Silver Crescent – The War Years
The 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings takes place this week and one of the commemorative events in Falmouth will be an 80 boat flotilla on the Carrick Roads on the 6th June. The flotilla will remember the occasion of the largest seaborne invasion in history and honour the bravery and sacrifice of the Allied Forces troops that took part. There were many Allied Forces stationed in and around Falmouth during the war and some of these locations will be passed by the flotilla as they make their way down the Carrick Roads, finishing off near Gyllyngvase Beach.
One of the boats that will be taking part in the flotilla is ‘Silver Crescent’, a boat based at Mylor Yacht Harbour. Silver Crescent was designed by Mr John Bain and was constructed by the highly respected boat yard of James A. Silver & Co of Rosneath on the Clyde. She was built with pitch pine planking on substantial English oak frames with American elm timbers between the sawn frames and finished with teak decks. One of the Silver Leaf class of Motor Yachts, she originally had a single shaft with one large Thornycroft petrol engine and a smaller Morris wing engine with a chain drive to the shaft.
Silver Crescent was launched on 6th July 1938, and after the outbreak of war in September 1939, she was requisitioned on 18th June 1940 for mine observation patrol in the North Sea, stationed at Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders. By November of that year she had been acquired by the Ministry of War Transport under the Defence (General) Regulations 1939.
In September 1941 she had moved to the Firth of Forth as a Boom Defence Patrol Vessel and in June 1943 she was reallocated to the National Fire Service in Dundee on the River Tay. Silver Crescent clearly had a varied and challenging war which can best be summarised by this quote from Yachting Monthly in July 1941 about her:
“One day perhaps she will come back to her own, but maybe not. That – and much more – is in the lap of the gods”
Now in her 86th year, Silver Crescent can be seen proudly still going from strength to strength in the inner harbour at Mylor Yacht Harbour in Falmouth, Cornwall.
Black and white image courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.