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-4- BOB TIMBRELL: NAVAL HERO Canadian Officer Saved 900 Soldiers at Dunkirk Rear-Admiral Bob Timbrell, the former vice-commandant of Royal Rhodes military college in Colwood, was a young Royal Canadian Navy officer still at a British gunnery school in Portsmouth when he was summoned from his class and told to take a boat to Dunkirk in May 1940. Aged 20, he was given command of the motor yacht Llanthony with a crew of six Newfoundland loggers, two London bus mechanics and a Royal Navy petty officer whose equipment consisted of a First World Wai' pistol, an uncorrected magnetic compass and a minefields chart. Having taken on boai'd barrels of fresh water for the troops waiting to be evacuated from the beaches, Timbrell immediately ran into a broken-down Thames pleasure steamer laden with troops, and towed it to Ramsgate. After reaching the beaches on his second trip, he was taking 16 men at a time into the yacht’s two small dinghies when a German shell exploded by the port bow, severing both anchor cables, breaking the fuel lines and stranding the ship. Timbrell had dug the propellers and rudder out of the sand when a sergeant, with eight guai'dsmen, offered help in return for a lift. The sergeant commandeered a tank in the town and drove down the beach and into the sea until its engine stopped; it was then used as an anchor to winch up the yacht while its engines were repaired. For his next trip Timbrell was given command of a flotilla of Scottish trawlers, whose skippers all seem to have been at sea before he was bom. One of the boats hit a mine and disappeai-ed in a flash, leaving flotsam but no survivors. On the next crossing Timbrell’s guardsmen, whom he has persuaded to stay w'ith him, drove off air attacks and surprised to E-boats with a Bren and two anti-tank guns. Returning for the last time to Dunkirk, he was greeted by a drunken soldier staggering down the beach as he avoided the German shell fire; the man insisted on paying for his passage with a case of brandy purloined from a French inn, then fell asleep in the wheelhouse. Timbrell returned to Portsmouth with a sorry-looking Llanthony â€"its boats were smashed, its funnels riddled with bullet holes â€"and stopped a bus outside the dockyard gates. Looking at the disheveled and diity crew, still with their anti-tank guns and brandy, the conductor asked: “Ai'e you just back from Dunkirk, Sir?” The civilian passengers were still on board as the bus took them to Whale Island. Timbrell was personally responsible for the rescue of some 900 troops from Dunkirk, and was the first Canadian of the war to be awai'ded the Distinguished Service Cross. The son of a British railway engineer in Canada, Robert Walter Timbrell was bom in Devon on Febmai7 1, 1920, and went to West Vancouver High School. At 15 he became a cadet I on the British training ship Conway, and then a midshipman in the monitor Erebus, and the cruiser Vindictive. He served in the British battleships Bai'ham and Warspite and the battle cmiser Hood in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. After the Dunkirk evacuation, Timbrell was in the destroyer Mai'gai'ee when it was run down in rough seas by a freighter, and was rescued with a handful of survivors.