History
From a jetty sale to four generations
Ninety-five years of paper, silk and weather, told in the entries the family kept and the ones the coast kept for them.
Ada Croft sews her first paper diamond from a sailmaker's offcut and sells it off the Falmer Point jetty for half a crown.
A gale takes the shop roof and delivers it, intact, to the vicarage garden. The vicar returns it with a note: 'Fly it, don't dwell in it.'
Reginald Halyard joins with a set of silk samples from a decommissioned barrage balloon. Silk enters the catalogue and never leaves.
The works builds 400 Serpent tails for the Northdown Centenary Regatta; the river of colour is photographed from a passing steamer.
Mira Halyard-Croft opens the repair bench to other makers' kites. The rule since: no kite turned away for being badly loved.
The museum room opens in the old rope store: eighty years of paper, silk and the occasional badly misjudged launch.
Four generations on, the shop still closes on days the wind blows Force 7 or better. Staff morale has never been higher.
Why Falmer Point
The point faces southwest into the steadying wind off the Channel, catches the thermal off the chalk in the afternoons, and has exactly one tree, which blew down in 1938 and was wisely never replaced. Ada Croft picked the spot in an afternoon and defended the choice for sixty years. The family has never once had a reason to overrule her.