THERE is a scene in the film Dunkirk, which has recently been showing at the Curzon Cinema, which shows survivors of that military disaster and magnificent rescue epic boarding trains to take them to destinations where they could be temporarily reorganised, fed and in most cases re-clothed.

One of these destinations was Knutsford Station.

As a small boy returning one hot June afternoon from the Silk Mill Street infants’ school to my home at the White Bear Inn in Canute Square, I found my mother serving tea in the inn’s courtyard to a score or so of men sitting around the walls who were obviously soldiers but who were mostly in a dishevelled state of undress.

I was later told that they were from a place called Dunkirk.

Also outside the White Bear and along Manchester Road and King Edward Road was a long line of private cars being driven to Knutsford Station to pick up men similarly attired and take them to Tatton Park via the Mere Lodges.

The good citizens of Knutsford had reacted patriotically and humanely to the call for their assistance.

The town should always be proud of itself for what it did in those fraught and uncertain days of war.

Later my flirtatious nanny took me to see the hundreds of brown bell tents erected inside the park walls along Ashley Road.

As for the White Bear, throughout the war it was to be the very centre (a veritable hub) for off-duty soldiers, whether they were Dunkirk survivors, paratroopers, artillery men stationed at High Legh, airmen from the night-fighter station at Byley or later swarms of American soldiers belonging to General Patton’s divisional headquarters.

The Heath becoming an American camp and the White Bear being regarded as the unofficial headquarters of the parachute regiment (?), it was all extremely exciting for this then small boy.

John Howard Knutsford