The Mad Cyclist of Cricklewood

This is a strange story from 1909. On the afternoon of 9 September, seventeen year old Percy Day who worked locally as a clerk for the Midland Railway, was walking with three friends along the Edgware Road in Cricklewood. They were chatting about football and had just reached the junction with Oxgate Lane (near today’s Wing Yip Chinese superstore) when a cyclist passed them.

A cyclist from the 1900s (Getty Images)

He got off his bike, reached into his jacket pocket pulled out a revolver and without warning, fired at the men hitting Percy in the arm. The assailant got back on his bike and cycled off rapidly in the direction of Cricklewood. Fortunately, Percy was not badly wounded and jumped on one of the new electric trams and pursued the cyclist.

Cricklewood tram c.1906

When they reached The Crown Cricklewood, the conductor told a policeman on point duty what had happened. Percy and the PC boarded a motor bus and chased after the cyclist, overtaking him in Kilburn and arresting him outside the Lord Palmerston pub. He was taken to the West Hampstead police station in West End Lane.

The Lord Palmerston, about 1870 (today a Nando’s Restaurant)

At the magistrate court, Ernest Frederick Chamberlin (sic) Stone, aged 27, of independent means, 17 Mount Road Hendon, was charged for shooting with the intent to murder Percy Day. He said people on the Edgware Road had annoyed him, but he agreed the men with Percy Day had not shouted or whistled at him. He said he just wanted to frighten them. His mother was in court and Ernest was allowed to speak with her. Stone was remanded and later after reports from the prison doctors, he was declared insane and committed to the Napsbury Asylum near St Albans on 24 September 1909. The police found that Ernest who came from a wealthy family in Leicester, had been in the local asylum two years earlier.

It appears that Ernest never recovered his sanity, and aged 47, he died on the 11 May 1929 in the Holloway Sanatorium, Virginia Water. He left £7,085 to his father Octavius Chamberlin Stone (1845 to 1933).

We have not found a picture of Ernest, but here is one of his father who was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a famous explorer of New Guinea in 1875 and 1876.

Portrait of Octavius Stone

Apart from the brief newspaper reports, we have no further information to explain Ernest’s behaviour and mental issues.

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