A true tale of one of the Little Ships:
A crusty old skipper named Lemon Webb was steering his sailing barge
Tollsbury down the East coast when he was approached by a Royal Navy launch and ordered to take his vessel into Ramsgate.
'What for?'
'We need her to take men off the beach at Dunkirk.'
'That's fine, I'll take her myself, me and the boy, I know Dunkirk well.'
'Fair enough, thank you.'
Lemon sailed across the Channel, saw the difficulty that the Navy was having transferring men from the beaches to larger ships offshore, and decided to beach the
Tollsbury so she could be used as a 'halfway house' temporary loading jetty. During the period of the ebb tide, hundreds of men crossed over her and she suffered several near-misses from Stuka attacks before she floated off on the flood tide. Damaged and loaded down to her marks with exhausted soldiers, she made it to Ramsgate, where Lemon and the boy had some dinner before taking the barge to her home dock as originally planned. Having handed her over to the owners' agent, Lemon and the boy went their separate ways home.
It took the authorities quite a while to find Lemon. He'd retired, you see, that East coast trip being his last voyage, and he wasn't inclined to much conversation at the best of times. He didn't say much when he was presented with the George Cross either.
