I am sorry to report that Peter Harvey, the club president, passed away on Thursday June 18 th . The following appreciation of Peter has been written by David Reinger.

PETER HARVEY - AN APPRECIATION

The recent death of our President has seen the Club lose a highly regarded older statesman and its longest serving committee member. By profession a Doctor of Dentistry he joined the club in the fifties and was one of an entirely Oxfordshire based membership. Peter had already, for a number of years, served as the Club's record officer when I joined the Committee in 1967. He is recorded lamenting an incomplete picture due to some members failing to send in their returns. As a Windrush orientated club we had unknowingly entered the last golden decade of fishing on this river when Peter took up the cudgels as Chairman in 1972. He had already assisted the previous Chairman in negotiating a further lease at Widford and supported the acquisition of the Stanton Harcourt fishery two years earlier. Anxious to minimise the cost of stocking the Club agreed to the construction of a stock-pond and Peter presided over the first netting, where he was photographed holding a specimen trout.

In his early years as Chairman the Windrush faced many challenges including abstraction, dredging and what became known as the issue of summer cloudiness (turbidity). Always at the forefront of these issues Peter wrote to the then Minister of State for the Environment (his local MP) and encouraged other committee members to do the same. This led to the rapid involvement of the Chairman of the Thames Water Authority and many years of exhaustive study, which sadly was to prove largely inconclusive. Although the condition of the water improved somewhat we were driven to seek water elsewhere and Peter supported taking on our first stretch of the Leach and accompanied me to meet the riparian owner to secure the deal. Acquisition of our next fishery on the Coln proved more controversial and Peter instigated a postal ballot to ensure the increased cost was approved by the membership. Democracy ruled, the result was a resounding 124 to 15 in favour of taking the water. As one member rather eloquently put it “he would rather see the Club's money in a bank he could walk along “. This led to a wider portfolio of water eventually being obtained and with a limited expansion of membership the Club enjoyed, at one stage, a seven-year waiting list. In 1987 Peter's longstanding chairmanship was brought to a temporary halt by a serious heart operation but during his recovery period he continued to take a keen interest and I often drove him to the meetings, where his contribution was always considerable, particularly his concerns about diminishing fly life on which he wrote frequently to the authorities.

In 1989 he relinquished the chair and was elected President in the same year. Peter attended meetings regularly and always had a firm point of view on most aspects of the Club's affairs. We fished together on only two occasions; once when he demonstrated how to catch a salmon on the famous Carrots beat of the Wye, the second when I took him to the Kennet, a river he had fished in his younger days at Marlborough .

With Peter's passing the Club has lost a most valuable servant with an unbroken record of involvement lasting fifty years. He will be greatly missed by his colleagues.