I found a fly rod at our local market. It was caked in crazed, orange yacht varnish. It was straight but needed a full restoration. I was reluctant to walk away. I knocked the asking price down a bit and totted up the cost of new fittings as I drove home.

The number on the reel fitting revealed that the 9’ 6” Hardy Perfection was made in 1913 when the country was on the brink of WWI, George V was on the throne and Mr Asquith was Prime Minister. The Morris Oxford first went on sale that year and Arsenal moved to Highbury.

The agate butt and tip ring were mounted in silver and were undamaged, the intermediate drop down rings were rusty and had to be replaced. Although the cane was straight, it was poor quality and badly built. The nodes were close together and had been planed not hot pressed. Some glue lines were obvious and the top section had a bulge near the tip.

The reel fitting was of a strange construction and the ferrule had a seam along its length. The reel fitting and ferrule had been fashioned out of sheet metal, rolled into a tube and the seams soldered together. The 1955 Hardy catalogue describes the rod, the specification of which had changed since 1913.

The rod had been built during the transition from greenheart to split cane and despite its problems, deserved to be refurbished and used to catch a few trout from the Dartmoor streams.

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