St Michael & All Angels Church, Bedford Park, marked Remembrance weekend in 2024 with an exhibition marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day in June 1944 and significant losses on the Home Front that year, including the V1 and V2 rockets which landed in Chiswick.
The church’s Remembrance Sunday Choral Requiem Mass on November 10th 2024 began at 9.55am, followed by the procession to the Bedford Park Memorial Seat, outside the Parish Hall, for the two minutes’ silence at 11am. Many attended the service in the church and the Act of Remembrance outside.
The 2024 Remembrance Exhibition featured images of D-Day painted by Ray Howard-Jones, an accredited war artist from Wales, who lived locally and worshipped at St Nicholas Church in Chiswick. They include “Invasion Scars: The first Landing Ship Tank to reach Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day, 6th June 1944” (above) and “Sea Transport: Poles loading bombs. Watercolour, 1944” (below) which are both in the Imperial War Museum.
Ray (Rosemary) Howard-Jones was a renowned Welsh war artist, sea painter, mosaicist, poet and Christian mystic. During WW2 she was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) to produce paintings of the fortifications on islands in the Bristol Channel and preparations for D-Day around Penarth and the Cardiff Docks. WAAC accepted 15 of her paintings, now held by the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, Amgueddfa Cymru/Museum Wales and other British galleries.
The Exhibition also recorded significant losses on the Home Front in Chiswick that year, including:
– the death of Mabel Harmer, one of only two women on our war memorials and the only one from WW2, who was killed by a bomb which landed in Thornton Avenue on June 30th 1944;
– a V1 ‘doodlebug’ which landed in Bath Road in August 1944, destroying Chiswick Polytechnic (now ArtsEd) and blowing out the East Window of St Michael & All Angels Church; and– the first V2, which landed in Staveley Road, Chiswick, on September 8th 1944. Read more about this on the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society website: Commemorating the Chiswick V2.
The exhibition was held in memory of David Beresford, former archivist and churchwarden who led the St Michael & All Angels Church World War 1 Project, tracking the lives of the 128 people named on its war memorials. David died in 2022 at the age of 82. You can see details and images from his work on the St Michaels WW1 website, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
From 2014 till 2018, to mark the centenary of WW1, David Beresford created illustrated panels which were displayed in the church, commemorating those who had died in each of the years 1914-1918. The stories of all 128 names are told in detail on the WW1 website, with maps and details of the roads where they lived.
Several of these panels were displayed as part of the Exhibition.
