Arthur Smith, who has died aged 92, had a lifelong love of angling.

He ran a fishing shop in Magdalen Road, east Oxford, and from the mid-1930s to the 1970s supplied anglers throughout Oxfordshire with tackle.

He wrote the angling column for The Oxford Times for many years, and was also a talented photographer, supplying many pictures of prize-winning fish to the Oxford Mail, The Oxford Times and Angling Times.

Mr Smith joined the Oxford Angling and Preservation Society in 1946 and that year won the prestigious Bustin Trophy.

A year later he became a committee member and two years later secretary, a post he held until 1967. He was also chairman for a year.

During the 1950s, he, his brother Jack and son Aubrey won countless competitions and cups, as team members and individuals, their photographs regularly appearing in local and national papers. He was instrumental in various angling initiatives, and perfected a system of relocating fish safely between waterways.

In 1949, as anglers tried to get fishing rights on a gravel pit at Cassington, it was discovered that the land belonged to the Duke of Marlborough.

Mr Smith was summoned to Blenheim Palace for negotiations. He and the Duke sat in separate rooms and their messages were carried between them by a butler until an agreement was reached.

The Duke agreed to the lake being named Marlborough Pool, and it remains the flagship waters of the Oxfordshire Angling and Preservation Society today.

Mr Smith grew up in east Oxford, one of a family of 11 children, and after leaving the Oxford Boys' High School joined the family building business.

He became a bricklayer and later an electrician, working for the Southern Electricity Board, AERE Harwell and finishing his career as principal technician in Oxford University's Inorganic Chemistry Department. During the Second World War he served in the RAF as a member of the ground crew working on Hurricane fighter planes.

Mr Smith, who lived at Botley, Oxford, was married to his wife Lottie, who died last year, for 72 years. He leaves four surviving children, Barbara, Aubrey, Jenny and Marylin. Two of his children, Patrick and Brenda, pre-deceased him.