Bertha Bracey was recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust in 2010 by Gordon Brown, for her work in helping to bring 10,000 Jewish Kindertransport children from Germany to Britain between December 1938 and September 1939.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, sixty Basque refugee children arrived at The Beacon on Tea Garden Lane in Rusthall. The local community’s role in welcoming, healing and nurturing these traumatised children should be celebrated.

I found a postcard that my mother had written to her mother in New Zealand in 1943. She described how she was spending the last month of her pregnancy at a home in Langton Green called “Pavey’s”, before going further up the road to a maternity home named “Northfields” to give birth.

In April 1913 the Nevill Cricket Pavilion was destroyed by arson. A photograph of Emmeline Pankhurst was pinned to the ground outside, alongside scattered Suffragette literature. “Tunbridge Wells is declared to be a hot bed of militants!” cried the mayor, and local author Arthur Conan Doyle also condemned the action, saying, “Outrages like this must be stopped because they mean neither more nor less than anarchy!”

“I instinctively realised that the pilot was in trouble as the plane was making a peculiar noise, which indicated to me that the craft was probably on fire. I rushed out of the workshops at the depot and mounted my motor cycle at the same time as the impact of the crashed aircraft took place, and I saw smoke rising…