La Canne à Pêche, a partner company of Carpano & Pons

[Paul Rochard]

Dear fishing reel enthusiasts

I would like to introduce you here to the history of La Canne à Pêche, one of the first partner companies of Carpano & Pons in terms of manufacturing and selling reels, as well as the company that had the monopoly on sales of the Mitchell reel in the early days following its invention ; it is also the company that developed the CAP reel. This story is a compilation of written and oral testimonies from the Rochard family supported by documents from La Canne à Pêche, the PDF document is too heavy to deposit, so I have transcribed it below in its version translated into English, if you would like the entire document with the photographs, do not hesitate to contact me.

I am adding two documents received by contacting the Cluses Archives which corroborate part of the statements in this story : a 1993 brochure written from testimonies obtained from former Carpano & Pons executives and workers, including that of Emile Pugeot that Mr. Caminade has already shared ; for my part, I am sending you that of Mr. Mimeur (if necessary I have transcribed and translated it into English), I also indicate that Mr. Mimeur's testimony clashes with other testimonies, but it is still an interesting source.

Part of the documents of La Canne à Pêche have been lost and the testimonies pass over the versions of the CAP reels to only address the most accomplished, the one that inspired the Mitchell reel, which is why I would be very happy to exchange with you, in particular about the sources that would have allowed us to date the first version of the CAP reel in 1937.

Kind regards

Paul Rochard


The text :

A family, a business : « La Canne à Pêche » in Angers

In 1912, in Cholet, Constance Rochard, tired of her job as a tripe seller at home and keeping the accounts of this business, in the name of her husband, Victor Rochard, and of the one selling wood and coal carried out by the latter, wanted a change of situation. She sold the business and bought a shop selling fishing equipment at 38 rue de la Roë in Angers. Victor and Constance Rochard then had three sons: Victor, working with his parents, Emile, studying at the teacher training college in Angers and Léon, still a schoolboy.
In 1918, Emile, who had become a schoolteacher, saw that his parents' retail business lacked organization in accounting and supplier relations and he decided to ask the school inspector for a year's leave to manage the business, which grew quickly thanks to the hard work of Constance Rochard and the help of her husband and her first workers, a success in the end, which allowed him to learn management and business. Eventually, Emile Rochard became indispensable to the family business and he joined his wife to keep the cash register and the accounts, working together. Later, she also accompanied him on his business trips that took him to England, to Shieffield, to order fish hooks, or to Paris to promote the company's products.
In 1920, Constance, seeing that business was going so well, sold the business on rue de la Roë, at the same time, the Rochards decided to become wholesalers, the company was created under the name of "Victor Rochard & ses Fils" and set up at 44 rue Jean Bodin where this family also lived. Thus, the father and a worker prepared the fishing rods in bamboo and reed, Constance and the workers assembled the fishing lines and those at home made keepnets and haveneaux (nets adapted to fishing for flat or fine fish) which they mounted on rattan circles; Emile, for his part, had prepared a team of suppliers so as not to lack anything, later joined by Léon Rochard who added Georges Coëffard to organize a network including five traveling salesmen to promote the products of La Canne à Pêche and sell them; the business was therefore very family-oriented. This is how the Rochard wholesale business became one of the main fishing product sales houses in France.
However, the company almost went up in smoke in 1927, first because of a fire that affected a wood and coal merchant next to the Rochard home, then because of the bankruptcy of the Vasseur bank, if Emile Rochard had not rushed to the bank in Paris to recover half of the capital. Despite this loss, the company was prosperous enough to compensate for it. Also, at the end of the 1920s, the Rochards, looking to expand their clientele, found a merchant in Lyon: Joanny Charou, who was then selling toys and fishing tackle; he proposed to join forces to sell La Canne à Pêche products in the south-east. A solid friendship and great trust was established between them and Joanny Charou proposed to provide capital to create a company that would manufacture fishing tackle entirely. Thus was born "La Canne à Pêche", place Lafayette, in Angers, on January 26, 1931, with a duration set at thirty years. The share capital of 200,000 francs was divided into 200 shares: 100 shares for Joanny Charou, 50 for Emile Rochard and 50 for Léon Rochard.

Having acquired comfort and wealth had not changed anything in the Rochards' way of life: Constance and Emile got up at 5 o'clock and met at 6 o'clock for breakfast, during which mother and son talked only about the company, that is to say the tasks to be done during the day, the week or the month, like an executive council with final decisions. Léon Rochard, in Angers, and Joanny Charou, in Lyon, had admitted, from the start, that they were executors rather than decision-makers. Thus, at 8 o'clock, Emile and Léon Rochard greeted the fifty or so workers of "La Canne à Pêche" individually, allowing them to give them news or make requests, such as time off or advances on their wages. Thanks to the profits, the Rochards bought three houses side by side on Boulevard de Strasbourg where the workers were received on New Year's Day. Also, bosses and workers met in June, during fishing competitions. Despite this family attitude, which some would call paternalistic, the Rochards were ahead of their time because, before 1936, workers already had a week of paid vacation and their salary was higher than the average for workers in France, so they could only claim syndicate when the Popular Front came. It should be added, however, that the Rochard brothers, and especially Léon, personally supervised the work of the workers when they could, the latter had carried out the marbling of bamboo, a process consisting of coating the bamboo in places with clay plates then passing it over a gas ramp so that after washing, the bamboo appeared black and white like marble, by the same process one could stripe the bamboo.
Despite the social unrest of 36/37, the company had progressed prodigiously throughout the 30s. The initial capital of 200,000 francs was very quickly tripled and increased to 1,800,000 francs in 1940. Its sales networks extended throughout France and began to penetrate Belgium, England and Switzerland thanks to the international relations that Emile Rochard had made for his company, the latter was very quickly replaced by Léon Rochard who quickly evolved in his role as sales director, crossing France to find new buyers and partners for La Canne à Pêche. Indeed, in a fishing rod produced by the Angers factory, all the components, except the weights and floats, came from abroad. We know that the bamboo came from Japan, the reeds from Fréjus or Italy. The hooks and swivels were imported from Oslo, Norway, and the horsehair from Murcia, Spain. The foreign firms had their representatives in Paris, where Emile Rochard did business with them in the cafes and restaurants around the Place de la République. However, these imports were stopped in 1940, the factory was running at a slow pace with the few workers who had not been mobilized. Léon Rochard, mobilized, had been taken prisoner during the early days of the war and then returned to Angers. In addition, following tedious negotiations with the Kommandatur, who did not understand the point of selling fishing products in wartime, the Rochards were able to resume their industrial activities, even though the Germans prohibited imports. The Rochards used the stocks to barter food from 1942.

Emile Rochard, no longer able to import hooks from Norway, called on the Cannelle brothers in Grandvillars in 1942, whom he charged with remedying this shortage, which they accomplished. For commercial convenience, the specialized factory was installed in a suburb of Angers, in Ponts-de-Cé, and production, with around ten machines, began at the end of 1942. Very quickly, Emile and Léon Rochard made the Cannelle brothers independent by selling them a majority of shares in the newly opened factory. Emile Rochard then confided to his son that he wanted to leave his partners autonomous, thus concentrating only on the production of fishing tackle entirely designed by the Angers factory. This first initiative towards new structures gave Emile Rochard the impetus to rethink the whole thing. If "La Canne à Pêche" could now manufacture hooks, it was necessary to find a way to make fishing hair on which to mount them. Until then, this consisted of natural horsehair imported from Spain. In Lyon, Joanny Charou was in contact with a chemical company that had obtained, just before the war, an operating patent for a synthetic textile fiber invented by the American company Dupont de Nemours; this fiber was called "no run" and, through successive deformations, "nolon", "nylon". The Rhodiacéta company in Lyon agreed to produce new, finer gauges and the first reels of fishing nylon arrived in Angers in the spring of 1943. Thus, the new lines could be manufactured since all the necessary components: fishing line, hook, float and weights, were now manufactured in France. All that remained was to find a replacement for the bamboo and reed of the canes, as well as to rethink the reel which, later, became a guaranteed source of income.
However, after May 1943, Joanny Charou was arrested by the Gestapo in Lyon, the Germans subsequently announced the dismantling of the "Victoire" network which allowed the transit of allied information and material to Switzerland, he was deported in 1944 and was repatriated in June 1945. However, in February 1944, it was Emile Rochard who was arrested, because the so-called Louis Coëffard, director of the Cordeliers primary school, whose socialist friends and he had organized a group of resistance fighters within the Francs-Tireurs, was imprisoned. He then had a paper with a list of candidates entitled "possible future mayor" after the liberation, the name of Emile Rochard was written on it. Then investigating "La Canne à Pêche", the Gestapo in Angers noticed the recent arrest of Joanny Charou in Lyon and tried to prove that Emile Rochard was engaged in the same activities, without proof, which earned months of incarceration and interrogations for the director of the factory who was released around May and who immediately returned to the head of his company, without taking a rest. "La Canne à Pêche" also survived the bombing of Angers on June 28, 1944, but because of this, Constance Rochard was asked by her sons to stay at home, so she brought the line fitters and their equipment to the Boulevard de Strasbourg, where the dining room was transformed into a workshop. They did not return to the factory until after August 10, 1944, after the liberation of Angers. In 1945, "La Canne à Pêche" was restarted, the workers who had been prisoners for five years had returned and, in Lyon, Joanny Charou was back from deportation, he took a rest in Vailly, his place at the head of the Lyon branch having been taken by his wife and son during his absence.
Despite their different experiences during the war, Joanny Charou and Emile and Léon Rochard all agreed on one thing: fishing would change after the war, both in terms of new mentalities and because of the development of production techniques. It was then that Joanny Charou heard Léon Rochard's proposal that he called "sport fishing". Far from the sedentary lifestyle and harmony sought by river fishermen, the idea of ​​"sport fishing" consisted of getting the fisherman moving, making him walk the banks in search of the place where the fish lay, where a good catch was possible. To make the river fisherman mobile in search of pike, perch, catfish and other predators, he had to be provided with a short, easy-to-carry fishing rod and a high-performance reel. It is therefore, for this new sport fishing, a complete renovation of the equipment that Léon Rochard envisaged, a reel that inspired the most famous of them and a fiberglass fishing rod.
"La Canne à Pêche" entrusted the production of this new reel to a company based in Cluses, in Haute-Savoie, and managed by two engineers: Messrs. Pons and Carpano. In 1947, the first reels were on the market under the name CAP, acronym for "La Canne à Pêche". The success was immediate and the results of the years 48/50 show an extraordinary increase in sales of the new reel. The technicians constantly made improvements such as braking the line when a fish struggles at the end of it, the automatic opening of the pick-up when casting; then the reels specialized for sea fishing, trout fishing or even left-handed fishing. The French market was quickly conquered and the presence of a large American fleet in the Mediterranean Sea made it possible to reach the United States market, since the sailors brought the fishing rods home.
As the fashion was for Americanization, "La Canne à Pêche" renamed its reel "Mitchell" and it was under this name that it literally conquered America. Subsequently, the "Mitchell" reel was attributed to Carpano and Pons, at least, after long and tough negotiations between the engineers who had perfected the original CAP reel, and the bosses of the Angers factory, especially Emile Rochard who surely made it clear that they would never have achieved such great success without the invention of his brother, Léon Rochard. Finally, the Rochard family accepted that the recognition of the manufacture of the "Mitchell" reel should go to Carpano and Pons, not without receiving a significant amount of royalties until the death of Emile Rochard. The feud was to fade over time, since for the millionth Mitchell reel, while US President Eisenhower received a golden reel, Emile Rochard acquired a Mitchell reel decorated with floral ornament.
"Sport fishing" now had its reel, it also needed its rod. As soon as the war ended, the Angers factory had resumed the manufacture of split bamboo rods, but the supply of bamboo was difficult because, in the period of great shortage that Europe was going through, the merchant fleets could not devote many cargoes to loading bamboo in the Far East and Japan, ravaged by the war, no longer produced enough. At that time, laminated fiberglass was beginning to be used in the manufacture of certain objects. A craftsman from Montpellier, a fishing enthusiast, had the idea of ​​making a rod in this material and came to present his model in Angers. But it was thick and without any flexibility, so much so that "La Canne à Pêche" did not buy his patent. It was the Japanese who, in the early 1950s, significantly improved the qualities of the product and thus began to conquer the fishing tackle market in old Europe. The fibreglass rod became popular in the following years and the Angers factory also produced some, but without the fame and manufacturing exclusivity it had enjoyed with the "Mitchell" reel. During the 1950s, in addition to split bamboo rods, it produced aluminium rods that were light but lacked flexibility, as well as so-called "telescopic" rods, made of light plastic, as long as reed rods and intended for pole fishing, but whose strands folded into each other, making them very easy to transport. During the 1950s, "La Canne à pêche" reached the peak of its production and profits. But these would have been at least doubled if its managers had not missed the exclusivity of the fiberglass market.
However, the death of Léon Rochard in 1957, then that of Joanny Charou in 1959, marked the end of the great era of the Angers factory. Emile Rochard, with his entourage, drew up a report of his management which appeared very positive. Nevertheless, despite Constance Rochard's ambition to have Emile's son take over La Canne à Pêche and perpetuate the Rochard legacy, the latter was often present, from the birth of the factory, to observe the workers or his uncle Léon, but he refused, wishing to discover the path that his father had not been able to follow. Emile Rochard, the last of the three creators of La Canne à Pêche, without his partners or successor, sold his shares in the factory in 1960 to a merchant from Valence, "Mr. Millet", with whom Pierre Charou, the son of Joanny Charou, joined forces. Emile Rochard finally died in 1963.

From the Rochard saga : Les feuilles vertes de l'arbre généalogiques, written by André Rochard, son of Emile Rochard.
Supplemented by archival documents and testimonies from the Rochard family.

[Sandman]

Thank you Paul.

"In 1947, the first reels were on the market under the name CAP, acronym for "La Canne à Pêche". Is this referring to the round body or egg-shape bodied reels? If round body, when were the egg-shape bodied reels first produced?

Sandman

[Paul Rochard]

Good morning Sandman,

I can't answer you with certainty, not having more details on this subject, however logically the first reel put on sale would be the first ordered to Carpano & Pons, that of Léon Rochard, therefore the round body reel.
Also, a paper from "Au fil de l'eau" indicates that the beginning of the manufacture of the Mitchell began in 1947 and the brochure places its first sale in 1948 from the testimonies obtained by the Cluses Archives.

Kind regards

Paul Rochard