TROUT IN THE THAMES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19250, 14 August 1924, Page 8

TROUT IN THE THAMES.

WELCOME NEWS TO ANGLERS. The news that brown trout have been taken in the River Thames off Shadwelb is the most start ling that anglers have read for many a long day (writes T. C. Bridges in the Daily Mail) Startling, because it is proof that London’s river, which for nearly a century was little better than an open sower, is new beginning to return to something of its former cleanliness. Spenser wrote of it as the “silver-streaming Thames,” but about the time that Queen Victoria came to the throne it was beginning to be ruined, from the angler’s point of view, by floods of filth recklessly turned into its channel. Up to about a century ago salmon ran. freely from the sea up the river, but the last record of a Thames salmon is, I believe, the 15-pounder caught in the Lea at Walthamstow in the year 1855. A couple of years later a fine Thames trout of Sib was taken off Oheyne Walk, and about the same date dace still sported as far down as Waterloo Bridge, and great shoals of barbel were to be seen in the shallow water between Chelsea and Battersea Bridges. Trout are extremely sensitive to certain poisons. One part of mineral oil in 100.000 of water will kill a trout within a few minutes. A comparatively small effluent of taw sewage or of waste from a factory will ruin any trout stream. Mine water and china clay are equally fatal. The fact that the Thames water at Shad* •well is pure enough for brown trout speaks volumes for the improvement made during the present century in London’s drainage arrangements and fills the hearts of anglers with nope that within the next few years salmon may once more be able to run up the river to their old spawning grounds. There are other signs that this hope is not so vain as might be supposed, for no longer ago than August last a fish that was almost certainly a sea trout was found alive 'in a pond at Richmond. It was covered with fish lice, proving that it was not long out of salt water Attempts have been made to stock the Upper Thames with American rainbow trout, and also with the land-locked salmon known as the “hjichen.” But the rainbow trout, though at first they seem to flourish, soon disappear, and the huchen, of which 405 were placed in a backwater at Headsor, were never again beard oL