On Saturday 7th August 2010, Tony Baldry unveiled a blue plaque at Tooley’s Boat Yard in memory of Tom Rolt. 2010 is the centenary of his birth.

“In 1939, Tom Rolt started a historic 400 mile journey from Tooley’s Boat Yard in his wooden narrow boat, “Cressy”.

He cruised the canals of England and wrote a moving account, called “Narrow Boat”, which did much to remind people of the romance of the waterways and their potential.

Immediately after the Second World War Tom Rolt was instrumental in the establishment of the Inland Waterways Association which brought together volunteers keen to maintain our national canal heritage, and Tom Rolt probably did more than anyone to ensure that we still have a national canal network.

For Banbury, linear transports such as the canal, and then later the railway, enabled Banbury, which had been a classic rural market town, to become part of the semi-industrialised West Midlands, and that process then continued once the M40 was constructed.

In this centenary year of Tom Rolt’s birth, it is particularly appropriate that a blue plaque should be erected in his memory in Banbury, at Tooley’s Boat Yard where he started his historic journey in 1939, a journey that has just been re-created by Ron and Mary Heritage, of today’s Oxfordshire Branch of the IWA.”