When Russia invaded Ukraine, Stuart Meaker had been retired from professional cricket for five months. He had some free time, a desire to help — and a large white van.
Last Tuesday, he loaded the Mercedes Sprinter with medical supplies from the Ukrainian Institute in London, and other donations dropped at the Oval, his former ground, and drove for 22 hours to a distribution centre in Lublin, Poland.
The 33-year-old former England and Surrey bowler is one of scores of Britons, from pub landlords to vets and paramedics, who have hit the road in cars, vans and minibuses in the past three weeks, delivering aid and supplies to the war zone and giving lifts to refugees.
“I don’t know a human being that could have watched the news of everyone being persecuted and uprooted from their homes and not felt they wanted to do something. It just so happened I had the time, I had the van and the facilities to fill it,” said Meaker, from Godalming in Surrey.
“I’m at an old hotel housing Ukrainian refugee children. The owner has given up his place for about 80 kids and their mums to stay while everything’s going on. I bought them a freezer as they didn’t have a way of freezing food for the children, using donations I got online. And they very kindly let me stay in one of their rooms.”
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Meaker was not the only famous face to head to Poland. On Friday David Cameron tweeted an image of himself at the wheel of a lorry filled with supplies donated to a food project in Chipping Norton, where he lives.
With two other volunteers, the former prime minister, 55, will deliver the aid to the Red Cross. “It’s going to be a long drive,” he wrote.
The actor and former footballer Vinnie Jones helped pack a 13-strong convoy of vans that travelled from Midhurst in West Sussex to Ustrzyki Dolne in southeast Poland on Monday.
Publican Digby Furneaux, 39, organised the trip, raising more than £60,000 and mobilising an army of 150 volunteers, including a plumber, builders, a musician and a café owner. The drivers dropped items ranging from tents to baby formula at a school after a Polish waitress who once worked for him contacted him and the local council. It is the first of several trips they hope to make.
He said: “Like everybody when this all kicked off three weeks ago we all felt pretty helpless. I put a call out on my pub’s Facebook page asking if anybody would be interested in volunteering and to meet at my pub to get something off the ground and had about 50 volunteers turn up. It keeps snowballing. Our vans left with our community lining the streets cheering in what was called a ‘Dunkirk convoy’.”
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On the motorways through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Poland they passed other convoys of cars and vans doing the same thing as them.
Furneaux, landlord of the Swan Inn, added: “On the way out I saw 20-30 different vans, most of them English with Ukrainian flags all over them heading back in the other direction, so you can tell what they’ve been doing. It’s everyday people taking action.”
British vets have also helped deliver aid. Till Hoermann, from Oakham in Rutland, made the 2,500-mile round trip to the border in a van packed full of donated supplies including syringes, catheters, mobile scanners and x-ray machines.
With red crosses attached to the vehicle, he met many like-minded charitable convoys: “My thinking as we drove was between feeling like being a hero and then within the next second, you think, ‘What am I doing here? This is not even a drop on the hot stone. Does this actually make sense at all?’”
Nina Babchuk, another vet, and a second-generation Ukrainian, has joined forces with Hoermann and persuaded the Royal Veterinary College to function as a distribution hub for donations for further trips and now every vet school from Carlisle to Cornwall is taking part. She said all the equipment would be used for humans, not animals.
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Charlie Hammerton, 27, a survival skills teacher from Falmouth, Cornwall, drove his Suzuki Baleno to the Medyka border crossing from Poland to Ukraine and set up a bell tent. He offered hot chocolate and marshmallows by a campfire to mothers and children. “I work with children who have been through trauma and I thought I could be useful. They’ve been dehumanised and seen their towns blown up and I wanted to put the human back into this situation.”
Hammerton also joined forces with others to find 1,000 blankets for people queueing at the border after hearing a woman had frozen to death waiting. On his way home he gave a lift to a mother, her two adult daughters and their grandmother who had fled Kharkiv, driving them 600 miles to their cousin’s home in Berlin. Hammerton, who served in the Royal Air Force, said: “I saw them standing there with just one bag and a couple of handbags. How can you say no? They showed me a video of their house. It was like a cartoon. It was a crater.”
Tom Littledyke, 31, who runs two pubs and a restaurant in Dorset, has made two trips to Ukraine in the past three weeks. Two weeks ago he went alone in his 16-seater minibus to deliver supplies and made several trips from Lviv station taxiing Ukrainians to the border.
After returning home to raise funds and collect aid, he went back with a convoy of 14 vehicles. Some dropped off supplies at the border and headed back, while others dropped two donated four-wheel drive cars and two second-hand ambulances with a contact in Ukraine who will get them to the front line.
The group had to queue for 10 hours to get back into Poland in a minibus with no heating, Littledyke said. “We went only 30km in. We sat in the minibus freezing our arses off but we had luxury compared with the tens of thousands of refugees there waiting to get out. Five people have already died at this single crossing. They are manually processing each individual and it’s costing people lives.”
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Olivia Holmes, 29, a winemaker, who drove in the convoy, said: “The Ukrainians just need as much support as they can get. The spirit and determination and will to stand their ground is amazing. If they’ve got that passion and drive, the least we can do is support them and make things easier for them.”
Khaled El Mayet, 38, who works for a software company from Cheltenham, led a convoy of six ambulances, funded by donations and filled with medical supplies, out to the border last week, delivering them to Global Outreach Doctors, which will take them into Ukraine.
His volunteer drivers included two paramedics, two British-based Ukrainian businessmen and an estate agent as well as Charlotte Carew Pole, 45, who drove out with Mary Macleod, a former Tory MP, posting pictures on Instagram.
Two weeks ago when he was raising money for the mission, Mayet’s efforts were mentioned by Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, at a press conference after he met Liz Truss, the foreign secretary. Blinken said: “We’re also seeing incredible solidarity and compassion from the British people, people like Khaled El Mayet in Cheltenham who is leading a local campaign to buy second-hand ambulances and drive them.”
After flying home on flights donated by British Airways, Mayet said: “All those countries we passed through, you would have lorries beeping and flashing at you as you went by, so there was definitely a sense of camaraderie, and many countries of people coming together for one cause.”
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On his namecheck by Blinken, he added: “A friend sent me a recording of it on Facebook and said, ‘Oh it’s being spoken about in the White House.’ I dropped my phone actually.”
