We do not know when the first salmon fly was tied, although it is sensible to imagine that as long as fishermen have angled for trout, they must have caught the occasional salmon. The earliest actual reference we have to catching salmon on a fly is in the Treatyse on Fishing with an Angle, published in 1496. A great deal of skill and luck would have been needed to hook and kill a fish in those days, given that the line was fixed to the top of the rod, and that casting distances were limited.

We have to wait another two and a half centuries before we get a clue about how early salmon flies were tied. In 1651, Thomas Barker, a friend of Walton's, wrote cautiously:

"If you will angle for him with a flie (which he will rise at like a trout) the flie must be made of a large hook, which hook must carry six wings, or four at the least; there is judgement in making those flyes."

It is frustrating that he said nothing about the materials used to tie a salmon fly, but his contemporary, Franck, was a salmon fisherman, and he gave us everything short of specific patterns:

"For that end let me advise you, that the ground of your fly be for the most part obscure, of a gloomy, dark and dusky complexion; fashioned with tofts of bears-hair, blackish or brownish discolour'd wool, interwoven sometimes with peacock's feathers, at otherwhiles lap'd about with grey, red, yellow, green, or blewish silk simple colours, or colours sometimes intermingled. For instance, black and yellow represent the wasp or hornet, and a promiscuous brown the flesh fly; and so the rest.

"And among the variety of your fly-adventurers, remember the hackle, or the fly-substitute, form'd without wings, and drest up with the feather of a capon, pheasant, partridg, moccaw, phlimingo, paraketa, or the like and the body differing nothing in shape from the fly, save only in ruffness and indigency of wings. Another necessary observation, is the wing of your fly, which ought to proceed from the teal, heron, malard, or faucon. The pinion and wing thereof ought to lie close, and so snug as to carry the point exactly downward."

Frances text tallies with Walton, who mentioned the salmon fly only once, whetting his readers' appetite with a brief observation that it might be made with the "red feathers of a Parakita, a strange outlandish bird; and he will rise at a fly not unlike a gnat or a small moth, or indeed at most flies that are not big." Flamingo, parakeet and macaw might seem to be rather exotic materials for a seventeenth century angler to tote in his dubbing bag, but trade in feathers had been established since the mid sixteenth century as a result of popular demand for ladies' hat making. Franck would have been able to acquire exotic feathers relatively easily in England. Unlike the majority of his countrymen, he had travelled far abroad, and the title page of two of his books tell us that they were written in America. It is pure speculation, but the verbose Roundhead may have been the first man to fish the fly in the New World.

The last of the early authors who have anything to tell us is Colonel Venables. The vast majority of Venables' text deals with fly fishing for trout, but he left us another valuable hint about early salmon flies:

"I shall only add, that the Salmon flies must be made with wings standing one behind the other, whether two or four, he also delights in the most gaudy and orient colours you can choose; the wings I mean chiefly, if not altogether, with long wings and tails."

If we put our assembled knowledge together, we have a picture of a seventeenth century salmon fly: a dull body, made of bear's hair, perhaps wrapped in coloured silk, and hackled with cock, pheasant, partridge, or the gaudy feathers of macaw, flamingo or parakeet. The fly might have been left as a hackle, or it could have been dressed with one, two, or even three pairs of wings, taken from the teal, heron, mallard or falcon.

The size of the patterns would have ranged from large trout fly size upwards. Within this description there is scope for creating flies as dull as the old Tweed patterns, or as startling as anything Blacker or Kelson might have tied.

Absolutely nothing useful about salmon flies was to be written for another hundred years. Then two quite detailed patterns pop up from nowhere, in Charles Bowlker's edition of the Art of Angling, in 1774.

"The wings are made of a reddish brown feather from the wing of a cock turkey, the body of auburn-coloured mohair warped with yellow sill, and a ginger cock's hackle wrapped under the wings, the hook No. 2 or 3. Or it may be varied thus; the wings of a rich brown feather from a heron's wing, the body drab, or olive-coloured mohair, a bittern's hackle under the wings, and a forked tail. This fly is about two inches in length."

"This is also a salmon fly, and is seen at the same time as the Dragon Fly. The wings are made of a feather from the neck or tail of a peacock; the body of deep green mohair, warped with light green silk, and a jay's feather striped blue and white, wrapped under the wings; the hook No. 2 or 3. It may be thus varied; the wings of a dark shining green feather from a drake's wing, the body of green mohair warped with chocolate silk, and a bittern's hackle under the wings."

These are royal flies, for royal fish, and the dressings are complicated enough that it is hard to believe that they do not represent many decades of experiment; but we can only speculate as to their parentage. Certainly, they are very different to Barker's fly. Then in 1800, a man called Taylor gave us three detailed salmon fly patterns, the first good description of how to tie a salmon fly, and, incidentally, the first reference to the vice. In making use of a vice, Taylor set himself years ahead of his time; even the great George Kelson tied by hand.

1. Hook No. 1; the feather for the wings, the darkish brown speckled part of a bittern's wing stripped off from the stem; the mixture for the body, the reddish brown part of hare's fur, and deep copper-coloured mohair; the tail forked, with two single strips of the same feather as the wings, a bittern's hackle over the body for legs; and the head the same colour as the body.

2. Let the hook be the same size as the former; the wings, the mottled feather of a peacock's wing, intermixed with that of any fine plain dusky red; the mixture for the body, the light brown hair or fur of a bear next to the skin, sable fur, and gold-coloured mohair, gold twist, a large black cock's hackle, and a red one a little larger; and for the head, a bit of deep red mohair.

3. For this fly also the hook must be No. 1; the wings, the feather of a hern, intermixed with the spotted reddish part of that of a mallard; for the body, lead-coloured mohair, small gold twist, a large white hackle dyed a deepish blue; a bit of the same feather as the wings for the tail, the head the same colour as the body; and your silk a lead colour."

After Taylor, the salmon fly never looked back, and every decade or so, new techniques would catapult its development forward. Sixteen years later, Bainbridge gave us another five salmon flies, including another gaudy fly. Bainbridge's book cast an interesting light on the philosophy behind contemporary salmon fly tying when he speculated on the reasons for the success of "gaudy" flies:

"Those made in imitation of the Dragon Flies are the most to be depended upon, as these insects are constantly hovering over the water, consequently are more familiar to the view of the fish. They are however, so capricious, that they will not infrequently rise at an extremely gaudy fly, which bears no resemblance to nature, in preference even to a real wasp or Dragonfly..."

There is no doubt that early salmon fishermen tied flies which represented dragon flies, for the allusion comes up again and again. These flies were anything if dull, which leads us to another question: where does the "gaudy" salmon fly owe its origins? The conventional view is that the origin of the gaudy fly lies in Ireland, but there is little evidence for such a theory. The earliest authenticated Irish flies date to about 1797 and even then, these are trout flies. It has been conjectured that fly fishing was brought to Ireland by English officers manning the garrisons, but this is pure, if reasonable, speculation. It wasn't until the 1830's that any light was cast upon the nature of Irish salmon flies, when Belton wrote:

"The Limerick flies are almost always very gaudy and have silk bodies; whereas those tied in Dublin are usually of mohair or fur, and much more sober in their colours, although infinitely more showy than Scotch salmon flies.

"The fly I found the most successful here, as almost every where else that I have tried it, was one of O'Shaughnessy's, a deep orange, silk body, with broad gold tinsel, rich mixed wings, and macaw horns."

So, by the early nineteenth century, the Irish school was sufficiently well-established that it had developed regional variations. It is possible that the influence of Irish patterns on their Scottish and English counterparts has been understated, but on the other hand, we know from Franck and Walton that gaudy patterns existed in England as far back as the seventeenth century. Neither Franck nor Taylor kept exotic feathers in their bags without a reason, so we can assume that the gaudy fly enjoyed an uninterrupted history in England between 1658 and 1800, although there is no written record of it during that period. Despite the dearth of salmon fly patterns of any description before 1800, a considerable proportion of early flies are extremely colourful. For example, in 1806, Mackintosh gives two flies; the Golden Fly and the Silver Fly, which are unquestionably gaudy. Even though Mackintosh plagiarised liberally from other sources, his two gaudy flies are unique and there is no evidence that they came from Ireland. Another author from the same period, Scotcher, wrote in 1810 that "...there are many gaudy flies made for them", which implies that he saw nothing new about gaudy salmon flies either.

After Bainbridge, salmon fishing became immensely popular, and the demand for different patterns of fly exploded, no doubt encouraged by local tackle shops who had a good deal to gain from the new breed of travelling salmon fisherman. This was the period when the idea of the gaudy fly really took hold of the popular imagination. Ireland was a hot bed of fly development at the time and fly fishermen brought back brilliant new patterns when they returned Ireland - with the result that gaudy flies became strongly associated with the Emerald Isle. My view is that the gaudy salmon flies were standard fare in England from at least the seventeenth century, gaining a powerful boost from an influx of new Irish patterns starting from 1815 onwards. The gaudy fly of the nineteenth century might have been popularised and developed by Blacker and the Limerick tiers, but its origins lie in Walton's day - perhaps even earlier.

If Bainbridge lit the fuse of interest in salmon fly tying, Blacker was the man who caused an explosion of development. Born in Newry, County Down, but established in London, Blacker's book was a tour-de-force, but his instructions are difficult to follow. Various explanations have been put forward to explain the problems that professional tiers experience when recreating the flies, including the awful possibility that Blacker intentionally made the instructions confusing. Recently, John Betts has advanced the sensible theory that part of the explanation may be that the book was "ghost-written", in part or in total. The best candidate for a ghost writer would be Edward Fitzgibbon, who already done the same for at least one other author. If John is right, the tying instructions may well be confusing because of problems Fitzgibbon experienced describing the swift movements of Blacker's long-practised fingers. Whatever the explanation, the sheer variety of materials in some of Blacker's salmon flies presents a challenge even to the experienced fly-tier, and Blacker employed a range of materials that would have stopped Taylor in his tracks. Take Blacker's No. 2 salmon fly:

"The wings are composed of golden pheasant tail feather , mixed with the following: strips of bustard, scarlet macaw, wood duck, mallard, yellow macaw body feather, silver pheasant, and a topping over all, extending a little longer than the other feathers; blue and yellow macaw feelers. The wing, as above, should be laid out on a piece of paper, ready to tie on after the body and legs are formed, the jay rolled over the head in this fly, and the head tied on last, of black ostrich. The tail is a topping, mixed with a strip of woodduck feather, tipped with silver twist, a tag of gold-colour floss, and black ostrich; the body puce floss to the centre, and the remainder orange pig hair or mohair, ribbed with broad silver tinsel, and a guinea-hen rump feather rolled over the orange beneath the jay hackle. The hook No. 6 or 9, Limerick."

The rest of Blacker's dressing are reasonably straight-forward, but the very fact that he tied them "in the hand" meant that the patterns dated badly by some standards. Only four decades later, Kelson was to take the view that they were only historical curiosities. He was right, but what curiosities!

Many fishermen saw the gaudy fly as a worthless interloper, which displaced perfectly good local patterns. The view was particularly prevalent in Scotland, which, until the 1850's, had not experienced the flood of English anglers who established gaudy patterns by force of usage. During the middle years of the nineteenth century the link between patterns and their rivers of origin began to be lost, although were tiers still paying lip-service to the tradition many decades later. Before 1850, an angler like Scrope was content to fish with a mere handful of flies, all with strong local associations. After 1850, as salmon flies became more diverse, it was difficult to justify the link. The new flies had a truly international flavour. Here is Stoddart's No. 1 spring pattern for the Spey, a sombre thing:

White wing: pure white feather taken from swan or white turkey; six or seven slips are sufficient for each wing. Body: dark-blue or black pig's wool in the upper part, succeeded by claret-coloured ditto; hackle dark, edged with brown, in the upper part, crimson hackle further down, silver tinsel. Shoulders: light-blue hackle intermixed with mohair of the same colour. Tail-tufts: light yellow.

It was around this time that fishermen began to abandon flies tied to gut in favour of the loop. Loop attachment of flies reduced the difficulties fishermen faced at a stroke: it made the carrying of flies much easier, it eliminated the problem of flies cracking off their 'own' gut, and it made changing flies much easier. Naturally, it was seen as a great threat to world order and fishermen were to fight a rearguard action against such a perversion of nature's laws for another sixty years.

The two outstanding tiers of the middle years of the nineteenth century are Jones and Traherne. Jones was a tackle dealer with a business in the heart of London's most fashionable area He sold high quality rods and reels to the leisured classes, and chose Tolfrey, a young journalist to write a book which promoted Norway, Jones' customer's most favoured destination. While the book can be taken with a pinch of salt (as far as we know, neither Tolfrey nor Jones ever went to Norway,) Jones's patterns were outstandingly beautiful and took the salmon fly new standards of complexity. Just compare one of Taylor's salmon fly dressings with Jones' Assassin:

"Hook - No. 7, 8, or 9.
Tail - Golden Pheasant, Guinea-hen, and Blue Macaw.
Tip - Gold twist, blue sill, scarlet silk, and Ostrich.
Body - Lower half, dark blue, and upper half, claret Pig's wool.
Ribbed - Gold tinsel.
Legs - Dark claret hackle.
Throat - Jay's Hackle. Wing - (Mixed) Mallard, Teal, Bustard, Black Cockatoo, Guinea-hen, golden Tippet, and golden Topping overall.
Horns - Blue Macaw.
Head - Black."

Traherne was perhaps the greatest fly tier of all time, and directly inspired George Kelson. From the "Emerald Gem," a riot of green and blue macaw, with a delicate filigree of golden pheasant topping as wing, to the "Chatterer" (a pattern which I have always regarded as the definitive gaudy fly, since it requires no less than 200 Blue Chatterer feathers to form its body,) his patterns were masterpieces. More than anything else, Traherne's flies are a celebration of materials and artistry, and it remains a technical challenge for an able fly dresser to be able to tie them well. A modest man, Traherne left it to his friend George Kelson to promote his patterns, and they survive largely through the latter's writings, chiefly in the magazine Land and Water.

By the 1890's, a truly vast selection of patterns was available, and the well-equipped salmon fisherman's fly-box was been a riot of colour. Kelson published nearly 300 patterns and Hale, 361. There was a fly for every conceivable circumstance, and several flies for circumstances which were not conceivable (for example, the Elsie, which Kelson justified as "a special pattern for fish lying behind upright rocks and large boulders.") Kelson was a perfectionist, and devoted more words to the subject of how to tie a tag on a fly than most early authors devoted to the entire pattern. A sea-change had taken place: the flytier's vice was widely available, although Kelson didn't use it, and numerous specialised tools were in use. The range of materials employed at the turn of the century was truly incredible, and tying techniques were far more sophisticated than they had been even thirty years earlier. The new patterns took the technical challenge of fly tying onto a new plane, since the process of cramming so many materials into a limited space mercilessly exposed the slightest technical flaw.

In Kelson's day, the complexity of the salmon fly was at its zenith. Some idea of the hold that the gaudy fly had over salmon fishermen's minds can be had from a quote from George himself:

"Is it not notorious that in several of our rivers the fish have been educated to persistently snub old patterns in favour of the new? And is it indeed not an achievement to present to the fish a fly that he then and there prefers to your rival's - to have yourself made the attraction so strong, as to establish, more or less permanently, a decided taste in the fish, so that he refuses other flies, to wait for yours!"

If the 1890s marked the zenith of the gaudy salmon fly's evolution, they were also marked by the first serious sign of dissent. Sir Herbert Maxwell came to the unromantic conclusion that the colour and materials of a fly mattered very little to the fish, while the size and movement were all important. He had chipped at the foundations of the gaudy fly, but we have to wait another thirty years before its empire finally fell. The death knell for the gaudy salmon fly was sounded, with particular finality, by A.H.E. Wood. In the process of his development of greased line fishing, Wood realised that the old, heavy patterns of fly, so suitable when fished deep, were hindering his technique. Wood's summer patterns were sparse to the point where it was hardly possible to reduce them any more. The 'Blueshanks' and the Redshanks' took the ultimate step; they were bare hooks, with the shank painted the appropriate colour. They were a far cry from anything Blacker would have recognised, but Wood caught fish with them; lots of fish.

The discovery of greased-line fishing for salmon encouraged a great deal of experiment, but most fishermen stayed loyal to traditional patterns of fly, dressing them more lightly as the floating line demanded. With Europe stuck in its ways, a new and radical approach to salmon flies was needed, and it emerged in the United States. Having taken to fly fishing salmon relatively late, American fishermen used derivations of British patterns until the turn of the nineteenth century. Fifty years of experimentation was long enough to reveal that something different was needed. Shortly before 1903, Theodore Gordon tied the first dry flies for salmon; a friend used them on the Restigouche, and caught fish. After this early experiment, it was left to Colonel Ambrose Monell, Edward Hewitt and George LaBranche to drive the development of the dry fly. The patterns which emerged were tied with palmered bodies, but it didn't take long before it was discovered that salmon would take almost any fly fished dry, when the fish were in the mood. Dry fly fishing for salmon, so effective in America and Canada, has never been popular in Europe, but it is interesting to note that the technique works very well in Russia.

The exact origins of the hair-wing salmon fly are obscure, but it seems to have originated in the late nineteenth century in North America. Bucktail flies were first used for bass fishing as early as the 1890s. As far as is known, the originator of hairwing flies was an Idaho rancher called A.S. Trude, who first fished his patterns some time between 1886 and 1890. Colonel Lewis S. Thompson saw the flies and had them adapted for trout fishing, trying them much later for salmon on the Restigouche (in 1928, or even a few years earlier.) The motive behind this radical departure from tradition is not recorded, but it isn't hard to guess. Many of the materials used for tying "standard" fly patterns were becoming hard to find in Europe, never mind America, and the temptation to experiment with local materials which were abundant and cheap must have been hard to resist. Trude was in an ideal position to take the plunge, because bass flies lacked the long and intimidating history that had so fossilised salmon flies. Trude was not alone. Theodore Gordon also experimented with a hairwing pattern in the late nineteenth century. His intention was to tie a better pike fly, but he found, incidentally, that the pattern would catch other game fish, including sahnon. The major development of the hairwing was undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s on the East coast of North America. The fully-dressed wet fly was in widespread use in America at the time, and a group of fly tiers began experimenting with simpler conventional patterns. They worked so well that it wasn't long before they abandoned the use of feathers in the wing and started to tie with local materials such as bear, squirrel, woodchuck and deer. The success of these patterns elbowed out the traditional British salmon flies, and led to a new and innovative school of North American fly tiers.

In a sign of growing American dominance in the field, hair-wing patterns didn't take long to make the transfer across the Atlantic. The hair-wing had become a significant influence on British patterns by the 1960s, with many traditional patterns being adapted to allow hair-wing ties. It seemed a small concession at the time, but with the acceptance of the new materials came a new mood in European fly-tying. As a result, when the consensus on the traditional wet fly broke down, it broke down very quickly. In the 1950's Richard Waddington invented his eponymous hook, which mounted a serious challenge to the heavy single irons that had been used until then. It is said that the tube fly was originated in around 1945 by a fly dresser called Winnie Morawski, who worked for the tackle firm of Charles Playfair and Co. at Aberdeen. To begin with, Winnie used hollowed out sections of turkey quills, with the treble strung inside the quill. To begin with, she used this unusual base to dress traditional patterns. Then a doctor called William Michie called at the shop, and suggested that she used sections of surgical tubing as a substitute for the quill. Later development resulted in the wing being dressed in a collar right around the tube, perhaps inspired by the Waddington, and the treble was left entirely outside the tube, so that the fly could "escape" up the line when a fish took. Suddenly, every aspect of salmon fly design was up for grabs, and a new era of invention was to follow.

Readers of the "Flyer" will be well aware of the new lease of life the fully dressed salmon fly has taken in the collectors market, but it is not to say that the traditional salmon fly is becoming fossilised. Steve Fernandez has taken the 'salmon fly as art' one stage fiuther and many of his flies not only have extreme shapes, but they are no longer tied on hooks. Whether they "count" as salmon flies any more is a matter of debate - but then there were those who said the same of young Mr. Blacker's creations. The future lies in your hands.