‘VILE’ thieves have stolen a brass Dunkirk memorial plaque - just days before Remembrance Sunday.

The plaque was removed from the outside of the Old Lifeboat Station at Poole at some point between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, say volunteers who are ‘upset and really angry’ at the violation.

The plaque commemorated the Thomas Kirk Wright Lifeboat which is exhibited inside the building and which was requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1940 as one of the heroic ‘Little Ships’ used to rescue the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.

The plaque states: “The 1938 Surf Class Lifeboat in this boathouse is a Dunkirk Little Ship. Taken from Poole to Ramsgate, the Admiralty used her to evacuate Allied troops from Dunkirk in WWII. She was the first Lifeboat to reach the beaches in France on 30 May 1940.”

Volunteer Anne-Marie Clark discovered the plaque was missing when she opened the museum on Sunday morning. “It had been there on Friday when the last volunteer was in the museum but with the awful weather on Saturday we didn’t open,” she said.“It’s just so upsetting that someone would come prepared to unscrew a plaque that really has no money value except for scrap. But it’s something very important to us as it’s there to inform anyone passing that this hidden gem is inside the Old Lifeboat Station where she served, and where she left in those dark days of war and returned to be the town’s lifeboat till 1962.”

The Old Lifeboat Station’s Facebook page said: “Our volunteers and visitors alike were utterly dismayed today to find our Dunkirk brass plaque had been removed. Operation Dynamo was a turning point so significant, where we fought together to survive, we were defiant and we would be living in a very different world today if against all the odds we hadn’t found our Dunkirk Spirit. So, to whoever took the plaque, you can’t take our pride and you can’t take our history, we speak for the boat and we share its story.”

The station said it hoped the thief may have a change of heart when they realised the plaque’s importance. Supporters of the station took to social media to voice their disgust at the ‘vile’ and ‘selfish’ act and asked ‘how could people stoop so low?’.