1900s-1945
In May 2025, villages and towns across the country paused to remember the eightieth anniversary of Victory in Europe, and Leigh was no exception. The parish church marked the occasion with a flower display, filling the building with colour during the anniversary month. Alongside the flowers, the village's local history society prepared a set of displays for the church entrance, drawing together reminders of what the end of the war in Europe had meant for this village back in 1945. Visitors arriving for services or simply to see the arrangements could pause at the entrance and take in a story that began eighty years earlier.
The news that the war in Europe was over was announced on 8 May 1945, and Leigh, like communities everywhere, treated it as a moment worth celebrating properly. The village school closed for two days, giving children a holiday that must have felt very different from the ordinary breaks in the calendar. After nearly six years of rationing, blackouts, air raid warnings and anxious news from the front, the announcement marked the end of a long chapter.
The celebrations for the children came a little later, and the local press took note. The Tonbridge Free Press reported on 18 May 1945 on a "V-Party" laid on for the young people of the village. Nearly one hundred children gathered for sports on the Green, and tea was served in the Village Hall. About ninety of them received prize money, and every child went home with a Victory gift of 1s 6d — a small sum, but a tangible token of the occasion. There was a treat of a more modern kind too: a motor-van dispensed free ices on the Green, a novelty that must have gone down well on a May afternoon. The day was rounded off with a dance for the adults, so the celebrations belonged to the whole village rather than the children alone.
There was one more date in that busy month. Empire Day was celebrated at Leigh school on 24 May 1945, and this carried its own significance, because the school had not marked Empire Day since 1939. Its return after six years of war was itself a quiet sign that life was edging back towards normal patterns.
The displays at the church entrance in 2025 also recalled the harder years that lay between 1939 and that celebratory May. The church itself had not escaped the war. On 25 August 1940 a service was interrupted by an air raid warning, and on 6 October that year no service could be held at all for the same reason. More dramatically, the church roof was struck by a bullet on 16 September 1940 during a fight overhead with German planes, though the damage amounted to no more than one broken tile. Worse followed on 13 November 1940, when an incendiary bomb penetrated the chancel roof. It was a shopkeeper who spotted the danger, calling out the fire brigade and alerting the vicar at 5.25 in the morning. Later in the war, on 27 June 1944, an unexploded phosphorous bomb was found in the old churchyard; it had damaged some of the graves near Church Hill. Amid all this, village life adapted in small ways — in February 1942 the choir took in ladies for the first time, because there were no longer enough boys to fill the stalls.
The story of evacuation is another thread the displays picked up. The movement of London schoolchildren out of the capital began on 1 September 1939, and Leigh received 176 children and 4 teachers from St Vincent RC Convent School, a school based in Westminster. They were not the only arrivals: the school log recorded that approximately 230 children in total were received under the Government Evacuation Scheme, and Leigh School itself was used as a disbursing point for the newcomers.
Sharing a small village school between two communities was never going to be simple. The local school had re-opened on 2 October after the hop-picking holidays, and at first the evacuee children used the Institute rooms. A shift system was worked out: St Vincent's girls and infants attended from 2pm to 4.30pm, while the boys came in the morning, from 9am to 12.30pm. Even so, the arrangement ended on 6 November 1939, with St Vincent's Seniors accommodated at the Institute instead. By December 1939 the school roll stood at 590 — an extraordinary figure for a village school. Staffing reflected the merger: the LCC sent Miss C Leigh and Miss Clark, while Miss O'Brien, Mrs Joiner and Miss Linthorne came from St Vincent, working alongside the regular Leigh staff, Miss Ellis and Miss Buxton. In time the evacuees set up their own school in the village hall.
Relations between the two sets of children took some working out. Local children found the St Vincent's youngsters a little alien at first — different habits, different backgrounds, arriving from a world away in Westminster. Yet some evacuees formed lasting friendships with the families who billeted them, bonds that outlasted the war itself. Many of the children had begun returning home by 1940, as the feared bombing of London failed to materialise in the early months.
Eighty years on, the flowers in the church and the displays at its entrance gave Leigh a chance to hold both halves of that story together: the disruption and danger of the war years, and the relief and celebration of May 1945.