A talk by Ian Gilbert

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain sent the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel to help stem the advance of Hitler’s Wermacht into Belgium and France. The effort was in vain and by the 21st May 1940, British, French and Belgian troops had been forced to retreat and were trapped in an area around Dunkirk. An evacuation had to be arranged, without which Britain would have lost a major proportion of its army and ability to avoid defeat. Some 800 vessels were assembled to undertake the evacuation, varying from naval destroyers to a collection of cabin cruisers, speedboats and general river craft. It is the latter that became known as the Dunkirk Little Ships and between the 26th May and 4th June the 800 strong rescue armada returned 338,266 British and allied troops to Britain to fight again. But Churchill famously said “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations”.

Ian Gilbert is Hon. Vice Admiral of the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships. He actually owns one of the surviving vessels, the ‘Lady Lou’ based on the Thames near Weybridge. He is thus well placed to describe the events surrounding the evacuation, the little ships involved and the Association that keeps the surviving Little Ships afloat and their history remembered.  Ian spent his career as an avionics engineer, starting in 1967 with British European Airways.