From war hero to prisoner

Jul 28 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Dunkirk is a long way from Liverpool but the two places were linked by a tiny but fascinating episode of changing patriotic loyalties in WWII. Peter Elson reports

IF EVER there was a case of a dark past catching up with a man and besmirching his courageous deeds, it was the intriguing case of Eric Hamilton-Piercy.

He was the subject of one of the most bizarre episodes of World War II, which reached its climax in Liverpool Prison, Walton, in the summer of 1940.

Incarcerated there after the famous Dunkirk evacuation, Hamilton-Piercy was one of the bravest of civilians who had sailed across the Channel to France in a little boat to help rescue the British Army.

Then came the awful realisation by the authorities that Hamilton-Piercy had been a “Black Shirt” – a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists – before his brave act.

Not the best citation on a CV when your home country is at the pivotal point in a war with Nazi Germany.

Yet Hamilton-Piercy played a front-line part in what wartime premier Churchill described as a “miracle of deliverance” when British soldiers were fleeing capture and defeat by the Nazis.

However, having returned from the hell of Dunkirk with his friend, Colin Dick, acting beyond the call of duty in saving hundreds of lives, Hamilton-Piercy was arrested shortly after arriving back in England.

His fascinating tale is described in Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s critically-praised book, Dunkirk Fight to the Last Man, now out in paperback.

“I was surprised to find Black Shirts supporting the British Army against Hitler, but he and two other Black Shirt supporters went to Dunkirk on May 29-30, 1940,” says Hugh.

“After all Hamilton-Piercy and Dick did at Dunkirk, they were both arrested on their return and held under the so-called Regulation 18b of the Defence Regulations 1939.

“There was black humour as well. Just as Hamilton-Piercy stepped ashore at Ramsgate, he heard a gurgling and his badly damaged boat, called Advance, bought from the Black Shirts, sank.”

In his appeal filed from Liverpool Prison, Hamilton-Piercy stated that, after all he had done for the country at Dunkirk, “We were sent on leave, and I was arrested (at) my home in Sussex on Sunday after I got back, in the midst of my wife and four children.

“The arrest is the reward I get for what the newspapers please to call a nation’s thanks. My only crime is nearly four years ago having been a member of what was then an organisation anti-communist, and as far as I knew then, patriotically British.”

Hugh, a former barrister, says: “Hamilton-Piercy claimed he was active, organising stewards of meetings until late 1935, having been in charge of the National Defence Forces of the British Union of Fascists. But in 1935, he converted to Roman Catholicism. He stated, ‘Being a catholic bars me from having any sympathy with any country at war with Britain, as such countries have been condemned by his Holiness the Pope’.

“From September 1939 until February 1940, Hamilton-Piercy and two friends, Dick and a gay lawyer called McGuff, served in the River Thames Fire Service on their own boat.

“They were keen to help and repeatedly asked the Admiralty for volunteer work with their boat, so they responded when the call came for volunteers with small craft to assist in evacuating the British Expeditionary Force from France.”

After signing on the Royal Naval Reserve, they sailed to Dunkirk, the only civilians in a tiny convoy of seven vessels manned by Royal Naval crews.

Hamilton-Piercy wrote: “We hadn’t reached Dunkirk before we were machine gunned from swooping aircraft, but fortunately only had the top of our mast shot away.

“Some of us had never been under fire before. We remained at Dunkirk for nine hours, taking men from the beach to destroyers and cargo boats laying off in deeper water, saving in all over 450 men.

“We saw our kinsmen literally blown to pieces after we had, as we thought, deposited them in safety on the larger ships. We ourselves were deliberately bombed by a plane that had missed a destroyer and our boat was actually blown out of the water.

“A number of holes appeared on her starboard side, but fortunately none of us were hit. The boat commenced to leak and after another hour’s work, we were instructed by the lieutenant in charge of the other remaining boat (the others were destroyed) to follow him back to Ramsgate.

“This we did across the minefields, through a good deal of fog and finally arrived with only four gallons of petrol left and making water fast.”