A great many of the hooks in the reference were never sold bare. They came whipped to a length of translucent, slightly amber material with a loop at the far end, and were bought by the dozen on cards or in folded wraps. That material was silkworm gut, and for two hundred years it was the connection between hook and line for every angler in Europe and America. The snelled hook is a product of gut, and the gut trade, centred on one Spanish city, is one of the odder chapters in tackle history. This article covers what gut was, how it was made, how hooks were snelled with it, and what to make of the snelled hooks that still turn up.
Before gut: horsehair
For most of angling history the line was horsehair, twisted from the tail of a stallion, and the last link to the hook was one, two or three hairs. Hair is strong for its size, but not very strong, it is not translucent, and it is hard to get in fine, even, long lengths. The Treatyse of 1496 and Walton in 1653 both fish with hair, and both explain how to whip the hair to a hook with silk: lay the hair along the shank, bind it down with waxed silk from the bend toward the end, and finish with a few turns. That is the snell, and the method did not change for four centuries; only the material did.
What gut is
Silkworm gut is not, despite the name, an intestine. The larva of the silk moth Bombyx mori, when it is ready to spin its cocoon, contains two long glands full of the liquid silk it would use. If the larva is killed at that point, usually by soaking in vinegar, the glands can be drawn out and stretched into a single strand, a foot or so long, which dries hard, smooth and almost transparent. Each larva gives two strands. A strand is a tippet; several knotted end to end are a cast, or in American usage a leader.
The Chinese knew this long before anyone else and kept it to themselves. Gut was being used by anglers in northern Italy and Switzerland by the early eighteenth century, was on sale in London by 1722, and by the early nineteenth century had displaced hair for anything but the coarsest fishing.
Murcia
The best gut came from Spain, and specifically from Murcia in the south-east, a silk-growing region where the drawing and processing of gut became a cottage industry and then a substantial one. Every major British and American tackle house had an agent in Murcia by the late nineteenth century, and firms such as Morris, Carswell of Glasgow described themselves as “craftsmen in silkworm gut” with works in the city. Spanish output at its height was reckoned in tens of millions of strands a year. The work of stripping the glands was unpleasant, done by women and girls drawing the strands through their teeth, and the trade’s later chemical processes were an improvement in every sense.
Gut was graded by diameter and quality with a vocabulary of its own, Refina, Regular, Padron, Marana, Imperial, that survives on old tackle-catalogue pages, and finer sizes were produced by “drawing” the strand through diamond-edged holes in a plate, in the same way wire is drawn. Drawn gut was weaker, and anglers argued about it for decades.
Snelling a hook
To snell a hook on gut, the gut is soaked until pliable, laid along the shank of a blind-eye hook with the end toward the bend, and whipped down with waxed silk in close turns from the bend toward the top of the shank. The tapered or spade end of the shank stops the whipping from slipping off; that is what the spade is for. The whipping is then varnished. A loop is knotted or whipped at the far end of the gut for attaching to the cast. For salmon flies, several strands were twisted together first, on a small device called a gut-twister, to make a loop strong enough for the job.
The tackle trade did this on an industrial scale. Redditch and Kendal sold hooks “to gut” as a standard line, whipped in the factory by women and girls at piece rates, and the snelled hook on a card, a dozen at a time, was the ordinary retail form of a hook in Britain and America from about 1830 until the Second World War. The eyed hook, from the 1880s, gave the angler the choice of tying on his own, but the snelled bait hook outlived the snelled fly by half a century.
Living with gut
Dry gut is stiff and brittle and cannot be knotted or cast; it has to be soaked, and anglers carried damping boxes with felt pads for the purpose. Wet, it is supple and strong for its diameter, but nothing like as strong as modern nylon: a good undrawn Spanish strand of 0X gauge broke at about two and a half pounds. It rotted if stored damp, weakened with age, and was damaged by teeth and rocks. Against all that, it was nearly invisible, it held knots beautifully, and it cast well, and there are anglers now who fish it for pleasure.
Nylon
DuPont patented nylon in 1938, and after the war nylon monofilament replaced gut within a few years. It was stronger by a factor of five or six, needed no soaking, could be made to an exact diameter, and did not rot. Ray Bergman was still preferring gut for dry-fly work in 1952, and Roderick Haig-Brown said as late as 1964 that gut cast better and was less visible, but the trade had moved. Spanish gut production collapsed, the Murcia agencies closed, and the snelled hook on a card became a nylon-snelled hook, which is what it still is in the bait-fishing aisle today.
Snelled hooks for the collector
Snelled hooks on gut are common in old tackle boxes and worth a closer look than they usually get. The gut itself dates them: real silkworm gut is faintly amber, slightly irregular in diameter, and has a fine longitudinal grain under a loupe, and it is almost always perished, either brittle or sticky. Nylon snells are uniform and glassy. The whipping is a maker’s signature: the colour of the silk, the number of turns, whether the varnish is clear or coloured, and whether the loop is knotted or whipped all varied by firm, and Redditch card-mounted hooks can sometimes be attributed by the snell alone. The card is the documentation, so keep it; a snelled hook cut from its card is just a hook with a piece of string on it. And do not try to soak an old snell to straighten it. Perished gut will break, and the hook is worth more with the evidence attached.
Source and further reading
Paul Schullery, “Fishing with Guts”, MidCurrent (2011), for the history of the gut trade and the angler’s experience of it. H. P. Wells, Fly-Rods and Fly-Tackle (1885), for the Spanish manufacture. Henry Sullivan Thomas, The Rod in India (1897), for the knotting and twisting plates. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds a documented hank of Spanish gut of 1880.
Image note: The illustrations are public domain reproductions from Wikimedia Commons and are credited in their captions.
