Waterworks Road
Walking down Thurstable Road from the waterworks towards the old brick works, look at the street names: Endeavour, Shamrock, Valkyrie, Genesta and Sceptre. Every one is named for a British challenger for the America’s Cup, and together they are a quiet monument to the most glamorous chapter of Tollesbury’s history. This was a village of “plough and sail”, and from the 1880s to the 1950s its fishermen were prized far beyond the Blackwater. In winter they worked their oyster smacks and sailed the hay barges up to London; in summer the best of them were hired as professional crew on the great racing cutters of the age, racing in the company of kings on the Solent and the Clyde and across the Atlantic for the Cup. The street names trace the whole arc of the British challenge: Genesta, the Victorian cutter of 1885; Valkyrie in the 1890s; Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrocks from 1899; the great J-class Endeavours of the 1930s; and Sceptre, the post-war revival of 1958. Men of Tollesbury crewed fifteen of the sixteen British challengers up to Endeavour II, and the last Shamrock and both Endeavours were skippered by Captain Ted Heard of Tollesbury. Endeavour is the one the village kept closest – still the yacht carved on the village sign and set in the Seafarers’ Window at St Mary’s, whose left light shows four of these America’s Cup challengers in glass.
One street steps outside the yacht names, and does it in a fitting way.
Hasler Road carries the name of the donor of the Seafarers’ Window in St Mary’s – the window whose glass gathers up the village’s bond with the sea. It is also, as it happens, the surname of one of the great figures of modern yachting: Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert “Blondie” Hasler, leader of the wartime “Cockleshell Heroes” raid on Bordeaux and later the father of single-handed ocean racing, who invented the first practical self-steering gear for yachts and instigated the first solo transatlantic race in 1960. In a village that sent its men to sea under sail for generations, it is a name that seems to belong here twice over.