Guest post by local historian Philip Grant in a personal capacity
Poppy from the Royal British Legion annual appeal.
If you have relatives who died in the First World War, particularly if they went to Dudden Hill School in Willesden and are named on the memorial pictured below, you will be very welcome to attend a short ceremony at Willesden Green Library on Tuesday 10 November. Please pass on this information to any friends who may be interested, so that they also have the opportunity to take part.
The restored memorial, on the first floor landing at Willesden Green Library.
Many of you will know that 11 November (Remembrance Day) this year marks the 109th anniversary of the Armistice which ended the awful “Great War”, now known as the First World War because of the second global conflict of the 20th century between 1939 and 1945. Willesden’s School Board had opened Dudden Hill as an elementary school in 1897, and more than five hundred of its former pupils answered the call to go and fight “For King and Country” between 1914 and 1918. Eighty-six of them, and one teacher, died in that conflict.
Dudden Hill School’s headmaster, John Kelly (who had such a well-respected educational career in Willesden that Boys’ and Girls’ secondary schools were later named after him), kept a record of all the former pupils who had died. At a meeting of the school’s Old Boys’ Association in 1921, it was decided to create a memorial to their fellow students whose lives had been lost in the war, and the money for it was promptly raised. The memorial to “Our Glorious Dead” was unveiled in the school hall a year later, on 4 October 1922.
Programme for the unveiling of the Memorial in 1922,
by Sir James Yoxall, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers.
The memorial was central to the school’s Remembrance Day commemorations each November, until its infants/primary department was transferred to the newly built Northview Primary School in 1960, and the remaining secondary school closed in 1964. The building was then used by Willesden Technical College for a few years, before being sold off to a developer and converted into flats.
The former Dudden Hill School building in Dudden Hill Lane. (Photo by Irina Porter)
Sadly, no respect for the former school’s memorial was shown by those carrying out work on the building. The wooden surround around the WW1 plaque, on which the names of former pupils who’d died during the Second World War had been added, and a casket beneath it, with a complete record by headmaster John Kelly of the actions during which the former pupils had been killed, were lost or destroyed. Luckily, the copper plaque itself, with the names engraved on it, was rescued from a builders skip by Bill Martindale, a lecturer at Willesden Tech.
Mr Martindale realised the historic importance of the memorial, and took it home for safekeeping. Years later, Paul Mitchell, who’d known the memorial when he was a pupil at Dudden Hill School, was trying to find out what happened to it, and came across photographs of the battered plaque on the War Memorials Trust website. Its location then was shown to be Wembley, but it had actually moved to Cumbria, when Bill Martindale retired there. Paul’s further efforts put him in touch with the Cumbria Western Front Association (“CWFA”), and in September 2022 one of Bill’s CWFA colleagues, Richard Preston, brought the plaque back to Willesden.
Paul Mitchell (left) and Richard Preston handing over the memorial
plaque
at Brent Archives on 23 September 2022. (Photo by John Bunn)
Brent Museum and Archives agreed that the memorial deserved to be put back on public display, once it had been cleaned and restored. With the help of a grant from the War Memorials Trust in 2025, that has now happened. The copper plaque with a new wooden frame, and its 87 names of the fallen picked out in black, now has a permanent pride of place in Willesden Green Library.
The ceremony at the library, on Tuesday 10 November from 10.40am, will be a Civic rededication and official unveiling of the war memorial by the Deputy Mayor of Brent, Councillor Kanta Mistry. A bugler and standard bearer from the Royal British Legion will be there as well, for an act of remembrance, and residents who wish to attend, in memory of those who have died in war at any time, are welcome to do so. You can reserve your free place at this event HERE.
Philip Grant.
I gratefully acknowledge Paul Mitchell’s article “Quest for Remembrance: A Personal Story of Dudden Hill School” (Willesden Local History Society Journal No. 56, Winter 2022/23) as the source for much of the information used in this article.
