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My Queen previously Gondolier Queen
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Another of Ridall's Red Cruisers at Dartmouth is My Queen, whose name was Gondolier Queen when she went to Dunkirk. At that time she was working as a passenger craft in the Poole and Swanage area in Dorset.
She was built in 1929 by a small Essex boatbuilder, Husk & Son of Wivenhoe. Gondolier Queen, although intended for passenger carrying from the outset, was an almost open, single-deck vessel with a small wheelhouse amidships. For most of her life she remained that way. Her services were retained by the Navy after the evacuation, and she is next heard of as a pleasure boat at Southend where she remained until the early 1970s.
George Wheeler Launches then brought her to the Thames, running a water-bus service between Westminster Pier and Greenwich. From there she went to the West Country and was given a new enclosed saloon, a top deck and an upper wheelhouse.
My Queen carries her passengers well, up to 169 of them at a time, for she has a very broad beam for her length. She has a shallow draft and John Ridalls, whose father started the family firm in 1930, says that My Queen "could float in a bucket."
During the season she carries boatloads of American visitors up the River Dart to Totnes. Many of them have come here, since the day in 1944 when 485 American landing craft went out of the River Dart bound for the D-Day landings four years after the Dunkirk evacuation. It is fitting that so many survivors re-kindle their memories on a boat that also went to war. Indeed, when France's President Mitterrand visited the area, it was on My Queen that he sailed up the Dart to look again at Brookhill House, wartime base of the Free French Forces, where he served with General de Gaulle.
It is a strange coincidence that Gondolier Queen has come to work alongside her wartime companion at Dunkirk. Her present owners, who bought her two years ago, did not know much about her history then, but now appreciate and preserve her all the more for that.
Source: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 19 & 20
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