ONE of the last living links with the Worcester families who, for centuries, earned their livelihoods by netting salmon from the River Severn is about to leave the Faithful City for America.

Mrs Catherine Fincher, whose grandfather was the last of 10 generations of the same family to fish professionally for salmon at Worcester, is soon to emigrate to San Antonio in Texas - at the age of 82!

Even so, it will clearly be a huge wrench for her to leave the city where she was born and has spent her entire life and where her forebears can be traced back more than 420 years. However, she is going where her heart now is - with her son, daughter-in-law, grandchildren and great- grandchildren in San Antonio.

I interviewed Mrs Fincher for Memory Lane five years ago, when she gave me marvellous glimpses back into the lost age of Worcester's traditional fisherfolk.

Her maternal grandfather, John Jenkins (1858-1934) was the last in line of the remarkable Jenkins' dynasty to earn a livelihood from fishing, and she regaled me with many happy reminiscences of times spent with him as a child.

The Jenkins' salmon fishing dynasty has been traced back to one John Jenkins who was born in 1580 and combined his fishing at Worcester with a real perk of a job - that of City Ale Taster.

Down the centuries, the traditional base of Worcester's fisherfolk was the appropriately named Severn Street, formerly Frog Lane.

During the 19th Century, most of the cottages and terraced houses lining Severn Street were the homes of fisherfolk, the majority of the families having the surname Jenkins as descendants, down various lines, of John Jenkins. Mrs Fincher's grandfather lived in the fisherman's cottage at 74 Severn Street - a property which still survives today.

"His fishing for salmon was done throughout his life by casting nets into the Severn below Diglis Weir. He had a shed on the riverside near the weir where he kept a lot of his tackle. He also had two punts which he moored near the Diglis Hotel," recalls Mrs Fincher.

"It was a very meagre existence. If you had no catch, you had no money. The fishing families certainly could not afford to eat the salmon they caught. They had to sell them to make a living - in grandfather's case to Mr Hunt's fish and game shop which was next to Marks & Spencer's in High Street."

Mrs Fincher says the death knell for Worcester's fishing industry was sounded in the 1920s with a big increase in freight traffic on the Severn and with mounting concern about the river being over-fished.

Mrs Fincher is the daughter of John Jenkins' daughter, Catherine, who married Charles Whitehouse.

Born in Worcester, Mrs Fincher attended the former St Peter's school but left aged 14, to go to work at St George's Laundry. However, anxious to improve her education, she went to night school and gained her school certificate. She then worked in the offices at the Marks & Spencer store before joining the ATS for five years service during the last war.

She was posted to military records offices at Bournemouth and Brighton and then to the War Office in London, where, after Dunkirk, she was involved in the unenviable task of informing the next of kin of those who had been killed and also in sorting through their belongings.

During the war, she became engaged to a childhood sweetheart, Cecil (Jerry) Fincher, who had been a classmate of hers at St Peter's school. His father was, for many years, a pharmacist and manager of Horniblows, the chemists in Sidbury. Jerry was a pilot in Bomber Command, flying Wellingtons and, in 1947, the couple married at Worcester.

Mrs Fincher became a housewife and mother to the couple's only child, Jeremy. Mr Fincher worked first as a glove cutter at Fownes, Worcester, but later became a civil servant with the Department of Social Security. Alas, in his 50s, he suffered a stroke and was wheelchair-bound for the last 15 years of his life.

The couple lived in Ombersley Road and then in Lucerne Close, but Mrs Fincher's home in recent years has been at Gheluvelt Court, Barbourne, Worcester.

Son Jeremy was born in Worcester and educated at the Royal Grammar School before working for Lloyds Bank in its High Street and Cathedral branches. However, he went off to seek his fortune in America as and now has his own carpet business in San Antonio.

Mrs Fincher said of her fateful decision to leave her home town of Worcester after 82 years: "I've been going out on holiday to San Antonio every year for the past 20 years, but last time I was there my son and daughter-in-law said they were worried about what would happen to me if I had to go into a nursing home.

"They didn't want me to be looked after by strangers and pleaded with me to go and live with them in these last years of my life.

"I've thought long and hard about it because I am not nave enough to think I shall not have moments of homesickness - this is the land of my birth, and much of what I hold dear is here in Worcester.

"There are lots of things I'm going to miss, particularly my friends here, but in the end the place I really want to be now is with my loved ones in San Antonio."

Her son and daughter-in-law, Jackie, have two children, Shelley and Mark, and two grand children, Cristal and Jessica.

However, Mrs Fincher's emigration to America will not rob Worcester entirely of descendants of John Jenkins, that last salmon fisherman of the Jenkins dynasty.

She's leaving behind two brothers still living locally - John Whitehouse at Kempsey and Ken Whitehouse of Hylton Road, Worcester.