ALICE MAUD STONE
1899-1943
Dormansland resident
TICKET OFFICE CLERK
During WWI Alice was an engineer’s forewoman in Lingfield. She was killed in 1943 when a bomb
was dropped on a cinema in East Grinstead
Alice was the youngest of five children to house decorator Pharoah Stone and his wife Emily.
They were living on Dormans High Street in 1901. Around 1916 Alice worked as a railway ticket
office clerk at Dormans station. By 1921 she was the last child still at home, aged 21. She had been
working and forewoman for Mr Hales’ engineering company in Lingfield.
She married gas meter inspector Joseph Meadmore in 1931. They had three children Patricia, Joe
and Bobbie by 1939 and were living on Sackville Gardens, East Grinstead.
During WWII on Friday 9 July 1943 the German enemy approached the town for a daylight
bombing raid on East Grinstead. Air raid sirens sounded and the corresponding announcement
f
lashed up on the screen of the Whitehall Cinema. At 5.10pm bombs were dropped on the High
Street, destroying shops and the cinema where an audience of 184, many of them children were
watching ‘Hop-Along-Cassidy.’ Alice was inside, one of the four adults killed. By chance many
of the children owe their lives to being seated at the front of the cinema. Overall 108 people died
in that raid, 235 seriously injured. Twenty two of those killed are buried in a communal grave in
Mount Noddy Cemetery.
There’s an inscription in Dormansland Parish Church to the four women who lost their lives that
day: Alice, Florence Firmin and Erica and Mary Fothergill and those civilians of Dormans Land
who died in the service of Civil Defence units 1939-45.
NOTES/LINKS
Article on the Bombing of the Whitehall Cinema in 1943:
https://spartacus-educational.com/2WWwhitehall.htm
BBC remembers on 70th anniversary of the raid:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-23243270
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