How legends grow. How lies and exaggerations accumulate around simple, clear stories. Anti anglers need not be put off by the fact that the catching of a trout is at the heart of this. You read here not so long ago about Sergeant Pepper of the Constabulary who, in his delight at catching a huge trout in Lough Derg in the year 1862, wrote a simple, straight account of the affair and sent it to the English Field, where it was published. It appeared again in a volume Harvesting The Field, an anthology of letters from 1853, and published by Pelham Books in 1991.
The Sergeant had gone out after pike and was surprised to land into the boat, using both arms, "a splendid trout." It weighed 29lb 6ozs and for over a hundred years was the record the specimen as some put it trout. Until Dr A. E. J. Went examined it in the Sixties of this century and pronounced it definitely a salmon. Anyway. On reading something of this here Declan T. Quigley, Commercial Fisheries Biologist of the ESB sent in an article on the same subject he had had published in Angling News in 1984.
He had followed up the story in extracts from The Irish Times of September 26, 1903, two score years later. A correspondent of that date, signed only U. C. got the weight wrong. He claimed it was short of 29lbs. Pepper, he said, was in the water, playing the fish in his "Garden of Paradise clothes" and, as the sun was hot, the next day "red as a rose was he" and for a week after could not be touched.
And possibly most heinous of all, the writer mentioned "Honest Tom" of Lough Corrib, who could "swear a hole through a griddle." So one Thomas Hewson warns that Honest Tom might have a friend on the Connaught Circuit who would put the usual innuendo on that for him. Another correspondent laughs off the ideas that a man, presumably bathing, could hook a fish, trolling. Things were getting out of hand.
So, in came Pepper himself "My attention has been drawn and gives a dignified account of what happened. Oddly enough, he gives the weight of 30lb 8ozs not the 29lb 6oz he reports in The Field in 1862. Maybe when officially weighed, the fish has lost weight. Not impossible.
But the colourful imaginations of a Paradise Suit catch were dismissed.
My two aides and I were fully clothed like poor mortals here below and not in Garden of Paradise uniform." Pepper is Sergeant most times but Declan Quigley has him District Inspector. Worthy promotion. But Pepper is immortal.