Tag Archives: Dunkirk
Restore the oyster dredger Vanguard! Plea to help fund restoration of Essex boat used at Dunkirk
The Vanguard Restoration Foundation hopes to restore the oyster dredger Vanguard by securing the vital £500,000 needed to have it rebuilt. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the group hopes the boat, now residing in Burnham, will get a fresh boost of Dunkirk spirit. The aim is to get her ready for a return to Dunkirk in June 2025 to take part in celebrations marking the 85th anniversary. >photos, click to read< 13:35
A ‘little ship’ of Dunkirk hero is being saved at its original home in Bideford, Devon.
In May 1940 the Jane Hannah MacDonald III (JHM), then known as Jane Hannah, set off from Blakeney in north Norfolk and became one of the little ships of Operation Dynamo. The ships rescued more than 300,000 British and Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk after the fall of France to Nazi Germany. The ship had been bought for fishing and leisure fishing trips out of Blakeney, after previously serving as a 35ft lifeboat at Flamborough, Yorkshire. 
It was owned by Bernard Chase and skippered by George Long, a 60-year-old Blakeney fisherman. Helped by Billy ‘Fat Freddie’ Long, the son of George’s brother William, he took the boat from Blakeney to Lowestoft and then on to Ramsgate in Kent, from where it was then requisitioned by the navy and taken across the choppy waters of the Channel on the night of June 5, 1940. >click to read< 09:30
“We shall fight on the beaches” – Michael Gerson: ‘Darkest Hour’ proves that history can hinge on a single leader
But the central conceit of the film — that a deflated, defeated Churchill required bucking up by average Brits — is a fiction. Very nearly the opposite was true. The policy of appeasement was broadly popular in Britain during the early to mid-1930s. In 1938, a majority supported Neville Chamberlain’s deal at Munich (which ceded much of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in return for … nothing). It is more accurate to say that Churchill summoned British courage and defiance by his intense idealization of British character. He saw heroic traits in his countrymen that even they, for a time, could not see. click here to read the story 09:13
