Clive Gammon - Telegraph Clive Gammon was born in Swansea on March 29 1929 , the son of an electrician. The BBC broadcaster Peter Jones was his first cousin. Clive's interest in fishing was inspired by his eccentric grandfather Willie Jones, who caught his 100th bass from Swansea Pier using his gold watch chain as a weight, having lost all his other fishing leads. After Swansea Grammar School, Clive went to Swansea University, later completing an MA at Oxford. The subject of his thesis was Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler . Gammon started teaching at Stand Grammar, Manchester, in 1953 but soon moved back to Wales to Pembroke Grammar School. To supplement his teacher's salary, he began writing fishing columns for Angling Times, The Field and Creel magazine. His first book, Better Angling for All, was commissioned by John Arlott for Heinemann in 1963. His friend, the foreign correspondent George Gale, then put in a word for Gammon at the Daily Express, and he wrote a weekly fishing column in the newspaper for most of the 1960s. This brought him to a larger audience and he started covering general sport for The Sunday Times under the pseudonym Nicholas Evans, a combination of his son's Christian name and his first wife's maiden name, but also a nod to Hemingway's hero Nick Evans. His writing caught the eye of Sports Illustrated, which used him for articles on anything outside America. It was at this point that Gammon moved to London and became television critic of The Spectator, taking over from Richard Ingrams . Eventually Sports Illustrated offered him a full-time job, which meant moving to New York. Gammon took over a flat from George Plimpton, the famed sportswriter, opposite Frank Sinatra's apartment on East 72nd Street. The job demanded just 12 articles a year from him, though these often needed a great deal of research and an extraordinary range of travel. Gammon had a brilliant eye for a story. He had written copiously about the sporting phenomenon of Liverpool, and when the Heysel disaster occurred in 1985, he was in demand all over America as a commentator. Later, he was said to had secured the exclusive story from his Irish contacts about where Shergar was buried, but when he blabbed out the story at a dinner party, one of the other guests scooped him. As Sports Illustrated took a more parochial (and cheaper) approach, Gammon found himself enjoying the job less. He moved back to London and soon returned to his roots in south Wales. A knee injury in Malaysia in 2006 severely limited his mobility and he moved into sheltered accommodation in 2010, admitting: "I have to face it that I'm never going to go wading out into the surf or splashing waist-deep in salmon rivers again." He wrote several pioneering books on Welsh and Irish fishing, but his best works are those documenting his travel adventures, I Know a Good Place (1989) and Castaway (2005). Clive Gammon married Divina Evans in 1957. They had a son and a daughter. After that marriage was dissolved, he married, in 1978, Juliette Harrison, with whom he had a daughter, Lottie. Clive Gammon, born March 29 1929, died June 10 2012