Kent’s determined chin…

Just 22 miles from the French coast, Kent was on the frontline during the Second World War. Nowhere was worse hit than Dover, which became known as Hellfire Corner.

HR Pratt Boorman, pictured right, the then editor and proprietor of the Kent Messenger, paid a visit to the town in 1940. In a book about his experiences, he recalls how an East Kent bus employee, Driver Share, summed up life in the area: “This is Hell’s Corner and we live in it.” Mr Boorman wrote: “Kent has a chin, a determined chin.

“It juts out into that 20-mile stretch of Channel, in defiance of the Greater Reich.

“That chin is Dover, with its castle, the Key of England, surmounting its white cliffs.

“It is true the chin is a bit double, and Folkestone, as well as Deal, share with Dover a position so protruding that they invite punishment.

“But can they take it? Yes, they can, and what is more they punch back as hard and as often as they get it, harder and more often nowadays, for the RAF controls the Channel.”

Dover and her people, he wrote, had sat tight.

“The mothers still remain at home to look after their homes and their husbands in spite of the authorities, in spite of bombs and shells, and in spite of the danger of invasion.”

Another who would not move was Jim Cairns, cairns who had been Mayor of Dover for five years. “They say that if invasion comes now, if the Day of Judgment comes, he will still be sitting in the mayoral chair, if Dover people want him.”

Two years later, undaunted by the relentless bombing, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his wife Clementine, and America’s First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, paid a visit to Hellfire Corner.

In a telegram to President Roosevelt, marked personal and secret, Churchill reported that Mrs Roosevelt’s visit to Canterbury and Dover had been very popular. She had refused to reduce the number of her engagements, noting that Canterbury had been bombed the day after her visit.