The Robbery at the North London Tavern

The North London Tavern on the corner of Cavendish Road and Kilburn High Road was originally the North London Railway Hotel, after the railway company that ran the service from the nearby station now called Brondesbury on the Overground. The name was shortened to the North London Hotel in 1895.

In the early hours of the morning of 12 June 1946, Maurice Herbert the licensee, heard noises in the cellar and called the police. At 2.15am the pub was surrounded, and four men were found stealing 130 bottles of gin which they were about to load into a waiting van. PCs Ian Moir and Robert Wade saw two men climb onto the wall at the rear of the building.

Moir said, ‘I shouted to them to come down. Davis fired two shots and they ran towards Cavendish Road. I followed them and Davis pointed the pistol at me. I threw my truncheon at him and grabbed him as he was climbing a fence. As we struggled he hit me on the head with the pistol butt’. PC Wade arrived and they arrested Davis. The three other men were arrested later. The pistol was a German Mauser which had two shots fired and one had jammed in the breach.

In court PC Moir showed his bloodstained uniform and said he had been off work since he had been attacked. The prosecution counsel believed that Davis had not deliberately aimed at PC Moir but fired the shots to frighten him. PCs Moir and Wade were commended for their bravery, and each awarded £10.

Eric Charles Davis was a 21 year old sailor from Greenford. Francis James Bloomfield, 20, was a driver from Fulham. Ernest Percival Hawkins, 18, was a tiler from West Kensington, and Richard Emery, 21, a soldier of no fixed address. At the Old Bailey, Davis was sentenced to five years imprisonment, Bloomfield and Emery received two years. Hawkins was sent to Borstal for a period not exceeding three years. Their girlfriends screamed when they heard the sentences and had to be led from court.

In February 1947, just six months into his sentence, Eric Davis escaped from Wandsworth prison by using a plank and climbing over the wall. The police issued a description of him as 5 feet 7 inches tall, black hair, grey eyes and a stocky build. After a month on the run he was recaptured at a pub in Finsbury Park.

In April 1953, Eric and his brother Victor Davis were convicted of stealing £22,000 worth of National Insurance stamps from a post office in Camberley Surrey. The brothers said they were car dealers: Eric in Mixnams Lane Chertsey, and Victor in Chertsey Lane Staines. They were known as the Gelignite Gang, believed to have made £50,000 in just one year from their safe breaking raids in London and the Home Counties. Scotland Yard had suspected the brothers, but they used fast cars and were good at spotting when they were being watched. The Yard put in an undercover officer called Alfred ‘Chalky’ White. He disguised himself as a down and out and grew his hair. After he told his controller about the Camberley robbery, the police raided the brothers’ caravans in Chertsey where they found the stolen stamps, as well as gelignite and detonators. Eric Davis, 28, was sentenced to seven years and Victor, 23, to four years imprisonment.

In April 1958 Eric Davis now aged 33, of Hereford Road in Bayswater, admitted to blowing up 12 safes with gelignite, including a raid on the Odeon Cinema Edgware Road Paddington. He was found with two firearms and two and a half pounds of gelignite. Davis was sentenced to 10 years. But in January 1961 he was one of five men who tried to escape from Dartmoor. They were caught after climbing over a 20 feet wall when a prisoner told the authorities about the plan.

Davis had graduated from burglary to safe blowing. He and his friends were career criminals who stole goods which they could easily sell in the austerity and rationing of post-war Britain. They were the ‘spivs’ who could get you anything for a price.

False Arrest: the Allum and Hislop Case

Trinidadian Desmond Allum came to London to study law in 1958. He worked in hotel kitchens and the Post Office and studied law at night. He qualified and was called to the Bar in the summer of 1962 and then got a job with the Inland Revenue. In 1964 and 1965 he lived at 116 Greencroft Gardens in West Hampstead. His friend George Hislop was born in Tobago. He played cricket for Trinidad and represented the West Indies at the Empire Games held in Cardiff in 1958. The following year he came to London to train as a teacher. In September 1962 he started work as a PE teacher at the Hillcroft Secondary School in Tooting Bec. The Incident On the evening of 31 January 1963 Allum and Hislop had visited friends at 351b Finchley Road (now redeveloped as part of the JW3 Centre). They left and were walking down Finchley Road towards the underground station on their way to Balham. At 9.25pm they were stopped and questioned by two plain clothes detectives who asked them to turn out their po...

Kilburn National Club

This popular music venue was at 234 Kilburn High Road, on the corner of Messina Avenue. Many famous musicians including Johnny Cash and David Bowie played there. We look at the original building which was the Grange Cinema, and what happened when the National closed and was taken over by two different church groups. Grange Cinema The Grange was a large mansion standing in grounds of nine and a half acres and with a frontage to Kilburn High Road. It was the home of Ada Peters the widow of a wealthy coach builder who made coaches for Queen Victoria . Following Ada ’s death in 1910, the property was sold. The new owner was Oswald Stoll, a major name in the entertainment world who had already built the London Coliseum in St Martin ’s Lane, near Leicester Square . Stoll wanted to erect another Coliseum theatre in Kilburn. In fact, progress overtook him and instead of a theatre, the 2,028 seat Grange cinema opened on 30 July 1914 . This remained the biggest cinema in Kilburn until th...

Smith’s Crisps

This is the story of how Frank Smith and his friend Jim Viney, began in a small way in Cricklewood and built the large and successful company of Smith’s Crisps. Early years Frank was born in 1875, in Hackney. His parents had left their native Suffolk by the mid-1860s for London, where his father ran a fruiterer and florist business. By 1881 the family were living over their corner shop at 128 Stoke Newington High Street, moving to Kingsland Road by 1891. Frank started working when he was 10-years old and went with his father to Covent Garden each morning to buy produce for their shop. Frank married Jessie Minnie Ramplin in Southwark in 1902. The couple and their six-year old daughter Laura were living in Mona Road Deptford in 1911, when Frank gave his occupation as ‘commercial traveller, confectionery’. Soon after this he went to work for a wholesale grocer by the name of Carter, in Smithfield. Carter had a side-line making potato crisps and Frank saw great potential in the product and...

History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

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