Three Little Ships

During just nine days in the early summer of 1940, nearly eight hundred ‘little ships’, from lifeboats and passenger steamers to small private yachts and dinghies, set off across the English Channel to rescue almost half a million men trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. Among them are three very different craft - a London fireboat from the docklands of the East End, manned by skipper Ollie Mears and his crew; a small pleasure steamer from the River Dart in Devon, commanded by 21-year-old Robby…