Meet the Committee
Chairman
George Graham
George spent 20 years as a journalist with the Financial Times, working in London, Paris and Washington DC. After five years heading the FT’s Lex column for five years (moonlighting at the same time as angling columnist in its weekend magazine) he worked for 12 years in the strategy team of a large bank, managing relationships with government and regulators. He is now trustee of a £40 billion pension fund, where he chairs the investment committee, and chairman of another £1 billion investment fund.
He began catching brown trout on Hebridean lochs and eels in the rather muddier waters of Dumfriesshire. There he experienced the devastating effects on fish stocks of poorly designed flood protection works when the then Ministry of Agriculture dredged and canalised the River Lochar. Most of his fishing today is for trout and grayling in southern England, but he has tried his hand further afield and claims to have caught one of the last trout on a fly from Iran’s Lar river before it was dammed to create a reservoir. He is a member of the Grayling Society and a keen cyclist.
Chief Executive
Jamie Cook
Jamie joined the Angling Trust and Fish Legal as CEO in January 2020. The son of a mad keen coarse all-rounder Jamie learned to fish on the Kennet, Thames and surrounding gravel pits as a child. His experience developed into specimen hunting with roach his favourite species. After a brief foray into match angling he turned his focus to carp fishing and has spent a decade targeting large carp across the South of England.
As a parent of two young children his time on the bank is now more limited and this has led Jamie to diversify in turning his hand to lure fishing in both salt and freshwater. He describes fly casting as his weakest suit but something he is looking forward to improving.
Jamie has based his career within the commercial sector with over 15 years experience of leading teams and developing brands in the media industry. He views angling as a gateway to the outdoors and is passionate about the benefits and wellbeing fishing can provide to individuals. Jamie is focused on ensuring more people fish more often and that the environments that anglers spend their time within are healthy and diverse.
Commmitee Member
Geoff Stephenson
George Stephenson spent 25 years in Africa running safari camps before setting up a highly successful business for Roxton Bailey Robinson arranging fishing expeditions throughout the world.
He is also Chairman of the Save the Rhino Campaign and he now lives on his farm in Wiltshire which includes two miles of the River Nadder and a carp lake. He has been a passionate all round angler since the age of 4, catching coarse, sea and game fish throughout the UK and around the world.
In addition to being a member of the Fish Legal Committee, George is the current Chairman of the Angling Trust.
Commitee Member
Mike Heylin OBE
Mike Heylin has fished in fresh and saltwater for 66 years and joined the ACA (now FL) in 1960. After a career in corporate and business management, Mike started and ran a succession of small companies in the construction and security industries. He now volunteers in angling organisations as a result of his fishing experiences and concern for fish stocks.
Mike runs an angling project for disadvantaged children, he is secretary of Boxmoor & District Angling Society Ltd., Director of the Dacorum Angling Project and secretary of Colne Valley Fisheries Consultative, qualified River Fly monitor and sits on the Colne Catchment Partnership, Director of the Angling Trades Association, Professional Anglers Association and the European Anglers Alliance and a committee member of Fish Legal. He was chairman of the Angling Trust until 2013.
Mike says: “It was Richard Walker who signed me up as an ACA member, saying, “If you only join one organisation in fishing, it has to be the ACA.”
Committee Member
Tim Goode
Tim Goode was born in Beaconsfield, Bucks and has been based in that area ever since although he spends much of his time in Scotland and Cornwall. He went to school in Bucks and University in York and Boston, Massachusetts. He has worked in banking and financial services for his whole career.
He is interested in all sorts of fishing but particularly barbel, roach, brown trout (both migratory and non migratory) and Atlantic salmon. He occasionally fishes for carp but having had several years as a serious carp angler now feels it worthwhile to have a life. His angling ambitions are for a double figure UK sea trout and a really big Atlantic salmon. His biggest regret is that on the day he caught his biggest roach he did not use bread as it would then have been a three pounder.
His angling heroes are John Ashley Cooper and Richard Walker. His favourite authors are Cormac McCarthy and Robert McFarlane. His ambition for the Angling Trust is to see it having the same size influence and financial clout as the RSPB. His other interests are singing and visiting wild places.
Committee Member
Andrew Nathan
Andrew is a solicitor with the company Hextalls Limited having been with the firm for over 40 years under its various different guises. He is a litigation solicitor and deals with a variety of insurance liability claims for various insurers.
He is a lifelong angler and says that he cannot remember a time when he had no interest in fishing. Although no one in his immediate family fished and he is therefore largely self-taught, his mother was born in Guernsey in the Channel Islands and two of her brothers (his uncles) were very keen anglers. It is therefore in his DNA… at least that is his excuse. Whilst he no longer gets the time to go coarse fishing as often as he would like he is as happy to fish a storm beach during the long winter nights for cod as he is fishing on the drift over sandbanks and reefs in the Channel Islands, fishing off rocks for mullet, casting a fly off the beach for bass or casting a fly on the Tweed for salmon and sea trout.
Happily he has passed on his passion to his son and they manage to fish together for a couple of weeks during the year up in Scotland, now joined regularly by another LAC member and close friend Nick Baldock. Andrew has Nick to thank for it was Nick who introduced him to and got him involved with the old ACA LAC and he has been happy to serve on the committee and as a board member of Fish Legal to give something back to the sport that he has gained so much from.
Andrew also sits on the boards of several charities and is churchwarden of a church in Bromley. In his “spare” time he has a keen interest in most sport, in particular rugby and is to be found at most home (and some away) games supporting Blackheath from the touchline.
Committee Member
Phil Chamberlain
Phil was born in Worcestershire but has lived in and around London for the last 35 years or so. He began his angling life as a young boy coarse fishing the rivers and streams of the Midlands. Career, family and re-locations interrupted his fishing, but he picked up the sport again in his 40s becoming even more enthusiastic than before.
In recent years, Phil has spent most of his time fly-fishing in the South East of England, with trips to Slovenia, Scotland and Alaska to add to his experience. He serves as a Committee member of his local trout syndicate in Kent and is also planning to get back to coarse fishing for barbel on the rivers of the Midlands where his angling life first began.
Phil spent his whole career in financial services, with the last 30 years in the City of London working in various senior positions for Willis Towers Watson, one of the largest insurance and risk management companies in the world. Much of his professional time was spent with major UK corporates, a background Phil hopes will serve him well as a Committee member of Fish Legal. Phil retired from active business life in 2017 and now has more time to give back to angling and angling causes.
Committee Member
Jamie Lamb
Jamie is a qualified chartered accountant working with Grant Thornton and Arthur Andersen before leaving the profession to set up a hotel business in 2002. Jamie led this business through a period of rapid growth culminating in the successful sale of the company in 2015. Jamie still remains on the Hotel Company’s Board as Executive Chairman.
Jamie started fishing at the age of 10 fishing for carp, tench and roach on the local pond in Southampton and sea fishing from local piers. He has been a keen angler ever since and is passionate about fish conservation, managing his own lake and encouraging the wider uptake of angling.
Most of his fishing these days is on coarse lakes in Oxfordshire or fly fishing in Scotland and Hampshire with the occasional overseas trip. Jamie is also a member and treasurer of the High Cree Gamefishers, an angling club based near Newton Stewart in Dumfries and Galloway dedicated to wild trout and salmon fishing.
Committee Member
Charles Nichols
Charles has been fishing since childhood, with a particular passion for fly fishing on the chalk streams near his home. He travels widely and rarely passes up the opportunity to fish wherever he finds himself. He has fished all over England and Scotland, the United States, Iceland, the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and South East Asia. He is also an enthusiastic scuba diver, witnessing first-hand the impact of global warming and pollution on the marine environment.
Charles recently swapped his executive career for the opportunity to run his own sheep farm in West Berkshire and pursue his wider outdoor interests.
During a 30 year career at Unilever, he held various senior positions in finance and general management, acquiring a breadth of experience in financial management, accounting and control, business strategy and risk management.
In addition to farming, he is a non-executive director of the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Standards Board (FMSB), and a trustee of the Unilever UK Pension Fund, where he chairs the Investment and Funding Committee. He is also is involved with the Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S).
Charles is a qualified accountant and holds a BA (Hons) degree in Chemistry from Oxford University.
Committee Member
Dean Luker
Dean has been a professional in the Information and Data Services sector for the last 25 years. He joined Ipsos Group SA in 2010 as Deputy Managing Director of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), working across the region on development initiatives. Following the acquisition of Synovate by Ipsos, he focussed on the combination of the two companies in EMEA and was subsequently appointed as CEO of Ipsos in Western Continental Europe in 2011, with responsibility for nine Ipsos country markets. In 2017 Dean became Global Corporate Development Director of Ipsos Group, joining the company’s Global Management Board.
Before joining Ipsos, Dean was Global Corporate Development Director for Synovate, a division of Aegis Group plc (FTSE 250) from 2003 – 2009, based in Hong Kong and London, where he was primarily responsible for executing Synovate’s acquisition programme in support of the company’s overall global strategy.
Prior to that, Dean joined Asia Market Intelligence in 2001. He was a Director of AMI Hong Kong and of AMI’s Customer Satisfaction Measurement Division across Asia-Pacific. Before this Dean helped found the UK branch of NetSurvey, a Swedish pioneer in online market research. He also held senior positions at GfK UK and with Zenith International. Before commencing his career in information and data, Dean spent five years in banking with Barclays Bank plc and then Leopold Joseph & Sons, specialising in large corporate loans and structured finance. He joined Barclays on its Accelerated Development Programme.
Dean has been fishing since his uncle took him to a Norfolk lake as a five-year-old. He will pick up a rod to try and catch any species, anywhere – coarse, game or sea. But being raised near the River Medway in Kent, his primary passion is coarse fishing on rivers – particularly match fishing. He is still desperately trying to qualify for the Riverfest Final!
Fish Legal are pleased to acknowledge that Nurole.com was instrumental in recently sourcing non-executive directors to fill vacancies on the Fish Legal Committee.
Committee Member
Mike Greenwood
Mike’s fishing began on the canals of Holland and the small rivers and ponds of Leicestershire. Since then he’s fished across the world from India to New Zealand. These days he spends a lot of time fishing for trout and sometimes salmon in the West of Ireland and the North of England, but he’s just as happy catching tench, pike or pollock. His general incompetence in all branches of the sport is matched only by his stubbornly enduring enthusiasm for it.
Mike read English at Cambridge and then worked for many years as a producer, presenter and commissioning editor at the BBC, spending some time at Radio 4 before moving into TV. He then joined Culture Online, a multi-award-winning initiative run out of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to reach new audiences with cultural content via New Media. He has a small production company making films for a range of environmental organisations and for the UK Parliament. He’s also Director of Communications for Waterloo Uncovered, an archaeological charity that takes wounded and injured military veterans and serving personnel to excavate on the famous Napoleonic battlefield, as part of their journey to recovery and rehabilitation.
He’s been governor of a local school and, for the last eight years, a non-executive director of the environmental charity The Woodland Trust.