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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Garvie, Learning Project Manager at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland on behalf of the Greenock War Detectives project and has been added with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

I was still in school at the time of the Free French but I remember seeing them in the town. They looked quite strange to me because they dressed differently from our own sailors. They had the same navy blue suits, but their berets were different. They had red pom poms on the top of their beret and that’s how we knew straight away that they were French sailors.

I didn’t meet any of the sailors and just saw them about the town. They came over around 1940 and I would only have been 13 at the time. I clearly remember the day their ship, the Maille Breze, exploded. I was in my art class at the time and we just heard this tremendous bang and we all wondered what it was. It was a bang that we had never heard before, really dreadful. We were excited and afraid at the same time wondering what this big bang was and it wasn’t until we went home from school that we were told what had happened. Some of the sailors were killed and others managed to swim to safety but even those sailors were badly injured in the blast. The sailors were brought ashore and were taken to halls in Greenock. A lot of the ladies in the town went along to the halls and helped to bathe their wounds until they could be taken to hospital — the old Greenock Royal Infirmary in Duncan Street.

The dead were buried in Greenock cemetery until 1946 when the bodies were returned to France. There was a service for those who had died in St. Mary’s church. The Free French memorial on Lyle Hill was erected in memory of those who had died. There’s something about the granite that it stands on, I think it represents the solidarity of this country with France.

There was a church in Greenock called the Martyrs North Church and they gave their halls over to the Free French Navy. The sailors had a canteen there and also beds for those off on shore leave, if they didn’t want to go back to their ship. One time Charles De Gaulle came over and broadcast to the French people from Martyrs North Church just to let them know that things were going well in Greenock and this was the homeport for the Free French Navy.

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