie Stoddard. I don’t keep in touch with them all the time necessarily, but we are great friends. So, coming through that system draws people together more than it does necessarily today, because you were all of the same mindset.”

How much have those guys changed, and how much have you changed?
“We’ve all changed as we’ve matured through life. We’re all in our fifties, going on 15. That’s what carp fishing does for you, it keeps you young, it keeps you mobile. Okay, what’s happened to me changes your view on things, but I don’t feel any different now about my carp fishing; I want to be climbing trees, I want to be smashing through undergrowth, it’s that old saying: “If fishing is an escape, then carp fishing is the great escape”. I will always want it to be that way.”

It must therefore be a source of great frustration that you can’t push the schedule along to the point that you’re there?
“I’ve broken so many bones in my body, but within weeks you’re back on the road, rocking and rolling, but your brain is a different thing. I’ve had to show more patience than I’ve ever had to show in my carp fishing, or any other walk of life. It’s almost exactly six-months since the operation and I still can’t drive, but I’m just waiting for the authorities to give me the thumbs-up.”

And when they do, how will it feel? Will you trust yourself?
“Well, I don’t want to be danger to anybody else but I’ve had to start my van up every five days, and I’ve got a mate, Nick, who comes round to drive it around for a couple of hours every few weeks and the same with the big truck. I didn’t want to do it, but now I need it; I’m married to the greatest woman that ever walked the face of the planet and they ask her, “You must get tired of him being away fishing all the time?” But the thing is, I was in the Army and often away for six-months here, three-months there, so two to three nights a week is nothing for Lynn to put up with and she likes her own time too, so it all works out.”

Spring is on the horizon, can you make it?
“I don’t know. I’m off to Willow Park tomorrow and it’s only a couple of miles up the road for me. It isn’t the hardest lake in the world, but we’ve just been through a pretty horrible period, weather-wise and maybe I’ll catch one? As long as it’s a carp, I don’t care if it’s still got the yolk-sac attached to it! Is it desperate for me to catch one? No it’s not – it’s that escape and it gives me time to think. I don’t think that, touch wood, that it’ll be long before I get my licence back, and I want to disappear off to a couple of special places and fish for some special fish. The support I’ve had, with Lynn at the top of that list, and the guys at Mainline; I mean, Kev Knight and Steve Morgan are ringing me up all the time, and Fox have told me that there’s no worry, and just to keep on getting better and get back out on the bank. Harry Charrington, who is just the most marvellous future for Fox than I can ever imagine, and I made a vlog about the first couple of trips I’ve done to Shawfields, and I’ll maintain to the day I spin off my mortal coil that that fish was the most special fish I’ll ever catch. I was in tears, absolute tears when it was in the net.

“Shaun McSpadden from Fox rang me up this year and said, let’s go fishing. He drove all the way from Essex, picked me up and took me all the way back to Essex, ten minutes from his house and we went fishing; what greater thing can a bloke do for a friend? I just don’t think there is.”

Has the way that the wider carp scene come together around you since the operation made you aware of a community that perhaps you weren’t before?
‘Mate, I’m so glad that you brought this up and I have to tell you that it brings a tear…”

The interview is suspended for a while, as a visibly emotional Chilly is forced to rest. Clearly still vulnerable to the trauma that his brain has endured, his blood pressure has rocketed, and Lynn takes over, calling a temporary halt.

“It’s absolutely the perfect point to end on. I would be the first to tell anyone that I do get emotional about it – we spoke earlier about the picture from Fox, and how important that was in my recovery. People don’t understand how quickly this happened; it was only there weeks before the operation that I’d been in to see the surgeon. The week after that I saw all the people involved in the neurology side of things. They put me on steroids to reduce the swelling on my brain so they could operate. I didn’t tell people on Facebook straight away, but there were loads of rumours going around that I was dying, or that Lynn was dying, so I thought I’d tell everyone. I’ve only been on Facebook for three or four years and it was a good way of supporting the people who supported me in carp fishing. Certainly the day before I went into hospital, everything changed, fundamentally and totally. I’d never been one to put up a picture of my motorbike, or my truck, but I posted that picture so I could say that all I wanted to do was be able to play with my Tonka toys.

“That reached 250,000 people and I was utterly amazed. There were hundreds of messages too, but I thought, this is just a one-off and people are nice and they just want to say something. Well, the next time I did, I needed help just to operate my phone, and they took a picture of the 50 staples in my head, which reached in excess of a third of a million people. Thousands of messages came through and when I fired my phone up the next day it took about ninety minutes for it to stop making noises; I thought it was going to break and eventually the battery went. That just carried on and I believe to this day, and I will go to my grave believing that every one of those messages was as honest and sincere as it’s possible to be. It took me probably three or four weeks to like every one of the messages, because I just couldn’t look at the screen.

“It made me so emotional, when I saw that it made me the happiest I’ve ever been. Everyone wanted to know how I was getting on – every morning I’d get private messages when I switched my phone on, I got e-mails, letters in the post, cards in the post – some didn’t even have my address on but the Post Office got them here, God knows how! It was people’s honest reaction to a guy who’d taken things to the absolute limit, only this time it was inadvertent. It was the most touching thing that’s ever happened to me, and it happened through a community that I wasn’t that aware of. I’d almost got used to it when the vlog that Harry and I made went on Facebook and it kicked off again. I think that got such a response because this ex-paratrooper with an aggressive streak, got so emotional looking into the net onto a 15lb common. I’ve said it on a number of posts but I’ll never ever, even if I lived another 100 lifetimes, be able to thank those people enough, because they’ve made such a massive difference to my recovery. Every carp I catch now will be done for them, and hopefully there’ll be a few of them, when I get driving.”