Some years ago I was given a small brown leather wallet.
Inside were half a dozen hand-tied, bucktail streamers made with real polar bear hair. All six patterns are still in relatively good shape considering they were tied almost 70 years ago. A couple appear to have been used at least once. The knot from the leaders they had been tied to are still intact on two of the flies. There are three red and whites, a pale green and white, a mauve and white, and one that looks to be a streamer version of a Mickey Finn. All were tied with a silver tinsel wrap, dyed buck tail fur and white polar bear on #2 sproat hooks for salmon fishing.
According to the fellow who gave them to me, they had been tied some time back in the late 1950s by one Florence Cox of Vancouver. Apparently Mrs. Cox was a well known fly tier in her day day and she would have been pushing 90 years old when these particular flies were tied.
I remember looking at the flies and thinking to myself they were rather unexceptional in appearance other than the fact they were very, very well tied. I also remember wondering who had purchased them originally and where they might have been fished. I probably then simply closed the wallet and put them away in a drawer.
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I happened to come across the wallet the other day while looking for something else. Looking at the wallet, I found myself intrigued with Mrs. Cox and her polar bear streamers.
What I have subsequently been able to find out about Florence Cox is that she lived in New Westminster on Edinburgh Street. She tied flies that were highly sought after and equally highly prized by anglers in the Vancouver area. Her flies were the ones that would have been kept under the counter for those in the know or who were considered ‘worthy.’ Apparently she was short in stature, standing a modest five-foot, three-inches or so in hight. She was one of 14 children. She grew up in Rudditch, England, a town rich in fly fishing history, and learned to ‘dress’ flies at the age of 15 as an apprentice tier at the famous Alcock’s of England.
Now I know these few facts may seem a bit sparse and somewhat incongruous, but I was only able to glean what I did from a July 15, 1960 column by outdoor writer Lee Straight who wrote for the Vancouver Sun. Straight himself was an interesting person. He was a close fiend of Roderick Haig-Brown.
Looking at Mrs. Cox’s flies in the leather Wheatley wallet, I can just imagine some angler walking into a tackle store somewhere in Vancouver back in the 1950s. Dressed in a brown Harris tweed jacket and beige cotton trousers, sporting a wide brimmed felt hat that looked uncharacteristically “soiled” for the rest of his attire. He would probably have been well known to the shop owner and clerks.
“Hi there, so-and-so.” The shop owner would call him by his first name. “Hello Mr. so-and-so.” The clerks would have been more formal and called him only by his surname. “Hi there guys” he would respond. “I’m heading up onto the Cowichan River for some salmon fishing tomorrow morning – got any of those special bucktails?”
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The shop keeper would then glance over at one of the clerks and nod. The clerk would then reach down and from underneath the counter and bring out a wooden tray with an assortment of exquisitely tied polar bear bucktail streamers.
“You mean these ones,” asks the clerk, presenting the tray as if it contained the crown jewels.
“Are those the ones,” he pauses in mid-sentence to feast his eyes, “tied by Florence Cox?”
“Yes, sir,” replies the shopkeeper. “These are the best polar bear streamers you can buy – at any price.”
The angler does not even ask the price. He knows they are worth their weight in gold when the fish are biting.
I think I will have the six streamers mounted in a shadow box frame with the name Florence Cox on a little brass plaque at the bottom.
After all, when it comes to preserving our Canadian angling history, streamers like these really are worth their weight in gold.
@SalmonArm
newsroom@saobserver.net
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