A volunteer recently found this news paper article from 24th March 1916. I shows that people have been concerned about disappearing salmon and water quality for over 100 years!

“At a meeting of the Yorkshire Fishery Board on Saturday, as reported in another column, the interesting statement was made that the River Aire, which in the past has been responsible for so much destruction of fish in the Ouse, in now practically harmless and no complaint has been made of it during the past year. Dr. Wilson, Chief Inspector to the West Riding Rivers Board, in an interview on the subject, has explained that the River Aire used to spoil the salmon fishing because, in freshots [?], all the solids that had been deposited in the river during the dry weather were carried down, and choked the salmon that were coming up in the flood waters. In fact it was quite a common thing for boatmen on the Ouse at Goole to go out and pick up the sickened salmon. Since more attention has been paid to the purifications of the sewage at Bradford and Leeds, where hundreds of tons a day are now taken out, and since all the other sewage works on the River Aire have been improved, the sludge deposited in the river is infinitely less. The improvement already noticed, Dr. Wilson added, is a warrant for what has been stated frequently that, when the sewage works of Bradford and Leeds are complete and the sewage is discharged into the rivers in a purified condition, the time may be looked forward to when salmon will not only be able to pass the mouth of the River Aire, but even to pass the towns of Bradford and Leeds into the purer waters of the upper reaches. Even at present coarse fish are returning to the stretches of the river below Knottingley.

So far as the River Aire is concerned, the Yorkshire Fishery Board doubtless have excellent reason for congratulating themselves, but local residents are inclined to resent the idea of Goole being treated like the lamb in the fable, and told that their new sewage scheme is responsible for the fouling of the Ouse above the town, and thus driving the salmon to lower reaches. A local piscatorial expert, on his opinion being sought by a “Journal” representative, asked: “What about the Dutch River?” and remarked that the sewage of Sheffield, Doncaster, and other towns which empties into the Don, is quite as deleterious as that of Leeds and Bradford, and that what has happened in the past in the case of the Aire, viz. the churning up of the solids deposited in the river-bed and the choking of the fish, is still happening in the case of the Dutch River, Goole’s sewage in this case being but a drop in the ocean. No doubt what the Fishery Board claimed in regard to the Aire was quite correct, but until the Don was similarly treated there would be little improvement in this part of the Ouse.”