We Came By Sea

Every day and every night when the sea was calm they came, and most days the newspapers and the websites said the same thing: ‘migrants’ in ‘small boats’ were crossing the English Channel. Rescuers were ‘overwhelmed’, coastal towns were ‘up in arms’. Over and over, the headlines and the photographs told the same story.

But no story has only one side, as the acclaimed author and journalist Horatio Clare discovered. 

In We Came by Sea, on dozens of journeys between Dover and Calais, he met lifeboat crews, volunteers who help thousands of people every year, and many more unrecognised, uncelebrated British people who are giving their all to help the vulnerable and desperate. 

In conversation with Rosie Goldsmith, Horatio tells an extraordinarily important story of our unexamined nation – a nation which is every bit as great and good as the people in the dinghies believe it to be.