Martin Locke: Lucky man?

Believe us, there was nothing lucky about the way that Martin Locke built his influential Solar brand throughout one of the most fascinating, and turbulent periods of carp fishing history, but what does one of carp fishing’s true innovators remember of the highs and lows of life at the cutting edge?

“Just through the door and Martin’s in there on the left,” the receptionist tells me. No pretentious office. No airs and graces. Indeed, Martin Locke seems a little surprised that someone wants to interview him at all. Yet his career is without doubt among the most colourful of any of our industry figures; from founding a company in his Mum’s garage, to losing sleep as the monster grew, he’s seen it all, lived it all. Despite all that, it’s abundantly clear that he's a modest man, with a well-defined live-and-let-live philosophy and the passion for fishing still burns in him, long after it was extinguished within many of his contemporaries. As a young man, he found himself in just the right place, at just the right time, deep in the Colne Valley as the scene around him caught fire, with Savay Lake and the infamous Horse and Barge pub at its heart.

What was inside of you that made you want to set Solar Tackle up?
“That was easy, at that point I was into the Colne Valley and I went down to the Cons Club for a guest session. You could only fish days, so I met the boys down in the car park the night before, ahead of an early start, and we headed to the pub. When we got back the old Capri had been broken into and my gear was gone. Of course, I couldn’t just replace it back then, largely because you just couldn’t get hold of any ‘proper gear’ as I saw it. I was working for an engineering firm, on a lathe at the time, so rather than replace the aluminium stuff I had with more aluminium stuff, I decided I’d make my own from scrap stainless. I made two banksticks, two buzzer bars and two monkey climbers and as soon as I was next on the bank I was getting, “Where did you get that? You can’t make me some can you?” Sure enough, I was busier in my dinner hour than I was during the day. It just took over and although I was hiding it under the bench, of course I got found out in the end! Suffice to say, when it came to the end of my apprenticeship, there was no contract for me, which mean that it was easier to go fishing! I think that I was getting £14 a week, and if you signed on, you got £11, so as much as my Mum didn’t like it too much, I signed on and went fishing!”

Very early days: DDAPS’s Sutton-at-Hone

So you didn’t immediately set-up, you went fishing first?
“Yeah, always! Eventually, I went back to the same firm in the end, and there were redundancies this time, so although I lost my job, they gave me a grand and I bought a machine and set-up in my garage. That’s how the whole thing started really.”

A 21lb 14oz Tip Lake mirror

Were you conscious of being a business, or were you simply trying to make enough money to go fishing?
“I just wanted to go fishing! Now, although nowadays overheads for everyone’s businesses are much higher, back then there were none, apart from £100 every three months for the electricity. I did an awful lot of hours, but because I had the time and motion instilled into me, I knew exactly how to do things quickly. For instance, I knew I could make those 1,000 monkey climber pips in a night, so I’d go downstairs after my tea at 8pm, get hard at it until 3am or 4am and that’d be it. The target always was to be able to go fishing the next week, because my rota would start every other Sunday. So that rota week was always the target, but often my Mum would tell me I couldn’t go, because she was packing and sending all the gear, and if she didn’t have enough to meet demand, then I couldn’t go. That instilled into me that you had to get the job done, work then you can play.

“After that, seeing as I was catching a few notable fish, everyone seemed to be alerted to the baits that you were using. Everyone was pooling their ideas at the time on Savay, there was no sense of, ‘Well I’ve got this and I’m keeping it to myself’. So the birdfood baits started to be asked for, so I was going home to make the stainless, and going fishing to make the bait!”

You were rolling the bait on the bank, right?
“I used to roll the bait on the bank, yeah; I’d make up a 24-egg mix every day. When I needed to upgrade, I ended up doing it in Mum’s garden shed.”

Darenth Big Lake

Who were your influences when it comes to bait?
“I’ll have to drop back much earlier, to my time on Brooklands, when I was shown how much damage you can do when you’re on THE bait. At the time we were fishing luncheon meat, walking through Dartford Town Centre with the gear on the shoulder on a Sunday, and we wouldn’t be back until the Friday. If you caught two or three in a week then you were chuffed with that. The Chad Valley boys - Dickie Caldwell, Paul Gummer and Bill Young were doing really well on particles on there, and I don’t quite remember how I came to be accepted by them, but they told me about peanuts and I went from catching three a week to 25! Ridiculous. It proved to me that the fish were going over the top of your baits, but they wanted some baits more than others, in a big way. That never left me.

“The next thing that sticks in my mind was the evolution the ester flavours. My friend Micky Murray and I were the two young lads who were going through thick or thin, whatever the weather during the winter. Occasionally we’d turn up to find the lake frozen and have to walk our kit back through town! But we only had nine-months of the year to fish, so between June and March, we were going. The other three months of the year I’d modify my stuff, so it was better than the other boy’s stuff. Anyway, there was a fella down there, he’s still about now, called Melvin, a good angler. He’s old school, but a smart angler. Melvin was just going down on his moped and doing day sessions, and catching, whereas we just hoped to get one carp throughout the entire winter. We thought at the time that baits for winter fishing needed to be soft, so the carp could digest them, and ours were almost liquid. We had to get on three buses to get the flavour that we were using at the time: Langdale’s banana flavour.

“There were a couple of things that Melvin was doing differently, for starters he was fishing his lines bowstring-tight and the old bottle-top indicators just below the rod. Rather than getting the twitches that everyone was getting through the winter, having to strike through the bait, he was getting reel-spinners. We were curious but didn’t like to ask. Eventually, he took us under his wing, because he could see that we were keen. He gave us the recipe: Amyl acetate was the one; pear drops, and told us to pull our lines into home-made line clips made from matchsticks. It seems obvious now, but it was massive then and I’ve thanked him before and I’ll thank him again here, because he changed everything.

“So, I had the recipe, but getting the Amyl acetate was actually harder than I’d anticipated. I knew that Mr. Hickey, the chemistry teacher at school wouldn’t give it to me, but I also knew that he had to go to the toilet at some stage, and as soon as he did I dived over and nicked myself probably just three or four millilitres. The drill was then, make the bait on Thursday and go on Friday. I made little, tiny pea-sized baits, which we could just about thread onto an Au Lion d’Or hook, which was one of the few available back then. We were using them with running leads and pulling the tight line back into the matchstick clip against the rod blank so the lines were that tight you could walk along them! This felt totally different and we were catching them from the off.

“I looked into it later on and discovered that Amyl acetate was thinner than water, so we were only pinging out 20 or so baits, and catching two or three per trip. It proved to me that if you had a more attractive bait, then you’d catch more, simple.”

Tip Lake Pilgrim - one of two captures, this time at 28lb 4oz

Did you ever fall out of love with fishing in England?
“Never going to happen. Can’t happen. If you’re an angler, then you’re an angler and the only reason that I stopped in England was because Solar had become a beast. My favourite words had been, “Leave it to me”, which gives you some indication of the problem. I’d plan to go Monday night and/or Tuesday night if it was looking good. I’d go in on the Monday morning and all of a sudden it comes at you like a freight train. Then the line comes into your head, “F*ck it, I’ll go next week.” Next week never comes. So it’s taken until now, but I cannot wait to get up to that Tip Lake, or down to an Essex lake that I’ve got a ticket for, settle in behind the rods and sort my life out! An angler is always an angler, but ultimately, I’ve always tried to do the best I can do for the company, so my fishing has suffered.”

What do you think your contemporaries, or anglers who know you, think that you do, fishing-wise now?
“I think that the outside world might imagine that I fish full time, which I clearly don’t. It really has been eating away at me that I can’t do my English fishing, because there’s too much pressure at work. The situation is much more structured and organised here now, so apart from doing the day-to-day stuff that I have to do, the job is to go fishing and promote the products more, and come up with new ideas, which is exactly where I want to be. But it’s only this year that I’ve got here, and I’m buzzing.”

Chopped Dorsel at 29lb 4oz, some 11 years before I had it from the same swim at 50lb 4oz

Is it therefore a source of some regret that the business ate your English fishing for a decade or more?
“The thing is though, this has kept me off the streets. Some might say that I’ve never done a day’s work in my life, because I’ve enjoyed it so much, but when things get so big that money is running out of the business in rivers and there’s so much administration and paperwork, you think, ‘This is not what I signed up to do’. I’ve had a reasonably stress-free life with it all, so if I’ve had a few odd years when it’s gone a bit wonky, then I can’t really complain about that. I’m as keen today for fishing as I was when I started.”

As a keen observer of angling media, it seemed to me that the last we heard of you in England was probably after your capture of Benson. Why was that?
“Well, the target at the time was Benson and when I finally got there I realised that I’d stretched my time on the bank so much that I had to catch up on it all. There are a few people that are reliant on me, and I realised that I just couldn’t cram it all in. Then I did a very strange thing, that some people did years ago, called getting married. I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got to leave something on the planet!’ And I’ve got two little girls now. Around that time I started going to Rainbow and I fell in love with the place. I know people must think, ‘Oh no, not again’ but I love the atmosphere there, I love the tension there, and I love the strategy that surrounds it all. You can watch your strategy unfold and learn lots on each trip. I must have done 90 or 100 trips there, yet I can remember exactly who was where and what they caught on each trip! I’m not being a trainspotter at all, you just can’t help but remember who was there, it’s just such an adventure. I prefer to look at fishing as not just a session, but as an adventure. When you leave your house, it doesn’t matter whether you’re going down the road to an easy pond, it’s always an adventure. No matter how long you’ve been carp fishing, when you’re sitting there at night, you really don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s the buzz. The passion’s there, you know?”

33lb 12oz Harrow mirror

You shouldn’t have to apologise for wanting to fish Rainbow.
“Well, this guy came up to me at one of the shows and said, “I don’t know why you keep going over there.” So I told him, “I always come back from there and ask myself, did I enjoy it? And the answer is yes. It’s always yes; I’m fishing for me, not what you think of me.” He shook my hand and said, “Fair play to you.” I was doing ten or eleven weeks a year out there at times, and to fish anywhere else in a year is being a bit greedy, even by my standards. It is a selfish sport isn’t it, and everything else goes by the by. Because I have a few other waters this year, as well as Rainbow, I’m looking forward to this year like no other!”

Do you think that there’s a chance that, given what’s happening with the company that your hopes
will be…
“…Changed? No. I drive past Darenth morning and evening and I’ve not fished there since 1980. Lee (Jackson) and Darren are running it now and they’ve invited me on for a ticket and I’ve had a ticket for the Essex lake for three years or so, and I’ve only been a couple of times. It’s the short sessions and overnighters that I miss.”

41lb 3oz mirror from Harrow - my second forty in four days

Did you miss out on the Tip Lake at its absolute peak if you fished there in 1980?
“No, not at all. I caught then and they were the fish that they were catching a few years later. The worst job that I’ll have to do for you boys is to go through all my old pictures, because so many are negatives or old prints. When I get round to doing a book, all those Tip fish, like the Gutbucket, Pilgrim and Big Bollocks will be in there.”

You’ve fished for some of the most prestigious carp in the UK. You’ve also fished at places that some people wouldn’t fish…
“If I go back to the Benson thing. I was never going to be on Wraysbury, fishing for Mary; I couldn’t do it, I didn’t have the time and you have to make sure that you’re not biting off more than you could chew. If you’re going for a night a week, then fair play to those who did that, to catch what they did, but that wasn’t quite for me. I kept seeing Benson in the papers, thinking, ‘That’s a lovely common’…”

A gust of wind takes Jacko, in the fish spotter, to Canterbury

…And that’s all you thought about?
“That’s all I thought about. I cut a picture out and phoned up Kev Green, God rest his soul, because I needed directions! I didn’t know where it was, how big the lake was, or how many other fish were in there, but I wanted to catch that fish. The more I looked at it, the more I wanted to catch it and the determination kicked in. I looked at that picture all the time and when I went up the M11 on that first trip, and I pulled into the yard, Lynn, Tony’s missus came out and said, “Hello, there, you alright?” She didn’t know me, and I didn’t want to be known either, I’m just a guy that goes fishing, and has been at it a while; I certainly never went for all that roping swims off stuff.

“Anyway, she handed me a coloured leaflet and I presumed it was the rules, but it was actually the list of local takeaways that delivered! “Where does this Benson live then, Lynn?” I said. “Just up there, love, go over the bridge, turn left and it’s the second lake up there,” she said. I made sure that it was the worst weekend that I could have picked to go, which was Bank Holiday, and it was packed! The thing that kept me going on there, was that the big fish are rarely with all the fish, so the good anglers chasing the fish that were jumping rarely catch the big fish.

“I never actually saw Benson until it was in my net. The people that caught it, caught one in a week. Lovely lake; I’d actually love to go back up there, because it was one of the best periods of carp fishing that I ever had. And because it’s central, you didn’t have any ‘cliqueyness’ going on, nobody was treading on your toes, but even if a lead did land in the little corner that I was fishing, I’d simply wind in and find a new little area, it was all part of it. When I was driving up the M11, I kept talking to the picture of Benson, saying, “One day I’ll be driving back down the other side and I’ll have caught you!”

Globet rotter on the St. Lawrence River - almost two-miles wide at this point!

What did you do after Benson then?
“Well, like I said, there came a time that I’d been doing so much fishing that I had to catch up on some work. Then I was moving factories and stuff, and it was the hardest of times because I’ve always lived by the motto, ‘The hardest thing to buy is spare time’ and all I wanted to do was go fishing. But I couldn’t get out of it; there was so much money going out of the door on overheads.”

It must have kept you awake at night, at times?
“Big time. That’s when the bite alarms started. It’s all for a reason, but at the time I wondered what the f*** that reason was. There’s nothing worse than a stressed angler, and as I mentioned, I couldn’t go out to play until the work was done.”

A carp I just had to catch

Do you think that because you’ve always been so hands-on, it’s cost you fishing time?
“Ultimately, yes, but you have to, don’t you, because that’s your living? The thing with the bite alarms wasn’t about money, as strange as it seems, it was about my pride in the job and having that last piece of the jigsaw sitting on that rod pod. It seemed like a good idea at the time, it’s all for a reason and I’ll draw a line under it. Like I say, when it gets bigger, and there are people relying on you, it ends up being a huge pressure.”

Was there a way that you could have structured things that would have allowed either Solar to grow differently, or made things easier for you?
“You learn as you go along. I was never a businessman, I was someone who came up with ideas. I started making fishing gear for mates, and now I look at it as if I’m making a lot more fishing gear for a lot more mates! There’s no point dressing it up in a load of big words, I come up with the ideas and once the job is done, I don’t sit back and think, ‘This is the bollocks’, I move onto the next thing. As soon as I’ve thought of the idea, I put myself on the other side of the tackle shop counter and try to pick holes in it. I wouldn’t say that I haven’t taken it seriously enough, but an idea in itself, or a product, isn’t serious, it’s a nice thing!

“I know that I’ve had people in the factory taking advantage when I’m not around; I know that’s gone on, but my job needs me to be creative and as soon as I’m worried about ‘someone’s late’, ‘someone’s ill’, or this has been ordered wrong, then I can’t be creative; that’s a foreman or a manager’s job. We had a few people try it and it was never as easy as we thought it was going to be. Because we were growing I had to get involved in all those things, so I was left with 10% of my time, what I call ‘forced time’, to come up with the ideas and I was never chilled out enough to come up with the ideas that got us here, after 30 years, in the first place. I have to be in a good mood, and know that I’m not being taken advantage of to do my job.”

Coming up with inventive ideas which will help other anglers is Lockie’s first love

Have you been too nice?
“You are what you are. The people who bite the hand that feeds them are no longer around. Life’s too short to have any hate in you, it’s all part of the circle. The story is already written, you just decide whether you turn left or right on the path. It’s like that in fishing, too. Thanks to the effort that you put in behind the scenes, the fish you want to catch locate you to a certain degree. If your name is on it, then it’s done. The (world) record fish for instance: it’s minus-six degrees, I’m on a 100-acre lake where no-one’s catching, and there are a million places to hide, so why is it that fish decides to pick my bait up? Unless the story’s already written.”

When I started reading about carp fishing in the 1990s, we’d just had the era of the Horse and Barge. Can you sum up what that period was like for those of us who weren’t fortunate enough to experience it first hand?
“Savay was one of the first lakes to attract people from a long way away. It was different to most English lakes, being 70-odd acres in what turned out to be the famous area of the Colne Valley. There were probably more thirty-pound fish in there that anywhere else in the country and when you saw a picture of those fish, you didn’t need to ask where it was from. Those huge sloping heads and underslung mouths. What the hell I was doing there when I turned up, I don’t know, but I went up with Dave Whibley, who is still a good friend to this day, and it was like going through the gates of heaven.”

Martin Locke: one of carp fishing’s most colourful figures

Most people don’t go carp fishing, go to the pub, get absolutely leathered, then go to the Indian and the cafe in the morning though Martin?
“I know it sounds odd, when we were there to catch them! Our way of excusing ourselves was that firstly, everyone went so there was nobody to upset and it seemed that we really weren’t missing out. We were on the infamous Looney Rota, and the other bunch of lads were the Toad Rota. You didn’t get a choice, you just had to go along with whichever rota you ended up on. We used to gauge it by the Toad Rota’s results, and let’s say there were seven fish caught the previous week, they’d often have had them all between 10am in the morning and seven at night. Good enough for us. Sometimes the fish would be coming out between 3am and 10am, so again, I don’t think that we really missed a lot.

“I think that there was one night that I stayed on the lake with Kerry Barringer, we were on the end of the Canal Bank and when the boys came round, the fish were jumping all over us. We got a little bit of stick for staying, and predictably, nothing happened! They came walking back and asked, “How many have you had then boys?” And at that moment, a toad jumped onto Kerry’s shoe. I’d never seen a toad on that lake before, and I haven’t since!

“When you went to the pub for the evening, there were lads from the other lakes over the road, from Harefield and the Cons; there was a nice bit of camaraderie. You learned a lot more when you pooled all your information. You could only have mushrooms if you’d caught one, so as soon as you’d walk into the cafe, you’d instantly see who’d caught one! That silliness of it made it fun.”

The Beast from Savay at 34lb. No such thing as an unhooking mat in those days!

Do you look back on it as the best time?
“In many ways, yes. I grew up on there. While lads back home were going up the pub, getting girlfriends and stuff, we were doing the same at the lake. I’d take a suitcase for my seven-day trips and you’d get that good at getting the old ‘bird bath’ in the car park, it was like you’d just stepped out of the shower. We used to go to the concerts at Wembley, which was only about half an hour away, we’d go to the pub and occasionally up to the wine bars in Uxbridge. It wasn’t annoying anyone, because everyone was going!”

Must have been where the term ‘pub chuck’ came from?
“For sure! I remember one night, you had to reel in your third rod at 8am in the morning. Peter Broxup, who was a real legend in every sense of the word, had told the water authority that they were only allowed onto the lake after 8am, so Pete insisted that we reeled in that third rod at 8am on the dot. I remember Roger Smith casting out from The Gravelly, after getting back from the pub, and the third-rod spot was about 10 or 15yds out. He’d always cast, then put the rod in the rest and pull the line back until he could feel the tap-tapping of the gravel between his fingers. I went down there at just gone 8 the next morning and said, “Come on Roger, if Pete sees you with that third rod out you’ll be for the high jump! “That’s alright, it’s the right-hand rod; if you could pick it up, I’m going to lay in my bed,” Roger said. I picked it up and it quickly became clear that the tap, tap, tap that Roger had felt was the lead bumping up the reed stems… the rig was hanging 18-inches out of the water! Roger simply said, “Well, I wasn’t going to catch one there, was I?” They were fantastic times. Everything was exciting, but you don’t realise how important it is at the time.”

How many of those boys do you still see?
“Oh, quite a few of them. Rob’s still about, as in Maylin; Dave (Whibley) is still about, Roger and Kerry still fish every weekend. I pop round to see Albert Romp every now and again; he’s top rod on the Fisheries, at 70-something years old - he just knows. Rather than using the latest ‘crash, bang, wallop’ they’re using the stuff that they were using years ago, but while everyone else is catching four, they’re catching 40.”

The story was already written. the world record fish: caught in minus-six, in a lake where there’s a million hiding places

Do you put yourself in that same category, the way you fish?
“I don’t put myself in their league. Subconsciously, you take what these boys have done, and you know what can be done and you use it. Every lake you go to, you’re taking just a couple of percent of the lakes that you fished before, so sometimes you’re 50% of the way there when you turn up. I’ve probably learned more from Roger and Kerry than anyone else, even though they fish totally differently to me.”

You got the nickname, Lucky, a long time ago; do you still feel lucky?
“That luck ran out a long time ago! It was Albert Romp who named me Lucky. I was in the North Bay and I had a fish caught up in the weed and there were no boats that the time. I walked to the next swim, cast over the line, wound it in, retied the knot and carried on like that until I freed the fish. It was the biggest one out of Savay that year, 36lb. Albert looked at me with a wry smile, and said, “That was lucky, wasn’t it?” It stuck for a while, particularly after I got run over! When times have been bad and things have ended up the wrong way round I’ve said, “Well who’s lucky now?” Nope, that luck ran out a long time ago…”