By Connie Leinbach
Commander Derek Powles was rueful that this year was his last to represent Great Britain at the annual British Cemetery Ceremony.
He was one of several British, Canadian and Coast Guard officials at the event May 10 commemorating the four British sailors whose bodies washed ashore on Ocracoke after their ship had been torpedoed on May 11, 1942, by a German U-boat.
Powles, the British Naval Forces Naval Attache, participated in the ceremony for the last three years, said he and his wife and daughter would leave the United States to a new assignment in Plymouth, UK.
“We love the island and the community,” he said as he helped clean up after the reception in the Ocracoke Community Center.
During the ceremony at the plot of land that is Britain, Powles told the crowd that the British trawler the HMT Bedfordshire was among the Royal Navy Patrol that kept the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes open for the British Navy.
While these trawlers pressed into military service were escort vessels, they were in the first line of fire as U-boats parked off the coast took aim. The Bedfordshire was one of many casualties.
“These tough ex-fishermen did not fully embrace Royal Navy discipline and one of the more polite names for them was “Churchill’s Pirates,” making it very fitting that they are so closely associated with Ocracoke,” Powles said.
Following the Bedfordshire sinking, Alice Wahab Williams donated the land beside Teeter’s Campground in which the bodies of four British sailors are interred.
