There’s a fascinating history behind the rusted metal hull you can see on the beach at Zuydcoote to the east of Dunkirk/Dunkerque. This is the wreck of the Claude London, a British water supply barge which was run ashore during the Dunkirk evacuation on May 29, 1940.
The ship was built by Irvine's Ship Building & Dry Dock Co. Ltd. of Hartlepool in the North East of England in 1915 as one of 200 motor landing craft ordered by the British Admiralty for the Gallipoli campaign.
The barges, or ‘X’ Lighters as they were known, were designed originally for unloading larger ships anchored offshore, bringing valuable supplies from ship to shore and back.
Measuring 32m long by 6.4m wide, they had a draft of between 1.1m and 2.15m, meaning they could operate in shallow, shoreline waters.
However, not all of the ‘X’ craft were employed in Gallipoli, and this barge – known as HMS X37 – remained in England and served as a transport vessel from 1916 to 1919, ferrying supplies from the Navy dockyards in Chatham, Kent to Calais and back.
In 1922 she was sold to civilian boatmen working in the River Thames estuary who gave her the name ‘Claude’ and modified the craft to be a water carrier capable of transporting up to 200 tonnes of water to ships anchored in the English Channel.
During Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of over 338,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers from Dunkirk in May 1940 she was once again pressed into Admiralty service and was tasked in delivering fresh drinking water to Allied troops encircled in northern France by advancing German forces.
This time it was to be a one-way trip though and she was beached on May 29, 1940, near to Zuydcoote where she completed her mission and can be found today.
Visible at low tide, you can still see the general structure of the ship and on closer inspection the rivets which held her steel construction together. Part of the bow is missing, and she’s certainly suffered from 85 years of erosion by the sea but that doesn’t diminish her legacy.