Ready to take a seat
I am delighted that we will finally have a new cinema in Ealing after more than seven years of waiting. It is exciting when trailers for new films come out now, because they provoke thoughts of how we could be sitting comfortably in a seat in the new cinema watching a blockbuster relatively soon. Cinema […]
Quiz: How is your local knowledge?
Have a go at our quiz and see how much you know on local history. Dr Jonathan Oates, the borough archivist and Around Ealing contributor, has set 20 questions on local events, places and people. See how many you can answer correctly. You can just do it for fun; but Around Ealing reader Peter Tummon entered our competition […]
Hockey heritage
Very few of the girls and boys who play for the recently reformed Ealing Hockey Club have any idea of its history or the achievements of its past players and teams. But the club has a rich heritage, writes Clare Cogswell, the club’s secretary and a former player. The club was reformed three years ago […]
Acton’s impetuous Edwardian stuntman
George Lee Temple was the first person in Britain to fly upside down. He was a daredevil in the early days of aviation and his dangerous shows attracted big crowds. He was born in Acton in 1892, the son of George Temple, a Royal Navy officer, at 9 Cumberland Park. The young George seemed initially […]
Napoleon, Waterloo and Ealing
Dr Jonathan Oates looks at how this much discussed battle in Europe touched our own area 200 years ago. This year marks the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo in 1815, when the British, German and Dutch troops under the command of the Duke of Wellington and Prince Blucher defeated the French under Napoleon and […]
First World War: The local war years, 1914-18
Originally serialised by us between August 2014 and March 2015, in five instalments, to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War, we look at what happened locally year-by-year. 1914 7 August Reports of panic buying of food and fuel 10 August Appeal for women to volunteer for hospital work locally 11 August First […]
First World War: Another soldier comes home
A second soldier who died in the First World War has been recognised in Ealing almost a century after his death. Following on from Herbert Crook, whose name was added to Ealing War Memorial by the council earlier this year, another fallen hero who was missing from the list has been etched on the memorial […]
Who was Susan Smee?
Well, she was a rather unusual and special woman for her time: Acton’s first female councillor – and first woman mayor. Yet, there is no plaque or public marker to her and her work, writes Dr Jonathan Oates. She was born in 1859 into a middle class London family and was well educated at a […]
A president in Ealing
From wasp-infested cricket games, to pony races and local gentry, the fascinating diary of a famous US president has been uncovered which outlines the years of his life spent living in Ealing. Mary Woods, of the Little Ealing History Group, explains all. John Quincy Adams lived in Ealing with his family between 1815 and 1817. […]
First World War: Rioting in Acton
A hundred years ago a riot took place in Acton, during the First World War. During the First World War, there was, in Britain, hostility towards Germany and Germans. That applied to those living here, too, even though some had enlisted in the British Army. The atmosphere of fear saw certain British Germans being interned […]
Second World War: ‘We never saw our parents again’
On 27 January 2015 it will be the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi’s nefarious Auschwitz concentration camp. A tree is planted each January by the council outside its Perceval House offices to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and remember acts of genocide across the globe. The horror of one of recent history’s darkest […]
First World War: Who was Miss Harman?
If you look on the Ealing War Memorial outside Pitzhanger Manor you will see, among the list of names of those men killed in the First World War, that of Miss A. Harman; the sole female name on that memorial. Dr Jonathan Oates investigated: I first noticed this when reading a book about Middlesex and […]