Frederic Maurice Halford (13 April 1844 – 5 March 1914), pseudonym Detached Badger,[2] was a wealthy and influential British angler and fly fishing author.

[4] In Royal Coachman – The Lore and Legends of Fly Fishing (1999), Paul Schullery describes Halford: ...highly formalized code of how a dry fly should be fished, a code further developed and popularized later in the nineteenth century by one of fly-fishing's most eminent authors, Frederic Halford, whose first book, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, was published in 1886 and took the upper-crust world of British fly-fishing by storm.Frederic Halford was born Frederic Maurice Hyam into a wealthy Jewish family of German ancestry in 1844 in Birmingham, England.

Samuel Hyam, and his brothers Lawrence and Benjamin, were very prosperous manufacturers of textiles and clothing in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester.

Halford's first experiences in fly fishing were at the age of 24 in 1868 when, through the generosity of a family friend, he was given a free beat on the River Wandle, a pristine trout stream to the southwest of London.

In 1879, in John Hammond's tackle shop in Winchester, Halford met angler George Selwyn Marryat, a meeting that was to change the course of fly-fishing history.

In 1880, Halford found accommodation at Houghton Mill, on the banks of the Test and, with Marryat, began his research for his first book, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, published in 1886.

The book was a huge success, and laid the foundations for Halford's legacy as the "High Priest of the Dry Fly".

The following passage by Halford epitomises his dogmatic views: ... Those of us who will not in any circumstances cast except over rising fish are sometimes called ultra purists and those who occasionally will try to tempt a fish in position but not actually rising are termed purists... and I would urge every dry fly fisher to follow the example of these purists and ultra purists.When G. E. M. Skues began promoting upstream nymphing techniques on English chalk streams at the turn of the 20th century, there was immediate tension between those who favoured and followed the Halford school of dry-fly fishing and those who chose to use other techniques.

There is no evidence that there was ever any personal animosity between the two anglers, only verbal wrangling in the sporting press about the pros and cons of the two techniques.

Indeed, Skues's second work The Way of a Trout with the Fly, which codified the upstream nymphing technique, was not published until 1921, well after Halford's death.

The result was decidedly in favour of Halford's dry-fly techniques to the exclusion of all others, but no one denied the effectiveness of Skues's nymphing methodology.

The debate helped cement both Halford's and Skues's seminal roles in the development of modern-day fly fishing.