In spite of the VAT rise in UK (effective 01 Jan 2010) all suggested retail prices for Fulling Mill products have been held at 2009 (or earlier) levels.
The amazing 'fly shoal' collection pictured above remains current and a POSTER SIZED leaflet including around 200 new fly patterns and several new products will be enclosed alongside the catalogue.
This web site will be fully updated and modernised during the course of the year, and if you have any suggestions or requests, please contact us at the address on the left.
For a copy of the new leaflet and our catalogue, please send £1 (to cover postage & packing) to the address on the left. We are also able to accept email and phone requests using your credit/debit card.
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Lt Col Andrew Unwin
Sadly, Andy Unwin - founder of the modern Kenya fly tying industry - passed away on October 14th 2009. Here Barry Unwin, Andy's middle son and Fulling Mill's Managing Director, tells us a little about his father's extraordinary life.
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Until the early 1970s most serious fly fishers avoided shop bought flies because of poor quality. My father, Andy Unwin, helped change that when he set up a company to tie “flies that we would use”, dragging a lacklustre industry behind him. He was a tyrant, a stickler for quality, and I remember him dropping a whole tray (nearly 300 flies) of beautifully tied Greenwells into bucket of black dye because the wing on one was skewed! |
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The then distraught fly dresser, seen here beside my father when we opened the new factory a few years ago, is now a highly experienced quality controller for Fulling Mill. Known as the 'Mzee' (a respectful Swahili term which literally translated means 'old man’) my father had just completed a tour of the factory and it was the last time he managed to visit us there. |
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An early childhood in Canada and Germany preceded an adolescence on the family farm in Cheshire, cycling or riding his horse 100s of miles in search of streams and rivers to fish. Later, during WW2 as part of the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from the western port of St Nazaire, he narrowly escaped after trying to board SS Lancastria which was sunk in front of him with over 4000 deaths. Subsequently commissioned into the Cheshires and transferred to Northern India where he remained until 1950, it was in Kashmir on the Scinde river that – having lost his last fly – he began tying his own. The fish were long forgotten, but the tyer was hooked for life. He is shown here with an excellent rainbow caught on one of his flies in 1946. By 1952, married and with three sons, he was seconded to East Africa during the Mau Mau uprising, and later as commander of the Military Training School in Kenya where he dealt with some of the major players in post-colonial East Africa. |
On his eventual ‘retirement’ from the army in 1970, Andy realised an ambition to turn his fly tying hobby into a career with the formation of Unwin & Sons in Kenya. It flourished, and in the early 1990s he sold out to us at Fulling Mill and set about his final ‘retirement’. He remained actively interested in and hugely proud of our ever improving quality and the standards we set worldwide. Fluent in several languages including French, German, Urdu and Swahili, the old boy spent a happy last decade reading, fishing and giving me a hard time from his retirement home in Nairobi. He died peacefully on 14th October, a month short of his 92nd birthday. A military obituary appeared in The Telegraph on 29th December 2009. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/6901541/Lieutenant-Colonel-Andy-Unwin.html |
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(Andrew Unwin, b. 27 November 1917, d. 14 October 2009, married, in 1946, Marianne McLelland Dick Stewart (d. 1967), and in 1969 Meryl (‘Billie’) Clayton, who survives him. With Marianne he had three sons, Brian (d. 1971), Barry and Tim who survive him.) |
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