The Medway Queen Preservation Society is looking for volunteers and trustees.
Trustees with financial management and fundraising expertise, as well as general volunteers, are urgently required for the ongoing restoration of the 1924-built, 180ft (55m) paddle steamer Medway Queen.
The historic paddle steamer PS Medway Queen is being fitted out, berthed on Gillingham Pier in Kent, England. Saved from its fate as a derelict, a core group of volunteers formed the Society to save the ship which saved 7,000 Allied servicemen during the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940.
Contact John Kempton on +44 (0)1634 575717 or by email at [email protected].
HER HISTORY:
PS Medway Queen was built at the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company in Troon, Scotland, in 1924 for service on the River Medway and in the Thames Estuary. Trialled on the River Clyde, she was delivered to be part of the "Queen Line" fleet of the New Medway Steam Packet Company based at Rochester, Kent.[2] She steamed the Thames on the routes from Strood and Chatham, to Sheerness, Herne Bay and Margate in Kent; and Clacton and Southend in Essex.
After attending the coronation Fleet Review for George VI at Spithead in 1937, she was converted to oil-fired steaming by Wallsend Slipway & Engineering Company in 1938.
Requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a minesweeper, she was renumbered No J 48 (N 48), serving for the duration of World War II in the 10th minesweeping flotilla, protecting the English Channel.
Her first task in 1939 was evacuating Kent children from Gravesend to East Anglia.[3] She was refitted in the shipyard of the General Steam Navigation Company (Deptford Creek), her aft being modified to take minesweeping gear. She operated patrolling the Straits of Dover. In October 1940 Operation Dynamo was launched to rescue the retreating British Army soldiers from Dunkirk in northern France. HMS Medway Queen became part of the flotilla of little ships. Medway Queen was fitted with a 12-pounder gun and two machine guns. She left with PS Sandown, PS Thames Queen, PS Gracie Fields, PS Queen of Thanet, PS Princess Elizabeth, PS Laguna Belle and PS Brighton Belle. She was to make seven crossings.
On her first trip, soldiers were taken off the beaches in lifeboats and ferried to the ship. On her return to Dover, her arrival coinciding with an air raid. She shot down a German aircraft outside the harbour. The "Brighton Belle" ran over sunken wreckage and began to sink. All of her passengers and crew were rescued by the Medway Queen without loss of life, and heavily overloaded she made the harbour.
On her second trip she took the soldiers directly off the beach- which required more skill, but was a lot faster. They used a technique with oily bags to conceal their distinctive wash from patrolling aircraft. On later trips, the Medway Queen penetrated the damaged Dunkerque port and took off men from a concrete jetty or mole.[3] Men were discharged at Ramsgate rather than Dover, where the vessel was re-oiled and reprovisioned.[3]
On Monday 3 June Vice Admiral Ramsey gave the order that all ships were to leave Dunkirk by 2.30 the following morning. This was the Medway Queen's seventh trip. She was at the mole in Dunkerque when a destroyer moored astern of her was driven forwards by an explosion and smashed her starboard paddle box, she sustained considerable damage. Medway Queen limped back to Dover with 400 French soldiers on board. By then, she had rescued 7,000 men.
She gained four awards for gallantry, having shot down three enemy aircraft, made seven crossings and rescued 7000 men. In view of this remarkable achievement in rescuing so many Allied troops from France, she earned the title of "The Heroine of Dunkirk".In 1942 she was converted to a mine sweeping training ship, and served out the war in this capacity
