In September 2015, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Blitz in World War II, the Chiswick Book Festival staged a panel talk at Chiswick House, ‘Books and the Blitz’, and an exhibition, ‘Chiswick, the Blitz and the V2’.
In November 2019, St Michael & All Angels Church displayed the exhibition again as part of its Remembrance commemorations, marking 80 years since the start of WWII and 75 years since the V1 that hit Bath Road and the first V2 which landed on Staveley Road (below).
ChiswickW4.com reported (September 7th 2015): ‘ It was 75 years ago, on September 7th 1940, that the aerial bombing blitz on London began. And 71 years ago, on September 8th 1944, the first V2 rocket landed in Staveley Road in Chiswick. Both events are commemorated this week in an exhibition and discussion in the Burlington Pavilion at Chiswick House & Gardens on Thursday 10 September which marks the opening of the 7th Chiswick Book Festival.
‘Hogarth’s House was badly damaged in the Blitz (right). And the effect on daily life in Chiswick was recorded in the book A Vicarage in the Blitz , The Wartime Letters of Molly Rich 1940 – 1944.
Molly Rich was the vicar’s wife at St Nicholas Church on Chiswick Mall, and the book is beautifully illustrated by her daughter, the artist Anthea Craigmyle.
“The letters were written to Otto, a 20-year-old refugee from Vienna who came to live with us at Chiswick Vicarage early in 1939 and quickly became part of the family,” writes Anthea in the introduction. “Fourteen months later, as Hitler invaded Europe, Otto was arrested as an Enemy Alien and sent to internment camps in England and then Australia. Otto was considered a fifth child by our mother, who wrote to him throughout the war.
“She described the life of an ordinary family living in a part of London that suffered badly during the Blitz. While trying to keep the household clean and clothed and doing a great deal of parish work, our mother dug the lawn to grow vegetables, created an air-raid shelter in the cellar and helped the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Mothers’ Union, often after a long night of fire-watching. She managed all the cooking with wartime rations and did the shopping on an old racing bike.”
Copies of the book, signed by Anthea, were on sale at the exhibition, with some of her original sketches. You can read an interview with Anthea which was published in chiswickw4.com in 2013 when the book was launched.
The ‘Chiswick, the Blitz and the V2’ exhibition was compiled by James Wisdom and Val Bott of the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society, with the help of the Local Studies department at Chiswick Library.
The exhibition includes maps, documents, newspaper cuttings and images of the period including many details of the event that put Staveley Road into the history books in 1944 – when the first V2 rocket landed a few hundred yards from Chiswick House, killing three people and leaving an enormous crater. A memorial was erected in Staveley Road on the 60th anniversary on September 8th 2004, by the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society and the Battlefields Trust.
