Club Committee:
Club Information:
Lake Information:
Club and lake History:
1992 Lake Refurbishment:
Founded in 1951 Sceptre Angling Club is a small, friendly coarse fishing club based at Moor Lane Fishery in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire.
The Club caters for a variety of fishing styles and we have an active match section with a calendar of events throughout the year at both home and away venues.
The Club
Committee Members
decide all the fees and rules as well as organising the maintenance of the fishery.
Club members can access the lake any time except when there are working parties and there is no Night Fishing allowed the night before Matches.
Matches take place on weekends and are typically held at Moor Lane Fishery with several taking place at other venues throughout the year.
The Fixtures List containing dates of matches and their locations is available on this website.
Any fisherman who wants to join the club must either be nominated by a current club member or speak to a committee member.
You will be required to fill in the membership form and pay a joining fee
(adult members only, no joining fee for juniors).
In addition to the membership form potential newcomers will be required to complete the clubs Data Protection Form.
Any member who breaks the club rules will be removed from the club.
Moor Lane Fishery is a pretty little lake with a small island. The fishery is owned and maintained by Sceptre Angling Club.
The Lake is within the Watford Piscators grounds along Tolpits Lane with parking and toilets within a reasonable distance of the lake entrance.
Neighbouring the larger Tolpits lake; Moor Lane lake contains multiple species of carp including Mirror, Common, Ghost and Linear
as well as other species including Bream, Tench, Perch, Pike, Dace and Roach.
The Entrance to the lake is located along Tolpits Lane, Rickmansworth.
When approaching from Watford the entrance to the complex is on the right hand side of the road just before the bridge over the River Colne.
A Brief History of Sceptre Angling Club courtesy of Roy Marshall*
*Roy Edward Marshall 1933 - 2022
was the last surviving founding member of Sceptre Angling Club and was a key shaper in the clubs development!
The club started in 1951 in an informal way with approximately 12 members at a small company in Watford called Petro-Flex Ltd.
Petro-Flex Ltd was taken over by Smiths Industries in the 1950s and moved into a new factory in Bushey in 1957.
In a very short time an angling club was started named Smiths Angling Club (Watford).
Watford was added to the name in order to differentiate the club from other Smiths sites that also had angling clubs.
Matches were held on local canals, rivers and lakes, many of which were then free waters.
In addition the club had joined the London Anglers Association as an affiliate, and thus travelled far and wide to fish their waters.
In 1959 the company decided to start a sports and social club and invited us, the football team and the cricket team to become sections of it, which we all did.
However, in 1961 we were told that we must expel all our members who were not employed by the company.
The people in question were a few family and friends who were club members before we became a section of the Social Club.
We held a meeting and decided to resign from the Social Club.
When told of our decision, the company threatened legal action if we continued to use the Smiths name.
A good friend of the club whose name was Smith agreed to give us written permission to use his name if it came to any legal action.
The name of Smiths was kept until 1961 when it was decided to change it.
The original badge had SAC Watford on it so ideas of new names were proposed at a general meeting keeping to the same letters so as to use the same badge.
Hence - Sceptre Angling Club was selected and the last link with Smiths Industries was finally cut.
Into 1962 and Sceptre Angling Club was now established.
From 1962-1975 the Club carried on as normal. Then in 1976 three things of interest happened.
The first was we ran out of badges so it was decided to design a new one.
Club members were invited to submit a new motif and a vote was held to select the winner that is still our club badge to this day.
The second thing was that the club was in negotiations to take over a good piece of water on Troy Lake near Harefield.
Things were going fine and near to completion when suddenly a letter from our solicitor arrived saying that the vendor was asking more money for a few extras,
400 pound a year for parking was one of them.
Needless to say the Club pulled out of the deal.
The third and most important of all, the Club purchased the Moor Lane property.
I say property because in 1976 it was nothing less than a marshy jungle and eight of the nine committee members did not want to take it on.
We made an enquiry to the owners, the London Passenger Transport Board, as to its availability.
Much to our surprise they offered us a ten year lease.
We decided not to take the offer up because there was ten years work to make anything like a decent fishery out of it and then a new lease would probably have been increased in rent.
We replied turning the offer down but mentioned we would be interested in buying the freehold and again, surprise, surprise, they made us an offer which eventually we took up.
The legal business was quickly done and Moor Lane was ours.
Six years later in 1982 a contractor was hired to improve the lake.
Unfortunately he did not have much idea and lacked the right equipment.
He got a digger so deep into mud that there was talk of him having to abandon it.
It was a total failure.
In 1991 we found a contractor who was capable to doing everything we required to improve the fishery.
We obtained an estimate for the work and then started a frantic year of raising funds, running jumble sales, raffles, draws, Christmas fairs etc.
A price of 7,400 pounds was agreed and work started in 1992 after a prolonged drought when the water level was at the lowest it's ever been.
The contractor brought in a huge drag line and built a causeway to get it onto the island.
He did what was required in the small pool, then worked back to the field side taking up the causeway as he reversed,
then removed a long island strip which ran roughly from swim number two up to just past swim number six.
With the deepening of the lake and removal of the island strip, in the region of 120 tons of earth and trees were removed.
A few days after completion the rain came down and the water level came up nicely.
From the Club's point of view it has been a 100% success story.
More details of the 1992 refurbishment can be
viewed here
There are a number of photos of the work being performed that can be
viewed here
Since 1992 the Club has continued to function quite well.
As the years have gone on the working parties in the close season have maintained and improved the fishery to a good standard and it is a pleasant place to enjoy a days fishing.
Finally, in the last two or three years, the use of machinery has fast-tracked work on the fishery that would have taken a lot longer without it.
Also the occasional restocking programme seems to have gone well.
Moor Lane is a fishery to be proud of.
Enjoy your fishing.