Interesting read this
'I told Mr. Austin that I thought the fly deserved a title, and in his reply he asked what I suggested. I replied that there was “So and So’s Infallible”, So and So’s Irresistible”, and so on – “Why not ‘Tup’s Indispensable’?" He said he did not care to name it and for the moment the matter dropped.
'The essential part of this dubbing is the highly translucent wool from the indispensable part of a Tup, thoroughly washed and cleansed of the natural oil of the animal. This wool would by itself be, like seal’s fur, somewhat intractable and difficult to spin on the tying silk, but an admixture of the pale pinkish and very filmy fur from an English hare’s poll had the effect of rendering it easy to work. There was also in the original pattern an admixture of cream coloured seal’s fur and combings from a lemon yellow spaniel, and the desired dominating colour was obtained by working in a small admixture of red mohair. For the mohair I generally substituted seal’s fur, and I believe Mr. Austin did so himself. When wet the Tup’s wool becomes somehow illuminated throughout by the colour of the seal’s fur or mohair, and the entire effect of the body is extraordinarily filmy and insect-like.
'In an unpublished volume of his favourite dressings Mr. Austin described the pattern in the following terms:
No. 28 - The Red Spinner
'This is a hackled fly tied with yellow silk on a N. 00 Sneck bend hook. It is made with a body sparsely dressed, of a mixture of white ram’s wool and lemon coloured Spaniel’s fur in equal parts, and a little fur from a hare’s poll, and sufficient red mohair to give the mixture a pinkish shade. It is hackled with a yellow spangled lightish blue cock’s hackle and has whisks of the same colour.'
Sometime around 1890 Austin put together a manuscript of dry fly fishing on the Exe and other North Devon streams, which unfortunately was never published. However W.H. Lawrie, in his classic work, “A Reference Book of English Trout Flies”, 1967, does in fact give a list of the flies from that manuscript but failed to give further information of its contents.
Interestingly, the pattern given for the Tups is called, simply, the Red Spinner, for it was to be quite a few years later that the fly became know as the Tup’s Indispensable.
Alex
