ENEMY OF THE POACHERS
cROUCHED inside a lone bush on a bank of the River Tweed, Eric Hastings was well aware how suspicious he must have looked to the owner of the black Labrador which was sniffing around him.
And yet his quarry was too well within earshot to allow him to give the dog owner an explanation. So he put his finger to his lips, mouthed ‘shhh’ and gave her a pleading look.
In truth there was nothing remotely unusual about hiding in the undergrowth in Mr Hastings’s line of work. The only thing out of the ordinary was it was daylight. Most of his skulking in bushes was done in the dead of night.
‘You could say the job was 98 per cent boredom and 2 per cent adrenaline rush,’ says the man who spent decades fighting criminals that many of us – even he, occasionally – sneakily admire.
Another way of describing the role to which Mr Hastings dedicated his working life is defender of the Tweed salmon. Thanks to his career-long battle of wits with poachers, untold thousands of the river’s iconic species have been spared a dismal demise in the cruel, unsporting gill nets which drown them. Now 69, Mr Hastings has finally retired from what he likes to call the best office in the world – the 97-mile stretch of the Tweed from its source in Peeblesshire to the estuary at Berwick. And, having spent the best part of half a century chasing those much romanticised ‘lovable rogues’ of the criminal world, he is perhaps among the best placed to set the record straight.
Those supposedly endearing qualities can be overstated, he says.
‘A lot of them used to say the same old thing – “we’re only taking one for the pot”. No, you’re not,’ says Mr Hastings bluntly.
‘If you’re taking one for the pot you’re going to feed your family with it. When you’re using a net and getting 30 or 40 at a time and you’re taking one to eat and selling the rest, that’s not one for the pot, that’s making a living from it.’
As for the two men with rods, salmon fishing on a Sunday afternoon while the water bailiff hid in the bush taking evidence, it was the brazenness of their crime which offended most. Nobody fishes for salmon on the Tweed on a Sunday – and certainly not on a Sunday in December when it is closed season.
Mr Hastings recalls with some satisfaction: ‘I jumped out of the bush as one lad came past with the salmon in one hand and his rod in the other and took the rod out of his hand and said, “guess what – you’re nicked!”’
Behind him, his accomplice still had his rod and line in the water. But, seeing his partner apprehended, he threw the rod in the water and scurried up the riverbank.
aS it is with fishing, so it is with going after poachers. There are always the ones that get away. ‘The older generation tended to be better at poaching,’ says Mr Hastings at his home in Drygrange only a few hundred yards from the river he patrolled.
‘I knew one person – I won’t mention his name – who always worked with somebody and if he had a new person with him and they were at the riverside at night and his partner stood on a molehill or something he went ballistic. He prided himself in never leaving a mark or any sign he had been there. It was like a forensic operation to him.
‘Other ones will go in and leave piles of rubbish. We had one guy who was addicted to McDonald’s food. Wherever he went on the river he left the packaging so we knew who it was.’
Some were so brazen they even left the nets which may have caught as many as 200 salmon in a single night. For the poacher with a regular buyer, that amounted to £2,500 worth for one night’s work.
But for Mr Hastings, the salmon which made the Tweed the world famous river it is had been through too much to be plundered wholesale by poachers.
‘One of the things I always used to think about with salmon is they hatch at the top end of the river and they spent two to three years getting bigger and then, when they are ready they head to sea and swim all the way up the North Sea and out into the Atlantic to feeding grounds off Greenland.
‘They spend a year or two there then come all the way back into the river they came from to spawn, only to get caught in a poacher’s net. I mean, how soul-destroying is that?
‘It’s an iconic species and, while the commercial netsmen, which is to say the legal ones, used to make livings out of it, the poachers as far as I was concerned, were tearing the a*** out of it.’
If Mr Hastings sounds disapproving of the many hundreds of poachers he has tangled with in the past half-century, it is not his only opinion of them. Like the sleuth who depends on the cunning of criminals to keep wits keen, so the dedicated water bailiff needs his share of slippery customers to keep things interesting.
‘It was a game,’ he says at one stage. One year, he even sent a poacher a Christmas card.
For Mr Hastings, the game was in his blood. His father Sandy first took up bailiff duties on the Tweed in the late 1930s and by the 1960s was taking his teenage son with him on night-time trawls for poachers.
On one such outing, father and son spied two men pulling in a net replete with salmon in the semi-darkness. While his father went to fetch back-up before confronting the poachers, the 14-year-old kept watch and followed the men at a discreet distance along a path as they left the river with their illegal catch.
Up ahead, the men spotted the bailiffs’ van coming in their direction and hid their bag of fish under a hedge to avoid being caught red-
handed. But the teenager saw them do it and told Berwick Magistrates Court so several weeks later, securing the conviction.
The thrill of getting one over on the poachers never left the youngster.
After working for a few years as a joiner Mr Hastings found his true calling when a vacancy appeared on the river, working alongside his father and eight other bailiffs to protect the river’s emblematic species from the hundreds of crafty opportunists in their midst.
To a large extent, the team employed by the River Tweed Commission were the police force of the waterway and its tributaries. They carried handcuffs (though Mr Hastings never had occasion to use his) and were even offered police-style batons. ‘I never carried it. Is that not antagonising people straight away?’ says the newly retired veteran.
Furthermore, the water bailiffs had powers of arrest, of stop and search, and could bring prosecutions without any police involvement at all. Only when there was violence, which was almost never, or when the poachers refused to give their name and address – rare too – were officers of the law called in.
All of which meant that, for the most part, the cat and mouse game played out between poachers and bailiffs over years on the Tweed involved the same cast of characters.
IF Mr Hastings did not grow to become friends, exactly, with some of his quarry, he could certainly pass the time of day with them. ‘Some of them were pretty nice guys. If you were in a café in Berwick and they were there you would sit down and have a blether with them. They used to give you little tips like, “ha ha, we got away with this or that”, and I’d be saying “hmm, I’ll remember that next time”. That’s what you did. It was a game.’
He adds, only slightly grudgingly: ‘You had to admire what they were doing. It takes a lot to go out night after night after night, sneaking about in the darkness. We were doing the same thing but at least we were having nights off.’
That was the theory anyway. There were times when 14 nights straight could be spent in the undergrowth of the riverbanks or dead still in the pitch black on the water itself, waiting for something to happen – perhaps the sound of oars dipping in the water or figures silhouetted in the moonlight hauling something aboard a dinghy.
‘That was the adrenaline rush,’ says Mr Hastings. ‘That was your 2 per cent.’
In common with many areas of crime, a technology arms race began in the poaching game, with each side deploying ever more sophisticated equipment to foil the other.
By the 1980s the first image intensifiers were used by River Tweed water bailiffs, instantly giving them the upper hand as they scanned the waters for movement. Even as the equipment was demonstrated to Mr Hastings and his colleagues they saw figures in a dinghy on the water in the middle of the night and cut the exercise short to apprehend them.
In the meantime the poachers invested in radio scanners which allowed them to listen in to the bailiffs’ communications.
Not only were they able to establish which of their pursuers were working on any given night but, more importantly, where on the river they were operating.
‘They were actually listening to our conversations,’ says Mr Hastings. ‘We had to pay thousands of pounds to get the whole radio network encrypted.’
But the biggest technological leap – the one that made poacher hunting almost as unfair a contest as poaching itself – was the introduction of the thermal imager. Suddenly there was nowhere to hide.
‘What a difference it makes. The one we had, you could be a mile away and point it in one direction for a few seconds and know there was no one there. You could see all the birds sitting in the trees in the darkness, see rabbits, a fox, a badger. It made a huge difference to what we were doing.’
Judging by the dramatic decrease in poaching on the Tweed it made a huge difference to what they were doing too.
But that is only part of the explanation for the crime falling out of fashion. Another factor is the plummeting price of salmon which triggered the decline of the bona fide netting stations on the Tweed – and yet another explanation, Mr Hastings reckons, is poaching is now too much like hard work.
hE says: ‘The young ones coming along now don’t want to be out all night, soaking wet and covered in smelly fish when they could sit at home with their PlayStation. I really think that’s the main thing that led to the decline.’
What now, then, for the nemesis of generations of Tweed poachers? A spot of fly-fishing, perhaps, on his beloved river?
‘Not a bit of it,’ he says. ‘I can’t understand how these people can stand up to their waists in water all day, chucking a line in. I’d rather sit on the bank and watch the world go by than fish.’
Besides, he says, where the human poachers have receded, the winged variety are now dominant. Cormorants and goosanders have moved in; they plunder the river of its salmon stocks ever more voraciously and no bailiff nor legal gunshot can stop them.
This doughty defender of the Tweed salmon has retired. But he says a new enemy has risen and a fresh defence strategy is sorely needed.
One-for-the-pot poachers. Criminals making thousands from illegal nets. And – heaven forbid – fly-fishing on a Sunday. How a father and son made protecting Tweed salmon a life’s work