History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This is the most detailed account ever published of an unusual story about Spiritualism, which has local connections to West Hampstead and Hampstead. Louisa Ann Meurig Morris (Getty) On Sunday evening 11 January 1931, the audience at the Fortune Theatre waited in anticipation of something special. They had come to see a young woman trance medium, Mrs Meurig Morris. Also on the stage was Lady Jean Conan Doyle and her 22-year old son Denis. Her husband, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had died six months earlier, and had spent the last years of his life speaking and writing to promote Spiritualism. Lady Doyle said they were there to show their support for Spiritualism and a collection would be made at the end for a memorial to Sir Arthur. After the audience had sung hymns, the producer and playwright Laurence Cowen spoke about how he met Mrs Morris at his local Kenton Spiritualist church in 1929. He said he had gone as a lifetime agnostic but after hearing her spe...

Today in Kimberley Road, near Paddington Old Cemetery, there is a large modern block of flats called Kimberley Court. This covers the site of the Welbeck Works which were built here in 1904 by a remarkable man called Frederick Richard Simms. Born in 1863 in Hamburg and educated in Germany and London, his grandfather was a merchant from Manchester who established a trading company in Hamburg to supply the Newfoundland fishing fleet.  Fred went into business making suspension cars and in 1889, while supervising the assembly of an overhead cableway at Bremen he met Gottlieb Daimler the car manufacturer. Fred negotiated the British patent rights for Daimler engines and in 1890 set up Simms & Co, consulting engineers, which introduced Daimler engines into Britain. The work was carried out by the Daimler Motor Syndicate, which Simms founded in 1893 and then sold to the financier H. J. Lawson in 1895. This laid the foundations for the British motor industry, with the Daimler works a...