The Lost World of Mr. Hardy

Jack: I used to fish a lot.

We used the fish the River Aln,

and in fact my wife did, as well.

She used to fish and all, too,

and my father-in-law.

He was a keen fisherman,

and that's ...

We used to all go down,

and we all had Hardy's equipment.

Everything was Hardy's.

It was the only kind there was, really.

It was the best kind.

Auctioneer: Well, Hardy's is probably

comparable to the Rolls Royce car makers.

Now, they were established in the late 1800s,

and I would say the quality of the workmanship

has been far greater than probably any other

reel or rod maker.

Ivor: It does mean a lot to you.

You have happy memories of the tackle you were using.

I mean, I can remember my first rod.

I can remember my first reel over 50 odd years ago.

It was my first rod.

It was a 9-foot Hardy CC de France, Casting Club of Paris.

Yes, and I had a little St. George reel.

That was my first outfit.

George: People treated them

We had an incident once

where somebody sent a rod in for repair,

and it was in a Swan Vesta matchbox.

It was two sets of joints,

and he said that ...

and you could see when we looked at it,

there were all, like marks on the joints,

in a letter that covered it, it said,

"My dog got a hold of my fishing rod,

"and chowed it all up, chewed it all up,

"and this is what I've got left.

"Can you build another rod around it?"

On the bottom, he said, "The dog is now dead."

Whether that, if the dog was actually dead or not,

we don't know, but that actually came in to the firm once.

People did really love their fishing rods, yeah.

Jim: When Prince Charles and Lady Diana

were about to get married,

we thought it would be nice to give them a wedding present.

We thought a nice Salmon outfit,

rod and reel for Charles would be all right,

and a similar but lighter weight outfit for Di.

Well, word came back that what we proposed for Di,

that would be quite acceptable,

but that Prince Charles himself would like

two 1912 Hardy "Perfect" salmon reels.

The trouble was, we had thought

to get a wedding present, we'll just go in the stock room

and take an outfit off the wall,

but we had to go on to the antique market

and pay a fortune for these two reels he wanted,

not just one.

Anyway, I met him a few years later,

and he was telling me that he preferred the old Hardy ratchet,

as he called it, the check mechanism,

to the modern ones.

I said, "I know you do, sir," but I didn't tell him why.

Mark: I was driving through Honiton,

and there was a big sign outside an auction room

for fishing tackle,

so as any fisherman would,

I think, turn in through curiosity,

and I went in there,

and I was just astounded by all the antique,

vintage fishing tackle that was in there,

and the majority of it being Hardy's.

The prices for Hardy's fishing tackle was just, you know,

it was just up and up, and now it just ...

I couldn't believe, you know, really,

it was sort of going through the roof.

Man: Five, it's going to be this one here.

Auctioneer: A rare, Hardy

9-inch big game centre-pin reel.

Five thousand.

Five thousand two.

Five thousand, two hundred, and selling away then.

104, five thousand, two hundred.

Ivor: I've got rods and reels

and they're still perfectly serviceable,

and they will be for another 50 years.

You don't get that in many other manufacturing industries

that'll give you a product that'll last 100 years,

and still be just as good, virtually, for catching fish

as the day it was produced.

Edward: If you were from

and you had any inkling that fishing was remotely interesting,

or indeed country clothing, or whatever, you know,

when one sort of "did London", Hardy's was very often

somewhere that people made a pilgrimage to, effectively.

In the same way that they'd go and see Nelson's Column

or, you know, the National Portrait Gallery,

or go and have tea at the Ritz.

Everybody worldwide looked upon 61 Pall Mall as Hardy,

not the factory at Alnwick, it was Pall Mall.

Jon: That Pall Mall shop was

It was where you went to see

the best fishing tackle there was.

And you'd see what was going on.

You'd see it, you'd feel it, you'd pick it up,

and think, "Oh, this is going to be nice."

It was a great place just to visit.

Very old-fashioned, very of its time,

and they still prided themselves

on the quality of everything that went on there.

Jim: Nearly all the customers

I mean, there's about 8 assistants in Pall Mall,

and people had a particular one they would go and talk to,

and they'd rather wait in a queue

and see Charlie Smith or somebody

rather than take any other assistant.

It was personal, buying fishing tackle.

Very personal.

Assistant: And the address

Customer: 230 East 48th Street.

Jim: They used to get an

talking to someone from New Zealand

about the Tongariro River or something in it,

make a note that on the Tongariro River,

a certain fly was very good now,

and when they had a customer going out to New Zealand,

they could tell them, "Well, the 'Wizi-Wizi' fly,

"or something was doing very well just now."

"Oh, I better have some of those."

Even at Alnwick, they kept a tremendous log

of all the fishing hotels in the United Kingdom,

and all the rivers in that area,

and what fly, and what rod, and what tackle

they should have,

so anybody ringing up

and say they were going up to Loch Maree.

"I'm going to fish for sea trout on the Loch,

what should I have?"

They could recommend exactly what they should have.

It was all done properly.

We're now in Paikes Street, or Paikes Lane,

as it is sometimes called,

where the two brothers, William and John James,

had their first shop.

They were both very keen fishermen.

That's why after a year or two in the gun

and in the engineering sort of business,

they started going in for fishing tackle,

and I think it was about 1873 or something.

A notice appeared in the local newspaper

to say that Hardy's had now

a very good stock of fishing tackle

for customers to come and have a look at.

There were lovely game-fishing streams,

the Coquet, the Aln, the Tweed not far away,

and they used to fish for salmon and trout in those waters.

When they were fishing, they could think,

"Oh, maybe we should do it this way, or something,"

and they could go and try it out.

It was a great development time.

I mean, fly reels, for instance,

were thought of as just something to hold the line,

and they weren't at all sophisticated.

They were just a winch, and they used to be called a winch.

It was Foster Hardy, who was the third brother in age,

who also served a marine engineering apprenticeship

on Tyneside.

He came into the firm,

and started developing a fly reel

because he thought they could be greatly improved,

and after a lot of experimental engineering,

he produced the "Perfect" reel,

and it was called the "Perfect" because it,

it was perfect.

It was the first fly reel which had ball bearings.

It was this mechanism which Prince Charles liked very much,

and it is a beautiful, simple,

but very strong mechanism.

That's the ball race there, with the balls

captured in the circle of bronze,

and that was the pattern which Foster Hardy developed.

That made the Perfect reels what they turned out to be,

most popular.

There's a little adjustment on the side, here,

you could put a strong check or a less strong check,

if you required.

But that's a lovely bit of work there.

It was launched in about 1892 at an exhibition then,

and it was acclaimed a tremendous breakthrough in reels.

It was still in the catalogue up to about four or five years ago.

Auctioneer: They brought engineering

into fishing tackle manufacture.

Chris: These are made exactly the same way

as the old reels were made.

I've gone back, like 50, no, 70 years,

because there's the modern technology about,

but I'm using the modern methods of machining

of the quality and the accuracy,

but it's still done in the old way.