History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This is the case of a man who had previously lived in West End Lane, but who was murdered in his luxury flat in Piccadilly. Horace Stanley Lindsay Horace Stanley Lindsay was the managing director of Linzi Dresses Ltd. He had lived in Acol Court on the corner of West End Lane and Acol Road from 1943 to 1949. At first we could not find details about him until we discovered that he had been born as Horace Stanley Zelinski on 10 Oct 1907 .  His grandfather Leon Zelinski came to Whitechapel from Poland and was an importer of German woollen goods. Leon was naturalised on 11 February 1892 , and his son Sydney Simon Zelinski, changed his name in 1918 to Sydney Melgrave Lindsay. Sydney had a successful drapery business and young Horace grew up in Stanford Hill and then in Maida Vale. Horace followed in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, and set up Linzi Dresses at 48 Poland Street in Soho . This became a very well known brand of dresses in the 1950s. Advert for Li...

Wain and his sisters moved to 41 Brondesbury Road Kilburn in September 1916. He became known as ‘the man who drew cats’ and his pictures showed cats doing various human activities. Louis was born on 5 Aug 1860 in Clerkenwell. He was the eldest child and only son of William Wain, a textile designer and salesman. His French mother Felicia Boiteux, also designed carpets and church fabrics. He had five younger sisters. Louis was a sickly child, and it seems he was born with a cleft lip and was bullied at school which he only attended from the age of ten. But his genius for drawing was evident early on. After his sisters gave him a kitten for his twentieth birthday, he began to produce the cartoons. People thought Louis was ‘odd’. He played the piano in a very jerky peculiar way, and would tell people that he had written an opera which was in rehearsal for the London stage, but this only existed in his head. He also believed that he had harnessed electricity from the e...