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Lillie Miers 'Queen of the Shoplifters'

Elizabeth (Lillie) Miers was born in 1872, the daughter of Joseph Miers and Cecilia Levy. They had married in January 1868 and lived at 47 Oxford Road Kilburn, where they had six children. But the marriage was not successful and they divorced in 1883. The divorce papers said that since December 1882, Cecilia had committed adultery with Alfred Nathan and cohabited with him since January the following year. Nathan was a teacher of modern languages and by 1891 he and Cecilia were living in Staines with two children. Ten years later Joseph Miers was living with three of his daughters at 18 Summerfield Avenue in Queens Park. He was a wholesale clothier with an office in the City, and Lillie worked for her father as a commercial traveller. When she became 21, she had invested £300 in his company, but later the business failed and Joseph went bankrupt. On 15 September 1901 he committed suicide by taking poison in his office at 56 City Road and died in St Bartholomew Hospital. Lillie was devas...
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Willesden Paddocks, From Horses to Tanks

This was a famous stud farm run by the Tattersall family who today are still one of the leading sellers of thoroughbred racehorses. It was part of Upper Oxgate which was off the Edgware Road beyond Cricklewood at the corner of today’s Oxgate Lane. In 1838 the Duke of Buckingham sold 96 acres of the Roberts estate to Edmund Tattersall. He carried out an extensive building conversion of the old houses on the property, some dating back as far as 1670, to create his stud farm. The illustration of the property is by George Tattersall, a talented artist member of the family, from his book on ‘Sporting Architecture’ (1841). Wealthy racehorse owners could send their mares to Willesden Paddocks for 12 shillings a week to be ‘covered’ by resident stallions at the stud: the fee in 1853 was 15 guineas. This area on the outskirts of London was popular for horse breeding and there was another stud farm at Neasden. Willesden Paddocks, George Tattersall, 1841 ‘Voltigeur’ and Sir Edwin Landseer ...
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Freddie Bartholomew: Harlesden to Hollywood

The famous child actor, Freddie Bartholomew, was born on 28 March 1924 at 17 Radcliffe Avenue Harlesden. His father Cecil Llewellyn Bartholomew had travelled to Canada in 1913 and joined the Canadian Army in November 1915. He was sent to fight in France and Belgium where he was injured and had his right leg amputated. He was discharged in January 1918 and returned to his parents in Warminster Wiltshire. In 1919 Cecil married Lilian May Clarke. They first lived at 300 Earlsfield Road Wandsworth and had two daughters, Eileen born in 1920 and Hilda in 1922. A year later they had moved to Harlesden where Freddie was born. When Freddie was three and a half, he was sent to live with his maiden aunt Millicent (also spelled as Myllicent), who had pleaded to be allowed to bring him up at Carlton Villa Warminster, the home of his grandparents. ‘Aunt Cissie’ encouraged Freddie’s acting and he appeared in local amateur shows. She enrolled him at the Italia Conti children’s theatre school in Lamb’s...
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Spirit Photographs and a Cricklewood Photographic Company

This is the story of how a Cricklewood factory played an important role in exposing a fraudulent spiritualist medium in the 1920s. Photographic Dry Plates To record an image, early photographers used wet plates which had to be processed straight away.   In 1871 Richard Maddox coated a glass plate with a gelatine emulsion of silver bromide. He found these plates could be stored until needed, and after exposure in the camera, taken to a darkroom for development at leisure. Joseph Acworth Joseph Acworth was born in Chatham in 1853 and was interested from boyhood in the experimental sciences. He began working in the laboratories of the Royal College of Chemistry in South Kensington, (now part of Imperial College). Acworth became fascinated by the photographic dry plates which Maddox had invented, and he worked in the labs of the newly created Britannia Dry Plate Company at Ilford. He went to the University of Erlangen in Germany where he...
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Wartime Decca

This story looks at events in the Decca Studios in Broadhurst Gardens West Hampstead during World War Two.   Decca Studios, 1963 Arthur Haddy (1906 to 1989) Arthur Haddy was the chief engineer at Crystalate and then Decca Studios which took over the building in 1937. During the War he was asked if Decca could help remove the static noise in intercepted radio signals picked up from German aircraft by the chain of ‘Y’ listening stations which were spread around the coast. He went to the Y HQ in West Kingsdown Kent to collect some wax recordings which were sent to the studios for improvement. The cleaned recordings were returned to the RAF to assist transcription, before they were sent to Bletchley Park. Arthur Haddy, 1970s (Getty Images) The company was also asked by the Government to develop a method of detecting submarines from their engine noise. An important event occurred on 27 August 1941 when the German U-boat U-570 was surprised by a Coastal Command aircraft which dropped dep...
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