REMEMBRANCE 2024: 80 YEARS SINCE D-DAY AND CHISWICK’s V1 & V2


Our Remembrance Sunday Choral Requiem Mass was held on Sunday November 10th 2024. At the end of the service, we processed to the Bedford Park War Memorial outside the Parish Hall for the Act of Remembrance and two minutes silence (above) . You can watch a recording of the service here and see photographs here.

Each November since 2014 – the Centenary of the start of World War One – we have highlighted St Michael’s and Bedford Park’s links to WW1 and WW2, including the stories of the 128 names on our war memorials explored in our St Michael & All Angels World War 1 Project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

1. In 2024, we are marking 80 years since D-Day on June 6th 1944 through the works of war artist Ray Howard-Jones, who lived in Chiswick …
Invasion Scars: The first Landing Ship Tank (LST) to reach Utah Beach in Normandy on D Day, 6th June 1944, by Ray Howard-Jones. Gouache, 1944. Image by permission of Imperial War Museum and David Moore, author of  Ray Howard-Jones: My Hand is the Voice of the Sea, published by Graffeg Ltd and available here.

2. …. and significant losses on the Home Front in Chiswick that year:
– 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 here:
– Commemorating the Chiswick V2 – Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society
– Val Bott was interviewed by The Chiswick Calendar about this and Chiswick’s other WW2 experiences.
– A sudden wallop in Staveley Road – Cal McCrystal, Independent 1992.
– The day Hitler’s silent killer came falling on Chiswick – Daily Express 2014.

3. We are also displaying panels detailing some of the stories of the 128 names on our war memorials explored in our St Michael & All Angels World War 1 Project (right, click to zoom in)
The St Michael’s Remembrance archive was created by Dr David Beresford, our former churchwarden and assistant archivist, who died in December 2022.
Click here to hear David talking about the project in 2017 with Chiswickbuzz.com.

See panel below, devoted to Alexander Robinson, the son of a Churchwarden at St Michael & All Angels, who was killed in the Somme offensive in 2016. His name lives on in St Michael’s in the Bishop’s chair given by his father.

Below that is a map of the Bedford Park roads where the Fallen lived (zoom in to see more detail).

See Remembrance at St Michael & All Angels, Bedford Park