George Mortimer Kelson (8 December 1835 – 29 March 1920) was an English amateur , sport angler, and self-promotional author who played for Kent County Cricket Club in the 19th century.
Biography
Kelson was born in
Sevenoaks in 1835 to George and Charlotte Louisa Rich (1811-1848).
[ George Kelson, CricInfo. Retrieved 2018-02-27.] His father was a doctor and Kelson's early life was "comfortable".
[ Land and Water, Kent Cricket Heritage Trust, 2018-07-02. Retrieved 2018-12-13.]
Cricket
made his first-class cricket debut for Kent in July 1859 in a county match against Sussex, going on to become a key member of the Kent team of the 1860s.
[Death Of Mr. G. M. Kelson, The Times, 1920-04-03, p.5.][ Kelson, Mr George Mortimer, Obituaries in 1920, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, 1921. Retrieved 2018-02-27.][ George Kelson, CricketArchive. Retrieved 2018-02-27.] He was described in
The Times and his
Wisden obituary as having been "beyond question the best bat in the Kent eleven" at a time when the best Kentish players would not play regularly for the county team.
When batting he was described as "a fine punishing player with a free attractive style"
and as "a brilliant field and a fairly good change bowler".
He played 69 times for Kent, scoring 1,810 runs and taking 41 wickets for the county team which he captained occasionally. His only century came against Surrey in 1863.
As well as playing for Kent, Kelson also appeared a number of times of the amateur Gentlemen of Kent team as well as playing for the Gentlemen against the Players and for England teams during the 1860s. He played his final first-class match in 1873.
Fly fishing and tying
Away from cricket, Kelson was described as a "great fisherman"
a "a great horseman, shot, (and) pigeon-racer".
[Herd A (2011) Terry Griffiths (ed) - The Essential Kelson: A Fly-tyer’s Compendium, Book Review, Fishing Book Reviews. Retrieved 2017-02-27.] He was the fishing editor of
Land and Water and wrote widely on the subject, authoring a number of books including
The Salmon Fly, considered an important work on
Artificial fly[Jackson A (1980) Salmon Systematics - A review of Two Editions of George Kelson's Monumental Book on Salmon Flies and Salmon Fishing, The American Fly Fisher vol. 7, no. 3 (Summer 1980), pp.24–28.] by some and by some others as developing a pseudoscience around angling with flies.
[Hellekson T (2005) Fish Flies: The Encyclopedia of the Fly Tier's Art, pp.604–605. Gibbs Smith.] He promoted the sales of fishing gear including an angling cabinet and Jock Scott fishing flies. He made use of the feathers of exotic birds such as toucans, grey junglefowl, turacos, Nankeen night heron and golden pheasant and created designs with fanciful names like "Phoebus", "The Black Prince", and the "Black Riach". He produced promotional chromolithograph cards of his decorated fish flies as part of a series of articles for
Land and Water. Robert Bright Marston, the editor of
Fishing Gazette invited Kelson to write in 1883. Kelson moved to write in the competing periodical
Land and Water from 1885. When Kelson published his book in 1896, Marston was one of the few to give a bad review to the book.
Marston noted that meticulous tying of fish flies was not really a necessity.
A new edition of his work,
The Essential Kelson, was published in 2011.
[Joergensen M (2011) The Essential Kelson, Book Review, Global Fly Fisher. Retrieved 2018-02-27.] His book on salmon flies influenced a major theft in 2009 of numerous invaluable bird specimens held in the Natural History Museum at Tring.
Kelson died at Surbiton in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames in 1920 aged 85.
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