‘I rescued one of Dunkirk's Little Ships and spent £250,000 restoring it'

Yahoo

21-05-2025

It was, the World War Two veteran and writer Arthur D Divine once recalled, 'the queerest, most nondescript flotilla that ever was'. In the final week of May in 1940, some 850 boats – from pleasure cruisers to fishing vessels, barges to private yachts – made up a patchwork civilian armada braided by one simple mission statement: bring them home.
As they motored from Ramsgate across the Channel towards Dunkirk, 'we were in a sort of dark traffic lane, full of strange ghosts and weird, unaccountable waves from the wash of the larger vessels,' Divine wrote. 'When destroyers went by, full tilt, the wash was a serious matter to us little fellows. We could only spin the wheel to try to head into the waves, hang on, and hope for the best.'
In the decades afterwards, the sentiment of those last four words came to attach itself to Operation Dynamo, the World War Two mission to rescue over 338,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from France.
Primarily involving the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy and civilian volunteers, 'the Miracle of Dunkirk' was indeed an astonishing feat, yet while the gods may have smiled on Normandy for those nine days, this remarkable act of deliverance was as much an achievement of planning and logistics as it was improvisation or pluck.
And when it was mission accomplished, there was no time for congratulation, no moment to catch breath. 'Wars are not won by evacuations,' Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons on 4 June, and it's true: there was work to do. So while the Navy regrouped and military leaders plotted the next moves, almost all the troops recovered from Dunkirk went back into training, ready to be redeployed within months wherever they were needed.
As for that hodgepodge fleet of vessels who carried them home, their fates were less predictable. Some returned from whence they came, many were lost, and a few remained with the Navy, which had requisitioned them in the first place. They came together to answer the call, then scattered as quickly as they arrived. The 'Little Ships of Dunkirk', as they'd be known, simply floated on with the tides.
'She's beautiful, isn't she?' Phil Christodolou says, beetling along a wooden pier at Penton Hook Marina in Chertsey, at the hem of south-west London and Surrey. There are around 500 boats berthed here, in the non-tidal reaches of the River Thames, but one, gently yawing under the midday sun, is a little more special than the rest.
Quisisana, a 30ft pleasure cruiser built by Thornycroft at Hampton-on-Thames 98 years ago, was entirely unremarkable at the time she was launched. By 1940, though, she was on her way to Dunkirk, and returned as one of the most famous Little Ships of them all.
'Hold on, I'll get the photo,' Christodolou says, retrieving a book about Dunkirk that features Quisisana on the cover. There in the photograph (pictured at the top of the article) is Quisisana being towed into Dover in June 1940, decks laden with 18 troops from the Coldstream Guards, who were among the last to leave the beaches after securing Dunkirk from the advancing German forces.
The image sums up the quiet heroism of these diminutive crafts. It seems as if it is heaving beneath the weight of the men, but they'd have been lost without it. 'That photograph's been used absolutely everywhere, on books, postcards, stamps, all sorts,' Christodolou says. 'It's part of living history.'
The 59-year-old Londoner, who's worked for most of his life in live events, including in the music industry and Formula One, has lived on a handsome barge, Bella G, at this end of the Thames since 2021. Across the Staines Road, the rollercoasters of Thorpe Park loom. 'Sometimes, when the wind's down, you hear the screams,' Christodolou says, cheerfully.
Soon after moving here, Christodolou met a classic boat enthusiast with close ties to the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships (ADLS). He became fascinated with the heroism of these everyday vessels, whose number is rapidly shrinking as they're lost or fall into disrepair. Moved to halt that decline, he set about trying to find one to buy and do up.
'I'd looked at a few and couldn't really find anything that was right, there were some real states out there,' he recalls. One day, Ian Gilbert, the honorary vice admiral of the ADLS, contacted him and told him about Quisisana.
'He said he'd been approached by the estate of one of the association's members, Martin Lowe, about Quisisana, which he'd owned for about a decade and hadn't been able to afford to look after. Ian said the estate wants it to go to someone who can look after her, but warned she's in Lowestoft, is a complete basket case, and needs a complete restoration.'
Christodolou, who is nothing if not impulsive, enthusiastic and solvent, didn't need to hear any more. The aforementioned photograph means Quisisana – whose name is based on an Italian phrase qui si sana, meaning 'where you are healed' – is something of a celebrity among the Little Ships, and returning her to former glory became a passion project that instantly took over Christodolou's life.
He purchased Quisisana for £5,000 in February 2022. Now, what is it they say about buying a boat…? He chuckles. 'Well, the clean version is that the two best days are the day you buy it and the day you sell it…' When he first picked Quisisana up, 'there were great big holes in her, planks were missing… She was, as I say, a basket case. We don't think she'd touched the water for at least 10 years.'
Christodolou contacted Malcolm Jones of C&M Traditional Boat Repairs, who specialises in classic wooden boat restorations and had recently refurbished a sister ship to Quisisana called Nydia, and installed his new purchase in Jones's yard in Egham. She sat there for two years while Jones set to work.
'Phil had a blank canvas to do what he wanted,' Jones, 67, says today. 'It was a perfect starting point really, exactly what you want to see. The previous owner had started to strip things out, so we could just carry on. So often you do jobs where you agonise over whether to take this or that out before you start, but this was brilliant.'
There are more veterans of Dunkirk around our waterways than you might think. The ADLS does its best to keep track of all the Little Ships still with us, and many can be seen in marinas, on rivers and pootling around our coasts, but as with lots of veterans, don't often make a great show of it. Jones has restored five or six for private owners, and owns one himself. Each bears a flag denoting its part in our national history.
Others are hidden in plain sight. It was only in recent years that I realised I'd been walking past one – the pleasure cruiser Hurlingham, which can usually be seen around Millbank – every morning on my way into the office. Like its ill-fated sister ship Marchioness, which sank disastrously in the Thames in 1989, Hurlingham was requisitioned by the Royal Navy for Operation Dynamo in 1940, but never actually left British waters.
'There are a lot of little urban myths about the Little Ships, and one is that all the owners of these boats suddenly thought they needed to help so went across the Channel. They were actually collected by the Navy, then often towed over there just to make trips from the beach to bigger ships,' Christodolou says.
'The Thames was seen as a place where there would be a load of shallow draft boats that would be the right shape and size. There's all sorts of stories, a woman who lived on hers and came back to Teddington boatyard to find all her belongings, including her cat, being put on the side of the river while they refuelled and took it.'
The basic issue at Dunkirk was that the advancing German army had funnelled the BEF into a narrow strip of land, where troops piled up on the beaches and couldn't be evacuated quickly enough. Large ships were unable to get close; the Navy was short on ways to ferry them.
'Again, it's another myth that the original skippers took the boats over. Most of the ships were skippered by members of the Navy or, as in Quisisana's case, Navy Veteran Reserve.' Specifically, at the helm of Quisisana was Sub-Lieutenant AJ Weaver. He and a naval rating took her to France and back.
'Originally they thought they'd be able to get 30-40,000 off the beach. In the end they managed over 300,000 with the Little Ships. And that's the part of the story that really got me. It's amazing, the difference they made,' Christodolou says.Christopher Nolan's Oscar-nominated 2017 film Dunkirk did a lot to revive interest in the tale. In the film, Mark Rylance plays the skipper of a Little Ship whose voyage is made even choppier by Cillian Murphy's soldier character being haunted by what he's seen at war.
'That film just moved it on to a new generation. The tourist board in Dunkirk have said there's been a massive resurgence in interest thanks to it, which is fantastic. Nolan used a lot of the real boats that went, and amalgamated various stories into it,' Christodolou says.
The finished Quisisana, which Jones and his team completed last summer, is indeed a thing of great beauty. Both men cried when the job was done. Two berths over from Bella G, she glimmers with polished- wooden superiority among the white fibreglass hulls of other boats in the marina.
At initial glance, it looks as if Jones and Christodolou, who spoke almost daily for two years as they volleyed ideas back and forth, have been entirely faithful to how Quisisana looked a century ago. And they have, to a point. 'My vision was that she's too big to be a museum piece, so you've got to make it usable. I wanted it to look traditional and then hide underneath the things that bring her up to date,' Christodolou says.
Jones, a master shipwright, revelled in the details, finding larch wood harvested from the Sandringham Estate to finish the hull's carvel planking, for instance. He and his team bent each into place around the oak ribs and secured them with copper clench nails and roves – just as the original builders would have done in the 1920s
That sort of fidelity to the original Quisisana was followed throughout the main structure and surface of the boat. Underneath, though, it's a little more up-to-date. Christodolou peels one mahogany panel back to reveal a fridge well-stocked with tins of Gordon's gin and tonic. Another unsheathes an air fryer, which he deemed an essential requirement for the modern, discerning pleasure cruiser.
'As I said to Malcolm at one point, 'You don't buy your granny Primark underwear for Christmas, do you?'' he says, by way of explanation. I turn to Jones. What was Christodolou's most outrageous request? 'Probably when he said he wanted a dolphin on the side of the boat in LED lighting.' Christodolou giggles. 'I went to a boat show and saw this company that does LED lights that follow the water line… I came back and went, 'I want that!'' He was swiftly disabused of the idea.
'Anything can be done, really, and hidden,' Jones says. 'Wi-fi, sinks, the black water tank for a modern toilet, it's all doable, it's just time and money.'
With its rich, dark wood and plush leather furnishings, the galley looks like the cigar lounge in a gentleman's club, and leads to a private berth just big enough for two people who know one another very well indeed.
Christodolou envisaged a quiet luxury about the finished product. He chose a colour called 'St James's red' for the leather and many of the furnishings, then added cushions made from red and gold silk to match the ribbon of the Dunkirk medal. In the loo are clippings and images relating to the boat's history Jones found on eBay. The chrome gauges and organ-stop switches, meanwhile, are entirely traditional, but tucked away behind a panel is a state-of-the-art Garmin chartplotter.
Other mod-cons are hidden just as elegantly. To glance at the new Quisisana is to see a beautiful example of care and craftsmanship in restoration, but the tricks and toys underneath show, if anything, an even greater level of care: in incorporating the new alongside the old, Jones and Christodolou have ensured Quisisana will remain ship shape for a very long time.
'We just spent absolutely ages working out how I can spend as much of Phil's money as I could…' Jones jokes. 'But he was so interested in everything, so involved, selecting the hides, buying so much of it himself. We need to protect the Little Ships, and this boat is just lucky it found someone like Phil, who can put so much into it.'
After buying it for £5,000, how much did he end up spending? He winces. 'About a quarter of a million… and that's a conservative estimate,' Christodolou says. But it's all worth it to him. And he'll never sell her on, he says. 'I can't part with her now.'
The plan, then, is to take Quisisana to as many Little Ship reunion events as possible. Current members of the Coldstream Guards have already been on board for a cruise, and Christodolou has shown her off up and down the Thames over the last year, enjoying many admiring glances wherever he docks.
But the goal was always to have Quisisana ready and dressed to the nines for the 85th anniversary of Operation Dynamo. To mark the occasion, Christodolou will motor up the Thames to Ramsgate, where he'll join up with a flotilla of dozens of other Dunkirk Little Ships for a very special return journey across the Channel.
'I think it'll be brilliant going over, but really quite emotional coming back in, in a flotilla of 60 or so. Being welcomed home into a Ramsgate harbour packed with cheering and waving people, especially if it's a nice sunny day, will be really quite something.' He pauses. 'Hopefully there'll be the same number of us as there were that went out…'
Today, as we putter around the marina for a few minutes on placid waters, it's hard to imagine the shivering, terrified soldiers scrambling aboard all those years ago as the Luftwaffe droned overheard. 'Oh, it's two different worlds,' Christodolou says, shaking his head.
'But this is about preservation and keeping it going. These are now the last of the veterans. It's our job to keep their memory alive, isn't it?'
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.