Hugh Falkus was a British writer, filmmaker, presenter, World War II pilot, and angler. In a highly varied career, he is perhaps best known for his seminal books on angling, notably salmon and sea trout fishing; however, he was also a noted filmmaker and broadcaster for the BBC.
According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Hugh caught his first fish when he was four, learned to shoot when he was six, and was an expert helmsman by age fifteen. By eighteen, he had learned to fly; at twenty, he became a pilot in the RAF.
In June 1940, Falkus’ Spitfire was shot down over France, and he spent the rest of the war in German prison camps, including Stalag Luft III, the Great Escape camp. Rumor has it his German captors were only too glad to be rid of him as he was somewhat less than a model prisoner and drove them crazy.
Hugh did have a bit of a dark side. He was married four times and, according to his biographer, Chris Newton, a sexual predator, gaining the nickname “Huge Phallus” at the BBC.
LINK (via Wikipedia)
He washed up (with a lady named Romille, at her house) in my north Pembrokeshire coastal village in the mid 1980s. We exchanged “Hello”s over a small stream edge of village bridge now and again, only meeting at one of my local Angling Association’s monthly winter get-togethers in a fine pub in a fine ancient village a few miles away some months later. For my sins / ability to chatter away affably and express an opinion without offending everyone for 40 miles around (Welsh bush telegraph – if I caught a salmon or two or had a catch of sea-trout on a piece of river 30 miles away my friend the local postmaster and Angling Association Committee member knew that I had and asked me for full details the following day) – I had been dragooned onto the Association’s committee. In due course, Hugh gave a talk to club members one off-season winter evening, screening the film feartured above, answering a few questions afterwards, then, whilst being bought a number of large brandies in the bar later whilst signing members the copies of his books that Association’s member had brought along for him to sign. I had all of those books too, but had somehow forgotten to dig them out and bring them along
Then Hugh suddenly disappeared, driven out of the village with his possessions early one morning by a local plumber ot electrician (I think he was) with a van. Went back to Cumbria (the English Lake District), local bush telegraph word said.
Romille sold the house shortly afterwards.