James Conway, Stockport's Cockleshell Hero
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James Conway, Stockport’s Cockleshell Hero In April 2017, local artists were invited to submit designs for a memorial to commemorate the participation of Stockport’s James Conway in Operation Frankton, the official name of the raid which will always be remembered as that of the Cockleshell Heroes. The successful design by Luke Perry was unveiled that December, 75 years on from the raid. It stands on what had been the empty corner of Edward Street and Wellington Road South (the A6), alongside the Coroner’s Court, across the road to the south from the Town Hall and to the east from the Art Gallery & War Memorial. James was the son of Thomas Conway and his wife Mary Ann née Kelly, a local couple, both born in the borough. They had married on 7th January 1905 at St. Joseph’s R.C. Church. In the 1911 census Thomas described himself as an excavating labourer and Mary Ann a ring spinner in a cotton mill. They had three children, Mary aged 5, Thomas aged 3 and new-born Harriett. I believe William joined them in 1912, Joseph in 1914 and finally, a good few years later, James, whose birth was registered in Stockport in the fourth quarter of 1922. The father Thomas was only 49 when he died in 1929, and the 1939 Register found widowed Mary Ann living at 20 Heaton Mersey View, Edgeley with three of her children: Mary, Joseph and James, who was a milkman with the Co-op. (Heaton Mersey View has gone. It was not in the 1970 A to Z street map, for example, but the 1939 Register suggests it was close or adjacent to Larkhill Road, which in 1970 was still neighboured by several small streets between it and Brinksway below. They have since been demolished and area landscaped.) Operation Frankton came at a low point in the war, December 1942, when opportunities to strike at the enemy on the occupied continent were limited. The aim was to sink blockade- running German merchantmen moored in Bordeaux harbour which were supplying the Reich with strategic material. The trouble was, it was one of the most strongly defended bases in occupied France, many miles from the ocean and safe from the Royal Navy. The plan was for six two-man canoes to be delivered to the mouth of the estuary of the Gironde by submarine and then paddled the 70 miles upriver to attach magnetic limpet mines to their targets. The canoes, fifteen feet long, flat-bottomed and canvas-sided, each bore the name of a fish: Cachalot, Catfish, Coalfish, Conger, Crayfish, and Cuttlefish. Strictly speaking, they were not canoes, they were cockles, hence the name of the 1955 movie. The commander of the raid Major ‘Blondie’ Hasler was in Catfish, and Marine James Conway was in Lt. ‘Jack’ Mackinnon’s Cuttlefish. I gather James (shown below) was just short of 20 when he set off on the mission. (The movie, based only loosely on the raid, gave fictional names to everyone, so I can’t tell you which actor represented James Conway.) Late on 7th December, the submarine started off-loading the twelve men, and things went badly from the outset. Cachalot was ripped, and its crew were obliged to stay behind with the equally disappointed 13th man, the reserve they had brought to be on the safe side. Five boats set off instead of six, but they soon hit dangerously turbulent water caused by cross-tides and cross-winds, and contact was lost with Coalfish; its crew made it to shore but were taken prisoner. Having survived that battering, the remaining four canoes encountered even worse conditions, which capsized Conger and left them no choice but to scuttle it. Its two crewmen were towed for a mile or so by two of the three remaining canoes, Hasler’s Catfish and Mackinnon’s Cuttlefish, to as close to the shore as possible, where Hasler reluctantly told them that in the interests of the mission they would have to swim for it. They either drowned or died of hyperthermia: one body was eventually washed up and buried but not the other. This was early December, remember, and the men were soaking wet. The plan was for their journey up the Gironde to take four days. Obviously, they could only move in the dark, as silently as possible, lying low and getting what sleep, rest and food they could during the day. Fortunately, the few people they encountered were sympathetic locals. The next setback, however, came during the first night while still at the mouth of the river, when Catfish and Crayfish lost contact with Cuttlefish with McKinnon & James Conway in it. Catfish and Crayfish battled on through a second, third, fourth and unplanned fifth night on the river and finally made it to Bordeaux. One pair took the west side and the other the east, and on the night of 11th/12th December they attached mines to several vessels, at least five of which were damaged or sank, albeit in shallow water. At the outset in England, the thirteen men had been put on board the submarine (HMS Tuna) before they were told the mission was the real thing and not a training exercise, and when one of them asked what the exit plan was, Hasler told them there wasn’t one: they would have to use their initiative to get over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain and make their way to Gibraltar. The two remaining pairs set off separately to do exactly that, but the pair from Crayfish were soon taken prisoner. Major Hasler and his fellow crewman Marine Bill Sparks from Catfish set off in what might be thought the wrong direction, the north east, but it was to make contact with the Resistance’s Marie-Clare Escape Line, normally used for downed airmen. With their invaluable and courageous help, the two men made it to Spain, Gibraltar and ultimately back to England, the only ones to do so of the ten who had set off from the sub. Both survived the war. So, what happened to the six in the team who were captured? The first to be murdered were the crew of Coalfish, but accounts vary as to when. They were captured on the first full day, 8th December, and the CWGC uses that date for their deaths, but other websites suggest 11th or 12th December. I use the word murdered because every man on the raid was in uniform, which meant that by international law they had to be treated as prisoners of war if captured, but six weeks earlier Hitler had secretly issued his Commando Order, instructing that captives of this kind were to be shot. This Order ultimately led to the execution of a number of German officers after the war for war crimes. Jack MacKinnon and James Conway from Cuttlefish managed to evade capture for four days. They headed south-east and were sheltered by a family in the village of Cessac, but they were betrayed and arrested by the Gendarmerie at La Réole, 30 or so miles southeast of Bordeaux, and handed over to the Germans. Mackinnon had been admitted to the hospital for treatment for an infected knee. The men from Crayfish, which had sunk at least two of the ships, met the same fate. The exact date and place of their murder is not known, but the date used by the CWGC for all four of them, based on German records, is 23rd March 1943, well over four months after the raid. The Coalfish crew were probably fortunate to be executed as soon as they were. It would be August 1945 before Mrs. Conway was formally notified of her son’s death. As with the Dam Busters raid, the real benefit of Operation Frankton was not so much the damage inflicted on the enemy as the boost to the nation’s morale: our fighting men were seen to be taking the war to the enemy in the bravest fashion possible. Indeed, from the outset, Operation Frankton had been recognised by those who planned it as all but a suicidal. Today, as well as visiting local memorials by the Gironde, you can walk the Frankton Trail, which follows Hasler & Sparks’s route from Blaye north-east to Ruffec. The Combined Military Services Museum at Malden has a Cockle Mk.II of the type used in the raid, but whether it is Cachalot, which got to the Gironde but was unable to take part in the raid, is open to doubt. Footnote In this context it is perhaps worth noting hat a victim of another legendary WW2 commando raid is remembered on local war memorials. Stockport solicitor Robert James Glover Burtinshaw was one of 169 Commandos killed in the St. Nazaire Raid earlier in 1942, when HMS Campbelltown was deliberately rammed into the dry dock and blown up, putting that part of the port out of action for the duration. He is remembered on the Bramhall civic war memorial, the one in St. Michael’s Church, Bramhall, the one in St. George’s, Heaviley, and that of Davenport Rugby Club on Headlands Road. IRC Sept 2019 .