It isn’t often we venture to Mersea, but I had agreed to give a talk (about the Battle of Maldon) at the museum there.

Taking into account the time of the year, the light and tide, my wife was up for staying the night somewhere.

I remembered a convivial evening in the early-80s at the Victory. So a quick phone call and a room at the pub was booked.

My memories of the place were linked to research that I was doing at the time into the author/countryman James Wentworth Day. He wrote an account of the Victory in his Farming Adventure (Harrap 1943) describing it as “standing bold on a little bluff on the coast road, with a ship-like balcony, a tall mast to fly its flag, its face to a fleet of anchored boats, its windows winking in the western sun”.

In those wartime days it was the haunt of those “earning their livings hardly from the bitter jaws of the sea with fishing net and punt-gun”.

A “salty breed”, as he put it - the Wyatts, Mussetts, Pullens, Millgates, Moles Dixons and Souths, doubtless among them.

In 1939, the manager of the Victory was retired army officer Sidney Freestone, who was there with wife Maud, son Edward and a barman and cook (the Archdales).

Just like a list of the incumbents of a parish church, Sidney (who died in 1944) is part of the roll of landlords, past and present, at that waterside sanctuary.

Maldon and Burnham Standard:

Before the Freestones, Captain Henry Allen Bleach was “mine host” and in the mid-1930s promoted the Victory as “an ideal place to spend a holiday”.

The tariff was three to four guineas a week. Travelling back further, in 1931 Henry and Blanche Risdon had the tenancy.

Henry was a Great War veteran who, by a strange Trafalgar coincidence, had previously been landlord at the Nelson Arms, in Wimbledon.

The Risdons had succeeded to the hotel from Arthur GH Hunt, who, according to Kelly’s Trade Directory, was at the Victory in 1929.

Prior to that we come to a really famous name in Mersea’s story. Ex-RNVR officer 'Ronnie' Hone and his wife Winifred took the hotel in 1919.

Described by Wentworth Day as “a woman of quick wit (and)... robust repartee”, he thought of Winifred Hone as the “Queen of the cooking pot…a high priestess of the palate”.

Her parents had run the King’s Head at Tollesbury, and it was at the end of the First War that she decided to follow in the family hospitality tradition.

She was, in many ways, a remarkable woman and transcripts of her memoirs can be accessed via the excellent Mersea Museum website.

She made her mark at the Victory right from the start, fitting new carpets, installing antique furniture and silver and brass, much to the initial annoyance of the locals.

A dance hall was added next door in 1923, but it burnt down in 1942.

The Hones had taken on the tenancy of the Victory from William Trim who, in Winifred’s words “used The Victory more as a home” than a pub, as he also had a small farm and agricultural hire business.

The Colchester Brewing Company owned the premises at that point and we find in their papers reference to the very origins of the Victory.

Dated 1907, is the “contract, estimate and specification for new hotel (Victory Hotel) West Mersea”.

William Howard Trim appears in the 1911 census as the innkeeper, but curiously he is also listed as such in 1898.

How can that possibly be?

We discover that the current Victory is, in actual fact, the second Mersea pub of that name. The “old” Victory was further down the coast road, almost opposite the sailing club beach launch (the village green) and is now a private residence.

William Trim was both the last landlord of the 'old' Victory and the first of the new one.

The old Victory has an equally fascinating heritage dating back to Nelson’s victory of 1805, when what was the Leather Bottle must have been re-named. But that, as they say, is another story and we must stick to the successor Victory of 1907.

Maldon and Burnham Standard:

We left Maldon by the winding coast road that snakes along the north bank of the Blackwater, passing through Goldhanger, D’Arcy, Wigborough and Peldon.

Hard by the Rose we crossed the Strood, drove into West Mersea, down the Coast Road and pulled into the car park of the Victory.

We checked in and were made very welcome. As the pub website says, it offers “fabulous accommodation and great traditional pub food with fantastic panoramic views across the harbour”.

As we stared out across the estuary from the “ship-like balcony”, although it was 2022, somehow I felt we were in the company of Winifred Hone.

Recounting her first visit to Mersea (in 1918), she remembered “cycling down the Coast Road” and seeing “a wonderful expanse of water… a few houses and… a graveyard of once famous yachts” and “a fairly new pub called the Victory”.

Thankfully, little has changed and the Victory is still there for us to enjoy today.