MY REPORT a few weeks ago about the heaviest bag of big grayling I have taken — it included eight fish over 2lb and two over 3lb — caused a stir. The paper can scarcely have been off the presses before readers were reaching for their telephones and letterheads.

All raised interesting points about the grayling, a fish normally not seen much above 1lb, never mind 2lb — and about significant grayling catches. Two contacts in particular stood out. One was a letter from Tim Conroy, a Halifax solicitor, the other a phone call from Dr Tony Hayter, author of F. M. Halford and the Dry Fly Revolution, an absorbing life-and-times of the father of dry fly fishing as it is practised by millions today.

Both men linked big grayling with a Yorkshire angler whose fame flickered briefly more than a century ago and whose long-forgotten book has just been reprinted.

Mr Conroy was dutifully reading The Times on holiday in Barcelona when he encountered my grayling saga. On his return, he sent me copies of several pages from Grayling and How to Catch Them, published in 1895 by Francis Maximilian Walbran, of Leeds. In them, Walbran recorded how, in 1891, he had taken 12 grayling weighing between 1lb 3oz and 2lb 6oz one day and from the same swim two days later, a monster of 3lb 9oz.

Dr Hayter, a professional historian and author of an introduction to the reprint of Walbran’s book, came up with more information. He gave me references for two catches of grayling said to have included three fish over 4lb and added for good measure that on November 6, 2001 he had taken a remarkable bag from a small Wessex stream — six grayling over 2lb, including three over 3lb. Like Mr Conroy, he also drew attention to Walbran and to his lesser, though still significant, grayling catch.

In truth, Walbran’s life and historical context are more interesting than his fishing, not least because he formed a living bridge between the north-country and southern schools of fly-fishing at the time of their most intensive development. Walbran the man has been too long forgotten, as the reprint of his grayling book makes clear.

Walbran was born in 1852, fished as soon as he could hold a rod and began to write as soon as he could grip a pen. By the time he was in his twenties, he was writing regularly for the Fishing Gazette — which went on to become the most famous periodical in angling history — and other journals. When he was 31, he produced a well- received revision of Theakston’s British Angling Flies. In 1888, he opened a large and initially successful fishing tackle shop in Leeds. In 1889, the first book from his own pen, The British Angler, came out.

Walbran’s writings brought him into contact with the most famous southern anglers, including Frederic Halford, William Senior, Major Anthony Carlisle and the enigmatic George Selwyn Marryat, collaborator in the researches for Halford’s greatest books, Floating Flies and how to Dress Them (1886), and the monumentally important Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889).

Walbran entertained several of these big names, including Halford, on his local rivers and in 1891, Halford reciprocated, inviting Walbran to try for the huge grayling of the Test. It was when fishing with Halford on November 5 that year that Walbran took his 12-fish bag and on November 7 that he caught his 3lb 9oz monster.

By now, Walbran was flying high. Within a year he was setting up one of England’s most soundly established clubs, the Tanfield Angling Club, on the River Ure. The club still thrives, has its own hatchery and keeper and miles of glorious fly water, chosen by Walbran himself, upstream and down from Tanfield village, near Ripon. It was the first keeper that Walbran appointed, Tom Sturdy, who designed the famous Sturdy’s Fancy fly.

Walbran’s career as a writer and businessman peaked sometime between the founding of the club in 1892 and his publishing of Grayling and How to Catch Them three years later. Thereafter, for reasons Dr Hayter discusses in his new introduction but cannot quite tease out, Walbran’s fortunes went into a decline. In 1909, he met a sudden death, graphically recounted in the introduction to the Walbran reprint.

On February 13 that year, Walbran gave warning in his column in the Leeds Mercury that the bed of the river around Tanfield was covered in limestone slabs that were “slippery as glass”. They needed, he said, “very careful wading”. Two days later, Walbran went to Tanfield, waded on to those same limestone slabs just downstream from the bridge, lost his footing, was carried away and drowned. A beautifully carved memorial to him, raised by public subscription, stands over his grave in Tanfield cemetery a few yards away.

In death as in life, Walbran has lain in the long shadows of those who refined the art of dry fly fishing on the southern chalk streams — and naturally in the shadow of Halford, above all. It is an irony that even now he is remembered not for Grayling and How to Catch Them, or for his written account of his time on the Test with Halford, or even for the fine fish he caught there. Walbran has been remembered, where he has been remembered at all, because Halford also chose to write about their days together in one of his own books — and it is Halford’s books, as always, that are read.

• Grayling and How to Catch Them, by Francis Maximilian Walbran (limited to 250 copies, leatherbound and boxed, with a new introduction by Dr Hayter), is reprinted by The Flyfisher’s Classic Library, The Old Police Station, Pound Street, Moretonhampstead, Devon TQ13 8PA at £69

• Brian Clarke’s angling column appears on the first Monday of each month