Poignant VE Day sermon shared eight decades on

A DEVON pensioner has shared a long-lost handwritten sermon by her father who was the Vicar of Crediton during World War Two ahead of next week's VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations.

- ATHWENNA IRONS

Jane Richards, 91, was 11 years old when Victory in Europe Day marking the official end of the Second World War in Europe was declared on May 8, 1945.

Her father, the Rev Francis Richards, had been a minor Canon at St Paul's Cathedral during the London blitz and was on fire warden duty in the dome of the cathedral the night a bomb landed on the steps and bounced down them. In 1940 he moved to become Vicar of Crediton, to provide a safer environment for his growing family.

Jane, a retired GP and former churchwarden from Whitestone near Exeter, said he used to write each of his sermons by hand in a series of notebooks he kept in alphabetical order. She inherited the notebooks when he died and was recently showing one of them to the Archdeacon of Exeter, when it fell open to his sermon of Sunday, May 13, 1945.