Sir Arthur Desmond Herne Plummer, Baron Plummer of St Marylebone, K.T., T.D., D.L.,, is a keen angler. So keen that he is the patron of the London Anglers Association, of 2A Hervey Park Road, a few years down the other side of the road from the vet's practice on the corner with Forest Road.
How often he visits their single storey clubhouse, which is grandly called Izaak Walton House, I don't know. Izaak Walton, himself, for those who do not know, was a well-connected and successful 'ironmonger' during the English Civil War (which could well have made him a manufacturer of the weapons which were then so much in demand).
After the end of the war the last forty years of his life seem to have been spent in organised loafing and other forms of congenial idling, visiting eminent clergymen and others who enjoyed fishing, compiling biographies and collecting things. His most famous work was 'The Compleat Angler', which went on to have its influence on Dickens and Jules Verne, as well as generations of men and boys who like pointing sticks and string around at water. Desmond Plummer was a chartered surveyor who became the Tory leader of the GLC (the only one ever to get a second term) who gave us all the Westway, as well as managing to acquire from the Government the power to run the London Underground and the rest of London Transport in 1969.
So now he fishes and patronizes. The London Angler's Association, by the way, is not a small affair: its membership is large and the extent of its waters impressive, as these things go. Formed from the amalgamation in 1871 of the 'Good Intent Angling Society' and the 'Hoxton Brothers', they have grown to control many waters they both rent and own throughout the south of England: in Kent, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire on rivers, canals and lake venues. They are particularly proud of the waters at a meadow known as 'Portholme Meadow' situated between Huntingdon and Godmanchester. Apart from the vast length of fishable bank and being the largest unfenced piece of meadow in England (over a mile across in either direction), no chemicals are used in farming the meadow which contains grasses, wild flowers and insects, unseen and long since disappeared from the farmers fields around. The public have a right of way over the paths but are not permitted to walk on the grass - unlike at the Westway, where there is only concrete and the car is king.
Plummer's name is to be seen as you dive into the southbound tunnel at Blackwall. I was never a Tory of any kind, but how nice to remember a time when politicians brought something into public life, rather than progressing from university clubs to research posts to safe seats.