Obsession, Love and Death in Kilburn

Esmond Road is a short, quiet, street on the Brent side of the Kilburn High Road near Paddington Cemetery. 

On Tuesday 6 November 1894, the top floor of Number 48 was the home of Alice and James Simms and their young children. About 11.15 that morning Mrs Simms opened the front door to William Carter who forced his way upstairs. 

Soon afterwards, the landlady Mrs Mary Bates was talking to a neighbour when they heard shots. As it was the morning after bonfire night, they weren’t alarmed, thinking it was just children letting off fireworks. But then they heard the faint cry of ‘Murder!’ and they saw Alice Simms on the landing covered in blood. 

Mary stopped a man on the road and said something terrible had happened and could he please help. He went upstairs and saw William Carter lying on the floor. PC George Allen X334 arrived soon after to find William Carter was dead with a revolver in his hand. He had shot Alice, intending to kill her and then shot himself through the temple. Alice who remained conscious, was taken to St Mary’s Hospital in Praed Street, Paddington.

Newspaper illustration of the case, Nov 1894

What had caused the tragedy?

William Carter was a clock jobber, a repairer who travelled to homes, winding and fixing clocks and watches. In 1881 he had married Mary Ann Robson and they had five children. At the time of the shooting they were living in Elliott Road Lambeth.

James Simms had married Alice Thatcher in 1885 and they had three children by 1894. He worked his way up from labourer to be a ticket collector at the Metropolitan Railway Station in Edgware Road.

About two years before the shooting, both families lived at 9 Maida Vale, near Little Venice. Alice Simms, described as a small, dark, pretty woman, flirted with William Carter. James Simms, who was a jealous man, got into an argument with Carter about his relationship with Alice, and hit him on the head with a stick. He also threatened Carter with a revolver and the police were called. But Alice persuaded William to drop the charges against her husband.

Because of the friction between the families, the Simms moved from Maida Vale to Messina Avenue in Kilburn and then four months before the attack, to Esmond Road. But Carter was obsessed with Alice and traced her to the new addresses. Perhaps Alice had encouraged William, as Mary Ann told police Alice had written to her husband several times. From her hospital bed, Alice strongly denied she had given William any encouragement.

48 Esmond Road (Dick Weindling, Dec 2018)

William Carter was jealous, drinking heavily and in debt. His employer found that William had been pawning clocks taken from homes ostensibly to be repaired at the workshop. The week of the shooting, William had been given a week’s notice. He was not eating and could not sleep. He had left home on the 6^th telling his wife he was going to the hospital. But instead he had gone to Esmond Road to see Alice. In his depressed state he had decided to kill her and himself. 

After the inquest jury had seen the body and heard evidence, they returned a verdict of suicide from a self-inflicted pistol wound.

After some time in St Mary’s, Alice recovered and returned to her husband and children. The bullet had glanced off her cheek bone and lodged in her neck, without causing serious damage. The Simms family moved to Acton and Chiswick where James continued as a ticket collector. Mary Ann Carter was left to bring up her children on her own, and by 1901 she was again living in Lambeth and working as a lavatory attendant.

This was a very sad case which shocked the Kilburn neighbourhood.