How Essex played its own starring role in Dunkirk

By TOM KING

tomkingfeatures@gmail.co

DUNKIRK is a maritime story, but in Essex it has left its footprint on the land as well.

It starts with the sea, of course. On May 20 1940, dozens of Essex boats headed for the Dunkirk beaches. The notion would never never have occurred to the crews at the time, but they were also voyaging into the history books. They had a job to do, and a pretty hairy one at that. Only when it was all over did the job turn into a legend.

The Essex mini-armada provided almost a fifth of the boats which took part in the Dunkirk evacuation. Operation Dynamo plucked over 300,000 soldiers from the Dunkirk beaches, within hours of annihilation. It was a miraculous feat of improvisation. Take away the contribution of the Essex coast, and a lot more of those soldiers would have remained on the Dunkirk beaches.

One eye-witness I spoke to back in 1990 said: “It wasn't until they all came together that you realised just how many ruddy boats there were in Essex waters.”

Look at a map of the county and you can see why it teemed with every variety of floating vessel, from millionaires' yachts to boys on oil-can rafts (which was how quite a few professional mariners started their career).

The ragged Essex coastline is punctured by inlets, estuaries, harbours and havens as if it had been peppered by asteroids. Cornwall is almost a smoothie by contrast.

In 1940, thousands of Essex people earned their living from the sea, and, particularly, from all those creeks and estuaries. Cocklers, oyster farmers, shrimpers, crabbers, Thames bargers, odd-bod fishermen who would catch and sell anything that anyone would put in their mouth.

There were the jobbing shipwrights and engineers who haunted the harbours in search of work, the ancient mariners who gave tours around the bay to holidaymakers, and the professional yachtsmen who manned the millionaires' yachts moored at Burnham-on-Crouch.

It was a motley bunch of men and an equally motley collection of

Essex vessels that set out on that day, when the only way was France.

After their hour of glory at Dunkirk, the boats and the men all went back to their day jobs and to anonymity. The years passed. Some of the boats sank, some disappeared from the records, some were abandoned, left to rot alongside scores of other hulks on the Essex mudbanks.

Yet the Dunkirk spirit lives on, and it has helped save at least one of those rotting hulks.

First, though - any Dunkirk journey in Essex should start, not aboard a boat, but in a churchyard. Among the gravestones at St Clement's Church, Leigh-on-Sea, is a reminder of the sacrifice, as well as the ultimate success story, of Dunkirk. It commemorates the crew of The Renown, a fishing boat from Leigh. It can only be a memorial, not a grave, because the men's bodies were lost at sea.

Renown hit a mine as she returned from Dunkirk by night, and was blown to pieces. She had been under tow by another Leigh fishing boat, Letitia. Letitia's skipper recalled the terrible moment. “In the pitch dark we could see nothing and do nothing – except pull in the town rope, just as we had passed it to Renown three quarters of an hour before.” The crew of the Renown were among the more than 3500 men killed during the Dunkirk evacuation.

The main element of the memorial takes the form of a large V. St Clement's stands high above the Thames Estuary, where it has been a clifftop landmark for shipping across five centuries. Peer through the base of the V and you see the water beyond. In a non-triumphalist way, the monument spells out the message Victory at Sea.

North, now, to Burnham-on-Crouch, home port for the oyster smack Vanguard. Vanguard currently lies well inland, with not an oyster in sight. She can be found at the entrance to the Mangapps Farm railway museum. The old girl looks like a burnt out case. Her ribs are stripped bare and there are gaping holes in her sides. Nazi bombs? No, the damage was inflicted by local vandals, who stripped Renown for firewood when she was lying in a boatyard on Benfleet Creek. A few more months and Vanguard would have disappeared completely into local wood-stoves and pizza ovens.

Her rescue was the result of a small group of dedicated people, using their own time and money, and a massive feat of improvisation. Once again, that D-word comes to mind.

Her last but one owner, Alan Weekes, donated her to Burnham Council. Burnham resident David Hopkins provided £1000 to pay for her transport from Benfleet Creek to a secure site at the railway museum. The site was provided by Mangapps owner John Jolly, whose well-known passion for historic railways has now extended to historic boats.

The commodore of Royal Burnham Yacht Club described the operation as “mission impossible”. Yet somehow this motley band proved him wrong, and achieved a miracle. Sound familiar?

Burnham town councillor Nick Skeens, a spokesman for the group, describes how the Dunkirk spirit once again got to work, and how Vanguard herself gripped the imagination of everyone involved.

“When you think,” he says, “of what she had done for this country, where she has been, and what she has been through, she is quite simply an inspiration.”

Those words could apply to any of the other surviving Dunkirk vessels – for instance, the Medway Queen, currently being restored at Gillingham. A traditional paddle-steamer, she used to run day trips between Southend and Clacton piers. Her preservation team plan that, one day, she will return to her old role, and she will once again become a familiar site at the pierheads.

Vanguard and Medway Queen share an aura, special to the little ships of Dunkirk. This is partly due to their history, of course, but it also because boats, properly preserved, have longer lives than people.

In 1990, I sailed with a flotilla of Dunkirk little ships as they returned to the French coast, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the evacuation. It provided the chance to talk to many Dunkirk veterans (the human kind). They survived Dunkirk, but time caught up with them in the end, and most are now gone.

Luckily, the little ships remain, with luck forever. They, also, in their own way, talk.

Visit one of these boats, and you realise that Mr Skeens is right. Vanguard and her fellow veterans are inspirational. More forcefully even than the film Dunkirk, for all its Imax screen and multiphonic sound, they emanate a sense of those desperate, heroic hours off Dunkirk harbour.

Even on land, they distill the sea. Stand in the presence of one of these vessels and you will share the pride and drama of Dunkirk- at least, once you have got over the sea-sickness.

LEIGH-ON-SEA provided six vessels for the Dunkirk operation, possibly the highest, proportionate to size, of any port.

The boats were Leigh bawleys, shallow-drafted vessels, specifically designed for catching cockles in the shallow waters of the Essex coast and Thames Estuary.

This feature made them ideal for close-quarter operations at Dunkirk. The downside was that they were not designed for the more open waters of the English Channel. There they were tossed around, in the words of one veteran, “like a floating pancake”.

Endeavour, the only Dunkirk bawley still afloat, took part in Christopher Nolan's film Dunkirk. Her skipper, Paul Gilson, not a man normally fazed by the sea, described the journey across the Channel as “a bit unpleasant”.

Leigh's key role is depicted in another recent film, Their Finest. Scriptwriter Gemma Arterton travels “to Southend” to unearth the story of one of the Leigh boats, which, according to newspaper reports, had been skippered by two young sisters.

If Leigh looks unrecognisable in the film, it is because the scene was shot in Porthgain, Wales.

Vanguard is on display for visitors to Mangapps Farm Railway Museum, Burnham-on-Crouch. King & Country will report on fund-raising operations to pay for her restoration.

Tom King is the author of The Essex Joke Book, and The London Joke Book, both available in April.