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Brigadier JAL Caunter, who died in East Looe on 20 April 1981 (aged 91), was the founder of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain, in Looe.

The Club was founded on the 4th January 1953 in Looe, Cornwall.  The first General Meeting of the club was held on the 25th January 1953 at the Hannafore Point Hotel in Looe. The hotel was allowed to fly the club burgee to enable it to be identified as the Headquarters of the club.

John Alan Lyde Caunter was born in Somerset to Richard Lawrence Caunter, a medical practitioner from Liskeard.  Commissioned into the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1909, he was captured by German forces in October 1914. He spent most of the war in German captivity before escaping from a camp at Schwarmstedt in the summer 1917. He managed to cross into the neutral Netherlands and reached England still wearing his POW clothes. The following year he published 13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German Prison.

Caunter went on to serve with the British Salonika Army in 1918.  On 13 February 1920 he married Helen Margaret Napier Napier in Churt, Surrey, where both lived at the time. A daughter, Pamela Margaret Napier, was born in 1921 and a son, John Richard Lyde, in 1924, both in Farnham, Surrey.  Caunter became commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, Royal Tank Corps in Egypt in 1935 and became commander of 4th Armoured Brigade in the Western Desert campaign in January 1940, in which role he saw action at the Battle of Beda Fomm in Libya in February 1941.  He became Deputy Director of Staff Duties, Armoured Troops at GHQ India in 1941 before retiring in 1944.

Shark Angling Club of Great Britain

Brig Caunter began fishing for sharks off the coast of Cornwall around 1945, and in 1953 founded the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain, serving as its first president. He was also a member for Great Britain of the International Committee of the International Game Fish Association and a member of the British Tunny Club.  Caunter further sat on the Sea Fisheries Committee, and began the Looe Sea Angling Festival. His book, Shark Angling in Great Britain (1961) was the first book published in Britain to deal with sharks and shark fishing off the British coast. From 1952 to 1967 he served on the Looe Urban District Council. Brigadier Caunter died in Looe, Cornwall, in 1981.