East Grinstead

You can see an East Grinstead Roll of Honour page on this website created by John Harrison.

My sister and I had been staying with our grandparents in Bexhill in August 1939 and had, with our Aunt, visited a friend of hers who had a notice in her window saying, “Don’t worry! It may never happen.”
I was nine years old a few days after the war began. We lived […]

East Grinstead, Sussex
A quiet small market town, not noted especially for anything of great importance, many interesting buildings, places of worship and a very good hospital.
I had been married for just a month when war was declared and very soon East Grinstead, like many other small towns and villages, became a hive […]

My childhood memories:-
I was about 9 years old, when, in East Grinstead, a Bomb was dropped on the Cinema, and the film that was being shown was “Random Harvest”. A carnage ensued.I sat with Granny, watching the bodies being taken to the mortuary and the little church next to the cemetery.
We used […]

The Fieseler Fi 103/FZG-76 (Vergeltungswaffe-1, V-1), known as the Flying bomb, Buzz bomb or Doodlebug, was the first guided missile used in war and the forerunner of today’s cruise missile.
The name Vergeltungswaffe, meaning “reprisal weapon”, was coined by German propaganda minister Goebbels to signify reprisal against the Allies for the bombing […]

As several contributors have already mentioned, the Whitehall Cinema, and several other buildings in London Road, were hit by a cluster of bombs from a lone German raider on 9 July 1943. I witnessed the attack at close hand.
I was exactly five and a half years old that day. I had been evacuated with my […]

My mother, Irene May Chatfield, was born and raised in East Grinstead and lived there during the war. Before the war she worked for Dixon’s Chemist in the High Street in the office above the shop. She became very good friends with Mr. Woosenham, the chemist at Dixon’s, and his family who lived in the […]

East Grinstead was our nearest town and was home to Archibald McIndoe’s pioneering work on burns injuries to war victims, mainly RAF personnel. I can remember the walking wounded in normal uniform but with white shirts and red ties, most terribly scarred and one I recall having a hole right through his throat. Early in […]

East Grinstead Winter 1940-41.
Having arrived back from a course on new equipment, promoted to Bombadier at the ripe old age of 17 I was sent to command a new searchlight cluster site at East Grinstead. On arrival I found a 150cm searchlight,120cm circa 1916 and a 90cm (searchlights are named after the diameter of the […]

Memories of WWII - Maurice Dann
I spent the first years in hospital in chailey in susex,treatment was for tb we spent every day outside.so we watch the dog fights over our heads.i left hospital in 1942 i was 8 years old, went home to east grinstead.the german raids went over every night my family all […]