FROM THE NORTH-COUNTRY streams of England came the most lasting landmarks in the development of the fly fishing. The idylls of Walton and the technical prowess of Ronalds and Stewart originated north of London, but it was the streams south of the city, the Test and the Itchen, that would be the settings of the most controversial developments the sport has ever seen — indeed, a controversy that would carry right to our own fishing today.

The birth of this controversy coincided innocently enough with the emergence (ahem!) of the dry fly under the divine leadership of one Frederick Halford and culminated and matured with the development of the artificial nymph under the sponsorship of G.E.M. Skues. Both men added to our literary history with writings on their opposing positions.

Frederick Maurice Halford was the first genuine dry-fly snob. In fact, he gave the character type its definitions. Between Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, published in 1886, and The Dry-Fly Mans Handbook, published in 1913, Halford developed from a progressive theorist with a better idea to a dogmatic pedant who believed anyone who fished differently than he shouldn't be allowed near moving water, let alone fish for trout.

He brought the art of dry-fly fishing to a high art, then drew a line in the dirt.

Of course, whenever any man draws a line in the dirt, another is certain to come along and step across it, whether as an act of defiance or because that line happens to lie across the other man's path. Such a second man was George Edward MacKenzie Skues.

Skues' writing was thoroughly grounded in fly dressing, and his game was the sunken fly, or nymph.

The two schools, Halford and Skues, and the wealth of literature and angling expertise their ideas spawned, provided one of the lasting and constant conflicts even in the ranks of American anglers today. There's scarcely a fisherman who won't side with one or the other at any given time over the superiority of the floating versus the sunken fly. The ongoing philosophical conflict forms an ideological core within the sport.

The same conflict that erupted on the chalkstreams of England carried to the New World. And Americans in their way came to their own reckoning with the two philosophical approaches.

Dry-fly fishing no more sprang from the mind of Halford than upstream casting from the pen of Stewart. Rather, a long and winding history prompted the overriding importance of the floating fly to the exclusion of all other methods. There was a long and developing history of the floating fly that led up to its ascendancy in the sport. Certainly there were plenty of references to floating flies throughout the written past of fly fishing.

George Philip Rigney Pulman is generally credited as the first to write of the dry fly in The Vade Mecum of Fly-Fishing for Trout, published in 1841. By the time the third edition was published in 1851, Pulman had added a paragraph discussing the "line switched a few times through the air to throw off its superabundant moisture."

From about 1840 on, flies were being fished dry all over the place. Over the southern Hampshire chalkstreams, the Itchen and the Test, the Devonshire Axe, Pulman's home water, the Wye in Derbyshire and north to the Tweed in Scotland the dry fly flew. Before long it was the established method on southern chalkstreams, though it came to the Test a bit later than other rivers. By the 1860s, the dry-fly method was well established on the southern streams. From 1880 onward it was the only way to fish.

This purist dogma owes a great deal to Frederick Halford, though the essential elements were already in place. Arnold Gingrich put it succinctly when he stated, "Purism, which it would not be too fanciful to say was fathered by Stewart's upstream technique on the body of Ronalds's entomology."

One of the earliest chroniclers of the dry fly was Francis Francis — the same one who sideswiped the trout of Scotland and rose Stewart's ire — who upon taking the helm as angling editor of The Field in 1857 reported the dry-fly method then beginning to capture the hearts and minds of the chalkstream crowd. But the champion above all champions of the floating fly was Halford.

Frederick Halford's first book, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, appeared in 1886. In it he begins to chronicle the work of George Selwyn Marryat, who was regarded as the finest angler on the southern chalkstreams, and Henry Hall. Hall was an engineer who worked closely with Marryat and developed the process and metallurgy capable of producing the eyed, light-wire hooks appropriate to dressing the revolutionary dry flies that were developing.

The development of the eyed hook was fairly important. No longer was a fly finished once its snelled gut wore out. The eye also afforded the angler with some choice in the size of tippet, making it possible to match different fishing conditions. Connection of tippet to hook was solved by a regular on the Itchen, Major W.G. Turle, whose knot provided a rigid connection to the fly and helped settle it on the water in the desired cocked position.

Halford in concert with Marryat did a lot of work developing the fly that would ease the fishing on the difficult streams of the south where a gentle presentation was so critical. The hard-enamel-finish silk lines had supplanted horsehair by this time, but they too presented problems all their own. Stiffness, chipping, and lack of sensitivity and response were the biggest shortcomings. They did allow the angler latitude in casting direction but were nothing compared to the response and efficiency of oiled silk — especially an oiled silk line with a woven-in taper.

Working together, Halford and Marryat developed the first tapered lines, forerunners of the modern double-tapers, and continued to improve the manufacture and production of silk lines for many years.

Halford's first two books (Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice came out in 1889) are considered his most valuable. The more he wrote, the more he became mean-spirited and intolerant of any but the most precise upstream imitative style of dry-fly fishing. Halford came to view all chalkstreams as distinctly dry-fly water.

"If he is to be criticised it is because like most reformers he overstated his case. He considered that the dry fly had superseded for all time and in all places all other methods of fly fishing, and that those who thought otherwise were either ignorant or incompetent," says Hills in his discussion of the dry fly, in A History of Fly Fishing for Trout.

Before the end of his life, Halford had seen the development of the dry fly become a system, a method of fishing that spread around the world, wherever trout were found, and he'd had a lot to do with that distribution. Even on streams with their own dominant methods, it had become an option in the arsenal of trout fishermen. It had also become a religion in the south-country rivers where it was spawned. Halford was the link through which the dry fly came to America, too, through Theodore Gordon, about which more later.

In spite of Halford's pedantry, he changed fly fishing for the better. The changes wrought by his chronicling the work of Marryat brought some of the biggest changes of all time to fly fishing. And while the dogma of the dry fly was eventually to crack and allow a more diverse approach, a more reasonable, well-rounded angler to emerge, the development of dry-fly technique changed the face of angling forever, and it changed it for the better.

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