Waldron at War is a community play written especially by local scriptwriter Valerie Chidson. It celebrates the courage, resilience and grit of the residents of the village of Waldron, East Sussex as they dealt with the day-to-day problems and privations of the Second World War. It is based on interviews with those who lived and worked in the village at that time and also on some printed sources.

Like many other southern villages, Waldron:

• had many of its young men and women in HM Forces, and 22 of its young men killed on active service
• was host to evacuees from Bermondsey, London
• had many hundreds of overseas troops (mainly Canadians) billeted in the area
• had Prisoners of War working on the farms
• had Land Girls working on the land
• had a Home Guard and ARP Wardens on duty in their spare time from their daily work
• had a very active Women’s Institute which raised thousands of pounds for the war effort, made 2000 items of clothing for HM Forces, ran a canteen for the billeted troops, and even had a heavy tank named after them
• was on the edge of “Bomb Alley” where bombs were dropped by enemy aircraft on their way to or from London in the Battle of Britain and later “doodlebugs” and V-rockets
• saw dogfights between allied and enemy aircraft overhead, with several planes downed in the vicinity

More unusually, the village was one of the locations where plans were laid for the disastrous Dieppe raids and later for the successful D-Day landings.

It was also said to have been the home for a while of the notorious traitor William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”), whose first wife and children remained in the village during the war.

The play will be performed on 8th, 9th and 10th July 2004 in three “promenade” performances by the present-day villagers of Waldron, of all ages. The current members of the WI will play their wartime counterparts. The patron of the project is Marguerite Patten OBE, the “Delia Smith” of her day.