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Listen online or download via:
http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcasts18 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com MAY 2016
F
rom my bedroom window I can see a
small stone memorial in the corner of
an ancient churchyard overlooking the
Thames Estuary; on it are the names of
four fi sherman killed while returning from the
beaches of Dunkirk.
In May, scores of sailors are heading across
the English Channel for the beaches of Malo-les-
Bains in the hope that
they may be included
in a Hollywood epic
about the World
War II evacuation
of 338,226 Belgian,
British and French
soldiers from the beaches in June 1940. Not
many of them will be aware of the memorial in
St Clements churchyard as they sail past.
76 years ago, after the German Panzer units
swept the British Expeditionary Force into a
pocket around the Channel ports, more than
800 ‘little ships’ including Thames sailing
barges, gaff-rigged fi shing smacks, yachts,
motorboats and lifeboats, were pressed into
service to rescue the armies in retreat. The
amateur ‘navy’ of vessels lifted soldiers from
the shallow beaches and carried them out to
awaiting warships; others ferried them directly
back across the Channel to Ramsgate and Dover.
Now another fl otilla of little ships and sailors
is heading to the French coast to act as ‘extras’
in the latest project of fi lm director Christopher
Nolan, of The Dark Knight, Batman Begins
and Interstellar fame. Earlier in the year, at
Nolan’s request, Ian Gilbert, commodore of
the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships, invited
members to take part in some pre-production
fi lming and also asked for a list of members who
are taking their boats across to join actors Tom
Hardy, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh.
‘There are issues surrounding insurance and
costs that will of course need to be resolved.
However we are simply trying to get an idea
of how many Little Ships might be available to
support the production,’ said Gilbert.
Of the small ports heavily involved with
Operation Dynamo was my home, Leigh-on-
Sea in Essex. From this Domesday Book town
went a fl otilla of six gaff cutters, used to rakethe cockles from the Maplin Sands, their shoal
draught hulls ideal to glide in over the shallow
French beaches to collect Tommies. They were
Defender, Letitia, Renown, Reliance, Resolute
and Endeavour.
After getting east of Margate Roads they were
attacked by enemy aircraft and they scattered.
The air attack was seen off by Spitfi res, which
downed fi ve Luftwaffe
aircraft and they
continued across the
Dover Strait.
At the beaches the
swell was too high for
the fi shing craft to pick
the soldiers up from the sand so they instead
embarked troops from the Royal Worcestershire
Regiment and Cameron Highlanders from
Dunkirk Harbour mole and transshipped them
to deeper craft further offshore.
After two days ferrying men to the ships,
two of the boats were out of action; Renown
had broken down and Letitia had a shattered
rudder. So both the wooden-hulled Leigh boats
were taken in tow by the steel-hulled drifter Ben
and Lucy. Just 30 minutes later a German-laid
mine blew Renown to smithereens.
Her sister ship, Endeavour, has been restored
and now has a fore-and-aft mooring in Leigh
Creek, just a cockle shell toss from Renown’s
old berth. She will be joining the fl otilla in
Dunkirk where fi lming starts on the 23 May.
Leigh maybe only a hamlet which can fl oat
hulls for just two hours either side of HW, but
she has a seafaring past which is impressive.
The mini-port has nurtured two Masters of
Trinity House, two Royal Naval Admirals, and
shipwrights for the Mayfl ower.
All these men died in their beds, but as the
lights go down in the Odeon and you grapple
with your popcorn, spare a thought for Frank
Osborne, Leslie Osborne, Harry Noakes and
Harold Porter, who did not. W‘76 years on, another
fl otilla of Little Ships is
heading for Dunkirk’
Sailors are being sought as extras for a blockbuster about
Dunkirk, but spare a thought for those who did not return