Before the war Harry Parkinson was a member of the local unit of the Territorial Army which met for parades and training at the Drill Hall on Oulton Lane in Woodlesford. On Sunday 3 September 1939, when Prime Minister Neville Chamblerlain announced on the BBC that Britain was at war with Germany, Harry was on holiday in Blackpool with his wife and young son. After they returned home he quickly volunteered to join the fighting. With a background as a mechanic he was posted as a sapper to the 116 Road Construction Company of the Royal Engineers. Many of its members were also from Yorkshire with quite a few from the Harrogate area. They joined the British Expeditionary Force in France and during the months of the so-called Phoney War, when little happened, his son remembered he returned for a period of leave after which the family said their goodbyes again at Pontefract Barracks.
On 10 May 1940 the German army made a rapid advance into France and it soon led to British, Belgian and French troops being cut off and surrounded in what Winston Churchill described as “a colossal military disaster.” After they retreated towards Dunkirk nearly 340,000 British troops were taken from the beaches by an armada of large and small boats between 26 May and 4 June 1940. Dubbed by Churchill as a miracle and celebrated as “disaster turned to triumph” it is still seen as one of the successes of the war.
It’s not clear precisely where Harry Parkinson’s unit was during this period but by the second week of June they were in western France near the port at St Nazaire. There on 17 June, as part of Operation Ariel to rescue tens of thousands of service personnel, they embarked on the Lancastria, a Cunard ocean liner which had been requisitioned by the government to evacuate them. Based in Liverpool it normally carried about 1,300 passengers but it’s believed that many thousands of soldiers, airmen and civilians managed to clamber aboard.
Despite cover from RAF fighter squadrons the Luftwaffe attacked the Lancastria and the ship was sunk in the Loire estuary. It went down just 20 minutes after it was bombed with vessels in the area managing to pick up about 2,300 survivors from the oily sea whilst still being under attack. As the ship had become overloaded officers had stopped counting those clambering on and estimates of lives lost vary between 2,500 and over 6,000. Even at the lower number it was the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history, far bigger than those of the Titanic and Lusitania. The exact death toll may never be known.
In the following weeks the sinking was not reported in the British newspapers on the orders of Churchill who was worried about the effect on moral at the same time as the French government were giving in to Hitler. It was briefly mentioned in a Derbyshire paper on 5 July but it wasn’t until the end of the month that the full story emerged across the Atlantic in the American press. That prompted the government to lift the embargo allowing the British papers to make it front page news. By then, however, the war had moved on and the Battle of Britain was underway so the loss of the Lancastria was never etched in the public mind in the same way as Dunkirk.
Harry Parkinson was born in 1903 and grew up in Gomersal where his father had been a family butcher before becoming a general carrier. After serving an apprenticeship he moved to Gargrave to work as a mechanic for the Skipton Rural District Council which had a number of steam rollers and steam wagons for road works. In 1926 he married Elsie Schofield, the youngest daughter of a worker at a mill in Skipton owned by the English Sewing Cotton Company.
In 1930 the Skipton road maintenance operation was taken over by the West Riding County Council and not long afterwards Harry was transferred to their depot at Garforth near the Gaping Goose pub on Selby Road. Harry and Elsie’s son, Terry, was born in 1933 and by 1939 the family were living at 12 Back Eshald Place in Woodlesford. As well as being a member of the Territorials Harry was also a special police constable.
Harry’s friend and fellow member of the highways department, who was in the same unit and who also also died, was lorry driver Thomas Henry Siberry. Also known as Harry he was a couple of years younger than Harry Parkinson. Harry Sibbery grew up in Garforth where his father had been a miner who became a Pearl Life insurance agent. He later worked as a coal delivery man living on Church Lane. In 1932 Harry married Phyllis May Gummerson. She came from Kippax where her father was also an insurance agent. Before the war Phyllis and Harry lived at Collingham near Wetherby.
After the Lancastria sank Harry Siberry’s body, like many others, washed up several months later on a beach near St Nazaire. Just 4 officers and 21 other ranks from the 116 company survived. Siberry must have been identified in some way because a letter was sent to his parents and the news was printed in the Yorkshire Evening Post on 28 November 1940. It said he had acted as a chauffeur to his commanding officer and a survivor had reported that he was last seen jumping off the Lancastria after the ship had been bombed. He was buried at La Berniere-En-Retz cemetery.
There was no similar letter or news about Harry Parkinson. His wife had lost her father in 1939 and her mother died at about the same time as Harry was said to be missing. After the records were checked it was eventually decided he had drowned when the Lancastria went down. He was 37 years old. His body was never recovered. He is commemorated on the Dunkirk War Memorial as well as at Oulton.