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 at Coventry Motor Mills.
Simms kept his own business affairs distinct from those of Lawson and between 1898 and 1900 he ran the Motor Carriage Supply Company Ltd. In 1900 Simms started making cars at the Simms Manufacturing Company Ltd, 55a Southwark Park Road in Bermondsey.
On 3 May 1904 he leased land from Lawrence and Aitken, cardboard manufacturers in Kimberley Road and built the Welbeck Works. The factory provided Simms with a base from which to run several companies.
He produced cars and commercial vehicles there from 1904 to about 1909, as well as engines for other manufacturers. The factory later produced magnetos, but Simms left Kimberley Road in 1920 and set up a new factory in East Finchley. There seems to have been a disastrous fire that year at the Kilburn works, but we have not been able to find a report of this in the newspapers.
The Grosvenor Carriage Co. had been making car bodies in Kimberley Road since 1910. When Simms left, they expanded and took over the Welbeck Works. The firm had a reputation for high-quality coachwork on leading makes of car, including Rolls-Royce. By 1920 they had joined up with Shaw & Kilburn, the main dealer for Vauxhall cars in London. About 1956 Grosvenor moved to Luton. In 1959 Hoopers, another famous car body firm, took over the site on the opposite side of Kimberley Road. They made Peter Sellers a custom-built body for his Mini-Cooper as shown in the picture, and they left Kilburn in 1995.
Simms experimented with military applications, mounting a Maxim machine gun on a De Dion quadricycle to produce the Simms Motor Scout.
In 1899 he invented what was probably the first armoured vehicle which he called The Motor War Car, but this was never manufactured in large numbers.
Simms’s principal legacy to the automotive world was in the field of components, especially magnetos which are small electrical generators. The Simms Magneto Company Ltd was established in Kilburn in 1907, after he had obtained UK manufacturing rights from Robert Bosch, the German electrical engineer, but small production runs could not compete with foreign products and this side of the business closed in 1913.
The same year Simms started yet another business, Simms Motor Units Ltd, initially as a sales and repair organization for motor components, especially dynamos and magnetos. Manufacture was initially undertaken by others on behalf of the firm, an important source in WWI being the Simms Magneto Company Ltd of New Jersey, established by Simms in 1910. The English workforce grew from twelve in 1913 to more than 300 by early 1919 and a subsidiary, the Standard Insulator Company Ltd, was established in 1915.
To build on his wartime success, Simms established Simms Motor Units (1920) Ltd in extensive premises at Oak Lane East Finchley, a large house with grounds, which had briefly been a piano factory. The slump of 1920–21 in the engineering industry, brought about the cessation of manufacture until the factory was reopened in 1926. Later the East Finchley premises were taken over by Lucas CAV in 1968 and closed in 1991. The six-acre site is now a housing estate.
Part of Simms Motors returned to Kilburn in 1948 when a London service branch was opened at No.254 Kilburn High Road. This closed in 1965, and today it is the entrance to the new Park Place apartments which overlook the Grange Park.
Simms Personal Life
His personal life has not been discussed in any of the major sources about Simms. His parents had German citizenship and Fred became a naturalised British citizen on 18 August 1896 when he was living at 44 Mayflower Road in Clapham Rise.
In 1903 while on a holiday to the Tyrol where he had a hunting lodge, he met a young Austrian woman called Lucie Sophie Wilhelmina Beate Greiff. He asked her to come to England and soon after, they were married at St George’s Hanover Square on 28 April 1903. Following a honeymoon in the Italian Lakes they lived in London at 6 Charles Street near Berkeley Square. But it was an unhappy marriage and Fred suggested Lucie should return to her parents in Austria. He went there in October and for a few weeks they resumed their relationship, but on 15 October 1903, Fred returned to England refusing to take Lucie with him.
Not knowing his home address, Lucie wrote to him at the Welbeck Works on 1 January 1904, saying she had been staying in a London hotel for three weeks and wanted to see him. He replied by letter on 6 January saying they were completely unsuitable, and because of the scene which she and her mother caused by threatening him with solicitors, he had suffered anxiety and heart problems. He offered to give her £200 a year, she refused and started legal proceedings through Lewis and Lewis, the top firm of London solicitors. This was filed on 8 January and a decree nisi was issued by the judge on 16 May 1904. Fred was ordered to restore conjugal rights and pay £500 per year (today worth about £54,000). Lewis and Lewis hired private detectives to follow him during 1907 and 1908 but they found insufficient evidence to force the divorce through.
Then in April 1908 Fred wrote to Lucie saying he was fed up being watched and suggested that the solicitors should make enquires about him at the Tudor Hotel in Oxford Street. Lucie went to court again in June 1908 and said Fred had committed adultery at the hotel on the night of the 14-15 April with an unnamed woman. This was the common way of obtaining evidence for a divorce at the time and Fred did not appear in court to contest it. Lucie, described in the press as a pretty young woman wearing a brown dress and an enormous hat, was granted a decree nisi on 14 October 1908.
On 19 November 1910 Fred married Mabel Louise Worsley from Blackpool, the daughter of a cotton merchant, at St Dionis in Palmers Green Fulham. This was a happier marriage and they had two daughters. Mabel died in July 1940. Fred died on 22 April 1944 at Dunbarty Stoke Poges, but he lived at Storth Oaks Chislehurst. He left £90,221 (worth about £4M today).
Simms was an inventor with over 60 patents. There are claims that he coined the words ‘petrol’ and ‘motor car’ but it seems likely the words were already in use. Simms liked setting up projects and in October 1895 he organized the first British Motor Show in the Agricultural Show Ground at Tunbridge Wells, which was called the ‘Horseless Carriage Exhibition’. He founded the Automobile Club in 1897 which became the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) in 1902 and that year he established the trade body, the Society of Motor Manufactures and Trades (SMMT).
About 2005 the large block of flats called Kimberley Court and another modern development called Hoopers Yard, were built on the sites of the Simms factory and the Hooper Works in Kilburn.
Today, nothing remains of Simms’ time in Kilburn, but as we have shown, he was a remarkably inventive and successful businessman.
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 at Coventry Motor Mills.
Simms kept his own business affairs distinct from those of Lawson and between 1898 and 1900 he ran the Motor Carriage Supply Company Ltd. In 1900 Simms started making cars at the Simms Manufacturing Company Ltd, 55a Southwark Park Road in Bermondsey.
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| 1912 OS Map showing the Simms Welbeck Works |
On 3 May 1904 he leased land from Lawrence and Aitken, cardboard manufacturers in Kimberley Road and built the Welbeck Works. The factory provided Simms with a base from which to run several companies.
 |
| 1904 advert |
He produced cars and commercial vehicles there from 1904 to about 1909, as well as engines for other manufacturers. The factory later produced magnetos, but Simms left Kimberley Road in 1920 and set up a new factory in East Finchley. There seems to have been a disastrous fire that year at the Kilburn works, but we have not been able to find a report of this in the newspapers.
 |
| 1935 OS Map showing the site now occupied by the Grosvenor Carriage Co. |
The Grosvenor Carriage Co. had been making car bodies in Kimberley Road since 1910. When Simms left, they expanded and took over the Welbeck Works. The firm had a reputation for high-quality coachwork on leading makes of car, including Rolls-Royce. By 1920 they had joined up with Shaw & Kilburn, the main dealer for Vauxhall cars in London. About 1956 Grosvenor moved to Luton. In 1959 Hoopers, another famous car body firm, took over the site on the opposite side of Kimberley Road. They made Peter Sellers a custom-built body for his Mini-Cooper as shown in the picture, and they left Kilburn in 1995.
 |
| Peter Sellers in Hoopers, Kimberley Road, 1963 |
Simms experimented with military applications, mounting a Maxim machine gun on a De Dion quadricycle to produce the Simms Motor Scout.
 |
| Fred Simms on his Motor Scout, 1898 |
In 1899 he invented what was probably the first armoured vehicle which he called The Motor War Car, but this was never manufactured in large numbers.
 |
| The Motor War Car outside Crystal Palace London, April 1902 |
Simms’s principal legacy to the automotive world was in the field of components, especially magnetos which are small electrical generators. The Simms Magneto Company Ltd was established in Kilburn in 1907, after he had obtained UK manufacturing rights from Robert Bosch, the German electrical engineer, but small production runs could not compete with foreign products and this side of the business closed in 1913.
The same year Simms started yet another business, Simms Motor Units Ltd, initially as a sales and repair organization for motor components, especially dynamos and magnetos. Manufacture was initially undertaken by others on behalf of the firm, an important source in WWI being the Simms Magneto Company Ltd of New Jersey, established by Simms in 1910. The English workforce grew from twelve in 1913 to more than 300 by early 1919 and a subsidiary, the Standard Insulator Company Ltd, was established in 1915.
To build on his wartime success, Simms established Simms Motor Units (1920) Ltd in extensive premises at Oak Lane East Finchley, a large house with grounds, which had briefly been a piano factory. The slump of 1920–21 in the engineering industry, brought about the cessation of manufacture until the factory was reopened in 1926. Later the East Finchley premises were taken over by Lucas CAV in 1968 and closed in 1991. The six-acre site is now a housing estate.
Part of Simms Motors returned to Kilburn in 1948 when a London service branch was opened at No.254 Kilburn High Road. This closed in 1965, and today it is the entrance to the new Park Place apartments which overlook the Grange Park.
Simms Personal Life
His personal life has not been discussed in any of the major sources about Simms. His parents had German citizenship and Fred became a naturalised British citizen on 18 August 1896 when he was living at 44 Mayflower Road in Clapham Rise.
 |
| Fred Simms, 1903 |
In 1903 while on a holiday to the Tyrol where he had a hunting lodge, he met a young Austrian woman called Lucie Sophie Wilhelmina Beate Greiff. He asked her to come to England and soon after, they were married at St George’s Hanover Square on 28 April 1903. Following a honeymoon in the Italian Lakes they lived in London at 6 Charles Street near Berkeley Square. But it was an unhappy marriage and Fred suggested Lucie should return to her parents in Austria. He went there in October and for a few weeks they resumed their relationship, but on 15 October 1903, Fred returned to England refusing to take Lucie with him.
Not knowing his home address, Lucie wrote to him at the Welbeck Works on 1 January 1904, saying she had been staying in a London hotel for three weeks and wanted to see him. He replied by letter on 6 January saying they were completely unsuitable, and because of the scene which she and her mother caused by threatening him with solicitors, he had suffered anxiety and heart problems. He offered to give her £200 a year, she refused and started legal proceedings through Lewis and Lewis, the top firm of London solicitors. This was filed on 8 January and a decree nisi was issued by the judge on 16 May 1904. Fred was ordered to restore conjugal rights and pay £500 per year (today worth about £54,000). Lewis and Lewis hired private detectives to follow him during 1907 and 1908 but they found insufficient evidence to force the divorce through.
Then in April 1908 Fred wrote to Lucie saying he was fed up being watched and suggested that the solicitors should make enquires about him at the Tudor Hotel in Oxford Street. Lucie went to court again in June 1908 and said Fred had committed adultery at the hotel on the night of the 14-15 April with an unnamed woman. This was the common way of obtaining evidence for a divorce at the time and Fred did not appear in court to contest it. Lucie, described in the press as a pretty young woman wearing a brown dress and an enormous hat, was granted a decree nisi on 14 October 1908.
On 19 November 1910 Fred married Mabel Louise Worsley from Blackpool, the daughter of a cotton merchant, at St Dionis in Palmers Green Fulham. This was a happier marriage and they had two daughters. Mabel died in July 1940. Fred died on 22 April 1944 at Dunbarty Stoke Poges, but he lived at Storth Oaks Chislehurst. He left £90,221 (worth about £4M today).
Simms was an inventor with over 60 patents. There are claims that he coined the words ‘petrol’ and ‘motor car’ but it seems likely the words were already in use. Simms liked setting up projects and in October 1895 he organized the first British Motor Show in the Agricultural Show Ground at Tunbridge Wells, which was called the ‘Horseless Carriage Exhibition’. He founded the Automobile Club in 1897 which became the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) in 1902 and that year he established the trade body, the Society of Motor Manufactures and Trades (SMMT).
About 2005 the large block of flats called Kimberley Court and another modern development called Hoopers Yard, were built on the sites of the Simms factory and the Hooper Works in Kilburn.
 |
| Kimberley Court 2005 (Dick Weindling) |
Today, nothing remains of Simms’ time in Kilburn, but as we have shown, he was a remarkably inventive and successful businessman.
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