Lifeboat Rescued

After saving lives on the East Coast and at Dunkirk, the RNLI lifeboat Lucy Lavers needed some help herself. Two brothers stepped in…

- Nigel Sharp

At the end of May 1940 the RNLI Liverpool class lifeboat Lucy Lavers set off from Aldeburgh to take part in her very first rescue mission, having been delivered from her builders – Groves and Gutteridge in Cowes – earlier that month. It was to be a rescue mission like no other, and one that would become one of the most famous events in recent history: Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 338,226 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk. Lucy Lavers was one of 19 RNLI lifeboats which took part, along with 700 or so other non-military vessels – or Dunkirk Little Ships as they would come to be known.

With a Royal Navy crew on board she was towed across the Channel from Ramsgate – many of the smaller vessels were towed over to save fuel – by the Yarmouth drifter Golden Sunbeam. With her shallow draft and stern gear protected in a tunnel, Lucy Lavers would have been suitable for picking up troops from the gently-shelving beaches to the east of Dunkirk, from which about a third of those rescued were collected, so it is surprising to learn that she operated from the East Mole, almost the only usable part of Dunkirk harbour, which had suffered considerable damage by advancing German forces. From there she embarked troops and transferred them to off-lying larger vessels: no one knows how many trips she made or how many men she rescued, although it is said that most of them were French. When her work there was done, she was towed back across the Channel, laden with more troops.