Carry on Smoking

Gerry Dimmock, a pipe smoking veteran of the Battle of Arnhem, lends a helping hand to pull a net across the River Dee in Kirkcudbrightshire, to catch salmon. His accomplice, fishmonger James McDavid, then fillets the catch and hangs them up, along with some trout, to be smoked. It’s the mid-1970s, and Bingley amateur filmmaker Eric Hall is on holiday, and on hand, to film the entire process from start to finish, with his usual care for detail.

Eric Hall – one time Chairman of the NE Region of the IAC and President of the Bradford Cine Circle – specialised in documentary type films. On this occasion he captures a fishing practice which may now be obsolete: using nets to catch salmon (doachs, ladle, shoulder or draught nets?). In any case, with fewer salmon returning, and more salmon farms, it may have run its course. It isn’t known what happened to the business of James McDavid, but it is known that Gerry Dimmock died in 2015, aged 94. Part of the Parachute Regiment's 10th Battalion that parachuted in near Arnhem, under heavy German ground fire, he was one of only 30 men from the Battalion to escape, although injured, by swimming across the River Rhine.