Jamie Maxtone Graham

Died 22 November, 2001, near Peebles, aged 77

JAMIE Maxtone Graham was a rumbustious, good-natured man who loved the outdoors and became an acknowledged authority on antique fishing tackle.

In a career that varied from service in The Scots Guards to running a restaurant (which claimed to be the smallest in Britain), Maxtone Graham remained a devoted man of the Borders. He lived for many years in the area and with his distinguished white beard, weather-beaten face and exuberant personality was a well-known figure on the Tweed and at many of the local shoots.

James Anstruther Maxtone Graham’s father was a Lloyds broker who had inherited the Cultoquhey estate in Perthshire. His mother was the author Jan Struther who had written the popular novel Mrs Miniver, about a very English housewife who survived the Second World War. Vin, the eldest son, in the book is clearly based on the young Jamie.

Maxtone Graham firstly attended Eton, which did not suit his nature at all. So his parents sent him to Gordonstoun, where he was only slightly less unhappy. But Gordonstoun appealed to Maxtone Graham as it encouraged him in his love of the outdoors and his growing passion for fishing.

In 1940 he joined his father in The Scots Guards. To his great disappointment he was injured while training in the south. However, he was posted to Trieste in 1944 and served on the general staff.

On being demobbed, he joined his father at Cultoquhey and assumed responsibility for the management of the farm. This he did for more than a decade and gradually modernised it and improved the annual yield. However, to his considerable dismay, and without consultation, his father sold the estate in 1956. This even entailed Maxtone Graham having to buy his own house from his father. Certainly, what he had believed to be his inheritance was gone in a trice.

With his first marriage falling apart, Maxtone Graham decided in the early Sixties to move to England, and he spent some years living in Berkshire writing articles for American magazines. However, he missed the fishing and the shooting and in 1976 moved to Peebles, where he took on a host of jobs.

In truth, Maxtone Graham responded to a life of many disciplines. On the one hand, he built up a thriving business dealing in secondhand fishing tackle, rods, reels and flies. He wrote extensively about field sports and his book based on old Hardy’s catalogues is much prized among anglers.

But Maxtone Graham also had his finger in many Border pies. He knew the Tweed arguably better than anyone and certainly fished it often and with a joyous enthusiasm. He supervised visiting parties to the river, he managed holiday cottages and with much good humour taught school parties how to cast salmon flies in all weathers.

By then, the early Eighties, Maxtone Graham was living in a small house on the High Street of Peebles. After attending a local cookery course he decided to open a restaurant in his dining room called The Thirty Nine Steps. Locals recall that the menu comprised principally of either game or salmon. But it was all done with a definite flourish and, one diner comments, "served with lashings of Jamie’s very personal finesse".

The restaurant only sat eight (thus the claim to being the smallest in Britain) and was unlicensed. This obviously necessitated diners bringing their own wine. On his own admission, Maxtone Graham liked "quantity in wine rather than quality" and this meant that he invariably sat down with his guests and heartily joined in. "Nightly," one Peebles resident says, "he was the life and soul of the party."

But he had a keen nose for a bargain. He could spot valuable vintage fishing tackle and realise its financial potential. His expertise in assessing old Hardy reels that had been stored away in lofts for years was unmatched. He even discovered in a sale in the far north a gaff with an inscription "To my dear and faithful servant" which proved to be a present from Queen Victoria to John Brown.

Maxtone Graham was a character. Untidy in the extreme and devoted to his tots at noon and 6pm (a buzzer on his wristwatch sounded on the stroke of the hour to ensure not a minute was wasted), he lived in the last few years of his life just outside Peebles at Lyne.

He was twice married: both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter and two sons, one of whom now manages the fishing-tackle business.