![]() “Just three guys sitting on a bench taking the mick out of each other and chatting the world away.” “Early morning or at sunset, when the light’s beautiful,” says Jamie. These days you’re more likely to find father and son fishing at their favourite spot on lake No 4 with Lakedown’s veteran instructor Ted Conklin. Roger Daltrey with the shepherd’s crook he bought in the Lake District in 1974 © Max Miechowski The lakes at Lakedown Trout Fishery © Max Miechowski He’s never seen what I do with my spare time.” Pete has been to the house, but he’s never seen the farm. But despite the abundance of rock-star anglers, the Daltreys have kept the fishery at arm’s length from the music biz: “Eric Clapton’s been down,” says Roger, “but that’s about it. There was the occasional famous house guest: “I remember loving Linda McCartney because she was the only one who’d play Monopoly with me,” says Jamie. “Having all this nature and freedom, the animals and tractors and diggers when I was growing up – it was really pretty amazing.” “Some of my earliest memories are of him carrying me around these lakes on his shoulders,” he recalls as we slide our way through the sticky mud between rainstorms. “Dad was around a lot more than people might think when I was growing up,” says Jamie. Our aim isn’t to be a trendy craft brewery, it’s to make beers we want to drink “I’m as proud of this as anything I’ve ever done.” “Just look, isn’t it beautiful?” he says, gesturing towards the lily pad-covered lake. ![]() I pull up a metal chair and someone brings me tea as well. “Come and sit down!” he says, beckoning me over with a smile that’s immensely charming, but also clearly not to be messed with. On the table in front of him is a mug of tea with a Union Jack on it. He wears a tweed baker boy cap and holds a battered shepherd’s crook (“I bought it in the Lake District in 1974 when we were filming Tommy”). ![]() Over at a table by the window Roger watches the rain lashing down outside. Today it’s full of people in wellies and overalls bustling around moving kegs, making tea and fielding calls about cattle and beer deliveries. Inside, it’s also comfortingly spit-and-sawdust: furnished with just a few wooden tables, a wood burner, a chalkboard with the beers on tap and a couple of glass cases displaying some vast prize trout. With its clapboard walls, corrugated-iron roof, and stacks of chopped logs outside, it looks more like a hunting cabin than a Farrow & Ball country pub. The Daltreys may be rock royalty, but the Taproom is resolutely un-fancy. Lakedown’s English Pale, Best Bitter and IPA © Max Miechowski Recently renovated (in large part by Roger himself), the lodge has now been designated the Taproom for their latest venture, The Lakedown Brewing Co, the micro-brewery that Roger, Jamie and Jamie’s brothers-in-law, Christopher Rule and Des Murphy, launched quietly this year. ![]() I meet them at a secluded fishing lodge overlooking one of the four spring-fed trout lakes that meander through the bottom of the valley. And it’s also where Roger built a 25‑acre trout fishery called Lakedown, which has been open to the public since 1981. Roger and his wife Heather Taylor bought it, and subsequently the surrounding farm, in the 1970s as an escape from London life. The Daltrey HQ is Holmshurst Manor – a Jacobean pile overlooking the rolling fields and forests of Wealden in East Sussex. This is a family – or maybe a better word would be clan – that is clearly very tight. From the moment I arrive at their 600-acre family farm in East Sussex to the moment I leave several mud-splattered hours later, the banter between Roger, Jamie and a whole cast of relations, in-laws and colleagues is almost constant. And there seems to be a lot of laughter in the Daltrey household. Framed by pretty lashes that lend them an almost permanent twinkle, they crinkle up merrily each time they laugh. Both The Who frontman Roger Daltrey and his 40-year-old son Jamie have eyes that are astonishingly blue. ![]()
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