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As a result a troop of soldiers from the 45th Infantry Regiment (later the Sherwood Foresters) was despatched from Canterbury and the “battle” occurred in Bossenden Wood. In the course of this, he shot the brother of a constable who had been sent to arrest him.

This meant that Dunkirk became known as the wildest place in Kent and on Oak Apple Day in 1838 there was trouble when a Cornish cellarman called John Thom, masquerading as Sir William Courtenay, started an uprising to aid the poor, promising to remove obstacles to the smuggling trade. There was no shortage of business as Canterbury was a place to which pilgrims would travel to visit the shrine of Thomas à Becket and some would stop off at the Red Lion for a pint and a bit of debauchery on the way. The area was not part of any parish and so was without law and order and it quickly became a den of thieves. Nearby Faversham was notorious for its smuggling and it was said that the folk in Dunkirk shared the profession. The hamlet was established by a group of “low persons of suspicious character”, who were probably smugglers. Today the main road has bypassed what is left of the great forest and the old London road through the village is quiet. I was early for the boat and worn out by the weekend’s excitements and so I answered the question that the signpost had raised. I discovered this on my way to Dover when I saw the sign and decided that I needed to stop for a snooze. That is entirely not what happened.ĭunkirk was there a long time before that. I think I probably assumed that it was named in honour of the adventures in 1940, when the beaches of Dunkirk were used to evacuate what was left of the British Expeditionary Force.

I’d seen it before on many trips from London to Dover, but I never stopped nor asked the question why it was there. You might think this makes no sense because Dunkirk is in France and Britain has not owned any part of France since Bloody Mary lost Calais, but there is a village called Dunkirk in Kent. Strange though it may seem, Dunkirk is reckoned to have been the scene of the last battle on British soil.