Remembering Wartime Ascot Sunningdale
and Sunninghill 1939-1945

by Christine Weightman

A new local history book by a Friends member was published May 2006. This completes Christine Weightman's studies in the history of Ascot Sunningdale and Sunninghill which began with Cheapside in the Forest of Windsor covering the general history of this area with a focus on one of the oldest inhabited villages, Cheapside and Sunninghill. This was followed by The Bobby's Notebook - On the Beat in Early Victorian Sunninghill. The new book is called Remembering Wartime Ascot Sunningdale and Sunnninghill 1939-1945.

 The lady who sat on a bomb, the ATS girl living at the racecourse, the evacuee knitting squares on the heath, the yank in a ditch at Sunninghill Park and the Italian POW who stayed on, these are five of the people who appear in Remembering Wartime. The book is based on 45 interviews with those who lived in the area during the war. Some have now moved away, back to the USA in one case, but their memories of the war years in Ascot Sunningdale and Sunninghill were as fresh as if it were yesterday.

The conversations were followed by research at the Public Record Office, the Berkshire Record Office and the Imperial War Museum. It covers the Home Front with the problems of rationing, shortages and blackout, the many active organisations from the Home Guard to the WVS and the issue of evacuation when a local population of less than 8000 took in 1600 evacuees from the bombing in London and several of these settled here afterwards. As well as the evacuees there were the refugees and heads of state who found shelter at the Berystede Hotel or in the large houses of South Ascot and Sunningdale

Even more people came into the area as soldiers or airmen. The racecourse saw a succession of army regiments come and go. The RAF had a convalescent hospital at Silwood Park and the Ninth Army of the USAAF planned for D Day at Sunninghill Park. More reluctant visitors to Ascot arrived at the internment camp on the edge of Swinley Woods. Enemy aliens and members of the British Union of Fascists had to rub along together there in the first years of the war and they were followed by German and Italian prisoners of war. Some of these stayed on here too. Remembering Wartime offers a comprehensive record of life in Ascot Sunningdale and Sunninghill between 1939 and 1945.

Remembering Wartime Ascot Sunningdale and Sunnninghill 1939-1945, 127 pages, 60 maps and photographs, index, ISBN0-9537945-2-0, available from Chapmans' Sunninghill or from: Cheapside Publications, Heronsbrook Cottage, Ascot, Berkshire, telephone. 01344 623820, price £10 plus £2 postage. The two earlier publications are still available from this address.