History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

On the 12 March 1910 Gordon Selfridge gave a talk to the boys of Kilburn Grammar School. Speaking on ‘Business as a Life’s Work’, he said that England was now in serious competition with the other great commercial nations of the world and they should be pushing in commerce as in any other form of activity. There were certain principles that young men going into business needed to know. These were energy, knowledge of the business, and absolute integrity. He urged the boys, ‘to be broadminded, to be splendid, to be big, and if they could not find an opening in any one place the whole world was open to them’. Gordon Selfridge, (Getty Images)   Gordon Selfridge had started as a stock boy in Marshall Field in Chicago. He worked his way up over 25 years to become a junior partner and a wealthy man. During his retirement, Gordon and his wife visited London in 1906, and he noticed that there was no shop to rival Marshal Fields or the great department stores of Paris. He decided to buil...

In the early 1960s I was listening to jazz and reading the ‘Beat’ writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. Recently, while researching Priory Road in West Hampstead, I found a 1984 interview by Dave Moore with Seymour Wyse who was born there. Then in 1939 he moved to New York where he became a friend of Jack Kerouac. Seymour returned to London and died in May 2015 in Kingston Upon Thames. Seymour was the son of Harry Wyse, a doctor, and Lilian Lipson who married in Hampstead in 1921. Seymour was born two years later in 34 Priory Road West Hampstead, and his younger brother Derek was born in 1926. In May 1939, with the threat of War, Lilian, Seymour and Derek, sailed to New York on the Ile de France. (In the interview Seymour thought they arrived in March, but the passenger list shows they arrived in New York on 10 May 1939). Seymour aged 16, loved jazz and as he says in the interview, was thrilled to meet members of the Duke Ellington band on the ship returning to Ameri...