Walton-on-Thames at War

Walton’s twentieth century was shaped by two world wars in very different ways: the first brought a hospital and a lasting international friendship, the second brought bombs, dictated by the town’s proximity to one of Britain’s most important aircraft works.

The Great War and Mount Felix

Walton’s First World War story is dominated by Mount Felix, the country house requisitioned as No. 2 New Zealand General Hospital from July 1915. Around 27,000 New Zealand soldiers passed through Mount Felix and the associated hospital at Oatlands Park before the hospital closed in 1920, and the connection is still marked today by an annual remembrance service at St Mary’s Church and by New Zealand Avenue, named directly after the hospital.

The Blitz comes to Walton

The Second World War brought a different kind of history to Walton, driven by geography rather than any particular strategic importance of the town itself. Walton sits close to Brooklands, the Weybridge site that combined a historic motor racing circuit with a major Vickers-Armstrongs aircraft works, producing Wellington bombers and other aircraft through the war. That proximity made the wider area, including Walton, a target for Luftwaffe raids, and the Victorian-era Walton Bridge itself was damaged during bombing in 1940.

Flight Sergeant Charles Sydney

The human cost of that period is recorded with unusual precision in one specific event. On 27 September 1940, Flight Sergeant Charles Sydney, a 25-year-old pilot with 92 Squadron based at RAF Biggin Hill, died when his Spitfire, serial number R6767, crashed in Station Avenue, Walton-on-Thames. He was buried in Orpington, and was for some years commemorated locally by a memorial plaque near the crash site, close to the former Birds Eye headquarters on Station Avenue; that plaque has been affected by the major redevelopment of the Birds Eye site in recent years. His death remains one of the clearest single markers of the Battle of Britain’s reach into Walton’s own streets.

The aircraft factories next door

The raid that did the most damage to the wider area targeted the Vickers works at Brooklands directly: on 4 September 1940, a daylight bombing raid on the factory killed nearly ninety people, most of them aircraft workers. Walton was not the target of that raid, but its closeness to Brooklands, and to the aircraft industry more broadly, meant the town lived through the war under the same shadow as its neighbours, an ordinary Surrey town caught in the blast radius of a strategically vital industrial site next door.

Memorials

Walton’s wartime memory is kept in several places rather than one: the New Zealand memorial and annual service at St Mary’s Church for the First World War, and the more scattered, less formal markers of the Second World War, from the site of Charles Sydney’s crash to the surviving fabric of the Victorian Walton Bridge, still bearing the consequences of the 1940 bombing that damaged it.