When Wales Went to War tells how two priests, the late Canon Patrick
Creed and the late Father Michael Murphy, saved the Blessed Sacrament from the
burning Cathedral on March 4, 1941.
Firemen and parishioners knelt in Charles Street as the young Patrick Creed
carried the Blessed Sacrament to the Church Hall, which was then used as a
pro‑Cathedral for the next 18 years.
The book also tells the story of Stephen Whitehouse, a Cardiff University
student who died while fire watching. He was the older brother of the late Father
Bernard Whitehouse, Administrator of St David’s Cathedral for many years. The
brothers had served Mass at Saint Mary of the Angels, Canton, Cardiff on Ash
Wednesday, 1941, the day that Stephen was fatally wounded in an air raid.
The book gives a full account of the blitz in Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and other parts of Wales. It also records heroic deeds by the people of Wales, at home and overseas.
One of the heroes was David Lord, of Wrexham who was training to be a priest
before joining the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of war. He was posthumously
awarded the Victoria Cross after the supply aircraft he was piloting crashed in
the Dutch town of Arnhem.
The author, a parishioner of Saint Teilo’s, Whitchurch, has been a journalist for
50 years and has written for Catholic newspapers for more than 40 years. He has
dedicated his book to World Peace.