By Will Hazell, https://www.falmouthuncovered.co.uk/
For most of its history the Princess Pavilion has played host to various pleasant things, but
in June 1940 it was instead a scene of pandemonium.
Scores of troops and assorted refugees fleeing the German invasion of France had arrived in Falmouth and been taken to the pavilion for processing. There was little official infrastructure to receive them, meaning that local volunteers, such as Evelyn Radford, had to step up.
Evelyn wrote a diary entry about her experience, painting a vivid picture of the chaos, as names were taken and lodgings were found.
‘Thursday, June 20: What a mix-up, civilians of all sorts, British subjects with remarkable English or none at all, French subjects speaking English perfectly, Malays with no known language... a sprinkling
of Spanish republican survivors, livid at the word “refugee”... Polish red cross, Czech airmen, French
and British all services, War Graves Commission, Imperial Airways, Standard Oil Co., Women’s Auxiliary drivers, a young woman with several children and twin babies of five weeks.
'They pour in steadily, the luggage pile mounts to the ceiling, congestion is awful. At one time I find myself interpreting in Polish which I don’t know (but find here and elsewhere that it works pretty well to speak Serbian until it clicks).’
The work did not stop when darkness came. Evelyn wrote that: ‘All through the night an incessant
stream... Canteen never stops. At 5:30[am] the stream stops. Step out in the dawn over hundreds lying
on the floor of the verandah, grass and bandstand.’ It’s quite an image!
The Dunkirk evacuation (Operational Dynamo) gets a great deal of attention today, but Operation Ariel, the evacations from the western ports of France, gets little notice. It’s a shame, because Falmouth played a large role. More than 6,000 people landed here in just over a week — the hundreds who met Evelyn Radford being only a small percentage of the total.
Sources: Falmouth’s Wartime Memories (1994) by Alan ‘Trelawny’ Symonds and ‘Operation Ariel and Falmouth – June 1940’ by Linda Batchelor, available on the NMMC blog, Maritime Views.
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