The Nevison Minnow from Allcocks

Hello, today I am displaying a vintage british fishing lure called the Nevison Minnow. As you will see from the detail of the blog this is not a lure that I know a lot about!

The Nevison was distributed,if not manufactured, by Allcocks. Not sure how old this is,or when they were around. Looking at the lure and the packaging I get the impression of the 1940s or 50s? I couldnt find the lure in my 1930s Allcocks catalogue but I dont think their catalogues included every item on sale at the time of publication.

If you put Nevison into Google you get quite a few science related hits, indicating that there was some kind of biologist maybe,called Nevison, and he/she seemed to have some interest in fish.So maybe the name came from this association?

Also, maybe the title Nevison was a generic name for a group of lures and not just the Nevison minnow? The reason that I say this is that currently on eBay.co.uk there is an item for sale which includes two Nevison Minnows, and two other lures called Nevison Golden Sprats. So at least one other kind of Nevison lure exists. Whilst we are on eBay just a quick comment on the typical value of Nevisons. Without a box they usually sell for a few pounds,maybe £5 if you are lucky. With the box you can expect a bit more, and on a good day maybe get up to £10. The lot mentioned above looks quite interesting and might be worth a bid,(£15?),if you want to get some Nevisons into your collection.

Back to the lure itself. I dont know much about these as you will now see.

Basically it seems to be some kind of real, dead fish, encased in some kind of clear resin. Obviously being a real fish it looks pretty natural and realistic. To be honest the minnow doesnt look very minnow like to me,so I dont know exactly what kind of fish has been used.

There seem to be a selection of colour patterns available. For instance the minnow pictured above is the trout pattern. Again it doesnt look like a baby trout to me, but I can see that the speckled pattern is trout like.

The above minnow is classified as medium size,i think it measured 2 inches. However I have seen references that indicate that they range in size from 2 inches up to 4 inches. So this might suggest that the medium size is actually the smallest size.

As you can see the hook rig is wired around the outside of the bait, and usually comprises of a couple of treble hooks,one at the tail and one half way up the body.

And that is pretty much all I know about the Nevison Minnow itself,hence any further information will be gratefully accepted.

The packaging can very a bit so is worth a late mention. Mostly you encounter the white card box as featured above,with the Allcocks label pasted onto the top. However, occasionally you can get an individual minnow attached to a card and wrapped in cellophane. Might be worth searching for one of each for your collection?

Another lure from Allcocks coming up shortly, The Allcocks Norwich Spoon.

Thanks for reading,bye for now.