Kendall Road Isleworth marks the approximate site of former Kendall House, home to the Duchess of Kendall, a favourite mistress of H.M. King George I. She was described as being of “lank, bony, hideousness”, gaining her the nickname The Maypole.
Mr. G. E. Bate, was the school master and historian author of And So Make a City Here published in 1948. This chronicles a wide range of authoritative local history articles. When All Saints, Isleworth’s Parish Church, was burnt down by vandals in May 1943 Mr. Bate gathered nails from the fallen roof. These were fashioned into a Cross of Nails, symbolic of the physical resurrection of All Saints and resurrection of Christ; it remains in possession of the Church.
Part of Bison skull dated from around 75,000 BC when reindeer and bison grazed the open frozen planes covering Thames Valley was found in 1958, along with tooth of woolly rhinoceros, during excavations at the dry ballast pit of Willment Brothers Mogden Lane, Isleworth. The skull is now held at the Museum of London.
A Neolithic or iron age skull was found at a depth of 14 feet on Isleworth Ait in 1935. The Royal College of Surgeons’ opinion at that time was that it was of a man, 60 years or older who lived about 500 BC. The skull is now held at Gunnersbury Museum.
A Bronze Age Stone Battle Axe was found at Syon Reach in 1913 of a type not usual in Britain and without known parallel suggesting it to be a continental import. By the late Bronze Age stone was no longer used to make tools and it is likely this was a prestigious item rather than functional.
A refashioned 15thC religious cope, held by the V&A Museum, was once in the ownership of Syon Abbey home to 60 nuns and 25 men “the number will be the same as the 13 apostles and the 72 disciples”. King Henry V granted the Order its charter in 1415. They moved to the site of today’s Syon House in 1431 to become among England’s richest and most learned monasteries, having a library of 1500 Latin texts.
Richard Reynolds was a father confessor of Syon Abbey at the time of its dissolution. Both he and John Haile, Vicar of All Saints Church, refused to acknowledge King Henry Vlll as head of the Church. For this act they were hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. A statue commemorating Saint Richard Reynolds can be found in Our Lady of Sorrows and St Bridget Roman Catholic Church, Isleworth.
During the 18th– early 19thC Isleworth’s china manufactory was located at Railshead where the River Crane enters the Thames. A biscuit porcelain shard, part of an unfired bowl base was found in the river below the pottery site in May 1999. It is incised 22nd November 1754 which pre-dates the first documentary evidence of existence of a pottery. Nothing in Parish Rate books gives a clue as to what was happening or who was operating or running a pottery before 1757.
H.R.H. Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, presided over opening of the newly built Church of England Primary, Isleworth Blue School, in North Street on the 24th July 1961. The school dates its beginning as 16thJune 1630 when Dame Elizabeth Hill made provision for “Young girls and maids of the town of Isleworth, not bastards but fatherless and without friends, to help them to learn to read and work with the needle and do all kinds of household business to fit them for service”.