Calais welcomes the return of its former lifeboat, Marshal Foch II
In Calais, a witness to the city’s maritime history is making a comeback after 50 years of absence. The Maréchal Foch II lifeboat has just returned to its home port to start a new life there this summer.
Faced with the silhouette of the old canoe still hitched to the trailer of the truck, Yves Goubelle struggles to hide his emotion.
“It’s funny”, release the septuagenarian while wiping his tears, “I wouldn’t have recognized him”. It must be said that it has been almost fifty years since Marshal Foch II returned to Calais!
The Maréchal Foch II is a lifeboat that marked the history of maritime rescue in the Cité des Six Bourgeois. Built in 1949 in Lorient, it was at the Calais rescue station that it fell victim.
In the sixties, almost all the men of Yves Goubelle’s family sailed on it.
From his jacket, the retiree religiously takes out a copy of a page from the local newspaper, Nord Matin Juillet 1967, which headlines on the bravery of his father and his uncles: “5 men, 5 brave”. Jean, René, Raymond, Georges, Marcel, all participated in rescues on this canoe.
A boat that returns and memories that resurface. Leaning on his cane, Jean Hagneré made the trip especially for this day. The Calaisien tells how he found himself dropped in an epic rescue one winter morning.
“It was a Sunday. The weather was bad, there was a hit of tobacco. A sailboat had left Boulogne but when it passed Cap Gris Nez, it broke the engine. So we went to get it. I I threw a touline at him, but as he was old, the bow of the sailboat tore off. So we had to maneuver in some hell of a hollow! But we recovered them. We left at 11 a.m. and returned to 5 p.m. I especially remember that I was hungry…. I hadn’t eaten anything, I was 17 years old” he smiled. “Today I’m happy to see him back here.”
Because after 25 years of good and loyal service on the Opal Coast, the lifeboat had left Calais for the island of Oléron.
There, he is known to have mixed fortunes. Bought by individuals, converted to yachting, she almost ended up scrapped, before her last owner in Rochefort-sur-Mer launched an appeal for her takeover. The Regional Federation for Culture and Maritime Heritage (FRCPM) then acquires it. And this is how Marshal Foch II returns to his original home port.
After 17 hours by truck from Rochefort, the old lifeboat was craned by air at the FRCPM shipyard in Calais.
“Maritime heritage is a real issue in Calais with the project of a maritime museum. It is therefore important that we recover here in Calais a canoe which has been part of its history” says Marcel Charpentier, president of the FRCPM.
“It is still in good condition, since it was sailing until this summer. There is just a little maintenance to do. We are going to give it a look close to its past: the white hull will be repainted in green, the color of the lifeboats.
This summer, if all goes well, Marshal Foch II will be relaunched where he will provide tourist visits in the port of Calais.
A new life for those who spent their life saving it!