Sports in Kensal Rise

In this story we move away from our usual area to look at a large stadium which was built in Kensal Rise before developers created the modern streets.

In 1890 All Souls College Oxford leased 27 acres of their land and the grandly named National Athletic Grounds were built close to Kensal Rise Station. The stadium soon became known locally as the Kensal Rise Athletic Grounds and it lasted to the end of WWI.

The stadium and grounds were impressive. There was a banked velodrome track for the rapidly growing sport of cycling of 586 yards, or three laps to the mile. Inside there was a 440 yards cinder running track and also a 240 yards straight track. Spectators watched from a grandstand pavilion which could seat 1,000 people. The first meeting took place on the Whit Monday Bank Holiday 26 May 1890 and attracted 3,500 visitors. Admission was 1s, to the enclosures 2s and the grandstand was 3s. All tickets were half-price when bought in advance. The Hon Sec. was Sydney Lee, an auctioneer who ran a cycle sale room in Quality Court Chancery Lane. In January 1894 he was one of the directors in the new ‘Puncture-proof Pneumatic Tyre Company Ltd.’

Drawing by George Moore (Bicycling News, 13 Sept 1890)

 

National Athletic Club races in 1891

At the opening meeting the facilities in the grounds were unfinished, and the programme was restricted to cycle racing. One of the directors, Edward Overall Bleackley, presented medals and prize money to the winners F.P. Wood of Brixton, W.H. Bardsley Hounslow, and H.E. Laurie of the Catford club. Bleackley was a wealthy cotton broker from Manchester, who when he died in Brighton in 1898, left £184,824 (worth about £21M today).

At the time, the stadium was exposed and the track was windy. One cyclist said that the back straight was higher than the Willesden-Gospel Oak railway, which it adjoined. In March 1891 the magazine Cycling criticized the owners for a grave error in holding races long before the track was fit for use, and consequently the grounds had suffered a chequered career. But they reported the lease on the grounds had been taken over by Richard Cook who intended to make Kensal Rise second to none. Adverts were taken out in sports magazines which said the facilities were open for practice. The season ticket for the running track was 10s and the cycle track was 12s 6d.

The adverts emphasized that trainers Joe Broughton and Sam Wisdom were always on hand. Broughton promoted walking races from 1890 to 1892. Sam Wisdom was a well-known trainer of athletes and the great-grandfather of the comedian Norman Wisdom. By 1905 Spencer (Sam) Wisdom was living at 79 Burrows Road in Kensal Green.

To obtain a permit from the Amateur Athletic Association, the proprietors of the stadium had to form a club, called the National Athletic Club. When they held their first annual dinner at the stadium in October 1891, Harold Cooke the Hon. Sec, said they now had 130 members, about 50 of whom were at the dinner.

Other local clubs such as the Pegasus Cycling Club with headquarters in The Railway Hotel West End Lane, the Kilburn Ramblers Cycling Club who met at the Queens Arms pub and the Queens Park CC used the stadium regularly. Bigger clubs like the Polytechnic CC also held meetings there.

A group called the Universal Sports and Recreation Society Ltd (Uniquia) acquired use of the grounds and held open meetings with prize money. They spent £2,000 to re-lay the track and rebuild the club house. The company had been formed in December 1895 when Walter Andrews sold the lease for the grounds to the group and was appointed managing director on a salary of £1,000 a year. However, in October 1896 Walter Bailey (also a director of various other companies) and Walter Andrews of Uniquia, went into bankruptcy. Andrews lived at 36 Callcott Road in Kilburn from at least 1894 to 1907. In February 1897 he applied for a license to sell beer and spirits at the Kensal Rise grounds in a bar he called the National Athletic Pavilions. By 1911 he had moved to Belsize Park and he died aged 77 in Marylebone in 1937.

In May 1900 Richard Cook of ‘Woodthorpe’ Stonebridge Park, faced his creditors for a bankruptcy hearing. He said he had been the lessee from All Souls College of the Kensal Rise Athletic grounds for about ten years and had spent about £5,000 improving it. He had liabilities of £11,880 but only £556 of this was unsecured and he did not admit he was insolvent. It seems despite this he went into bankruptcy.

James Barden was the first manager of the grounds. He was a champion runner in the army in India, and his son Charley Barden became the English cycling champion in 1896, breaking records from 440 yards to 10 miles. Charley had begun as a track boy and then aged 16 he joined the Kensal Rise Bicycle Club and later the Polytechnic CC. He was trained by ‘Old Joe Broughton’. In 1897 he criticised other riders for the death of Bert Harris and after this he found it difficult to get races in England and moved to Paris.

Charley first used Pennell racing bikes which were made by Henry Pennell at 507-509 Harrow Road. This was a meeting place for local riders and the shop displayed sepia photos of famous racing cyclist on the walls. In April 1899 Pennell sold the business ‘lock, stock and barrel’ to F.C. Armstrong, a racing cyclist, for £330. The following September Pennell went bankrupt. He said he had started the business in 1885 in Queens Park before moving to the Harrow Road shop. But he began drinking heavily and lost his money gambling on the horses.

James Barden played a major role in modernising cycle tracks by the introduction of banking and cement instead of cinder tracks. In 1892 he cemented the inside section of the track at Kensal Rise and the whole track was made of cement two years later. Following this success, he moved to Putney and set up a business constructing roads, tennis courts and racing tracks in England and overseas. In 1931 he was living in Maldon Essex when he celebrated his diamond wedding and received a letter from the King and Queen.

From 1896 to 1901 Queens Park Rangers football team used the Kensal Rise grounds after they had obtained a ten-year lease. In 1901 All Souls College won their case in the Appeal Court to terminate the Club’s lease, and there was pressure on Willesden Council to buy the ground for the public. QPR moved briefly to fields in St Quintin’s Avenue. They returned to Kensal Rise in 1902 where they stayed to 1904, but when they could not afford the increases in rent demanded by All Souls, they moved to the Agricultural Showground at Park Royal. In 1907/8 they moved again to another ground at Park Royal capable of holding 60,000. After moving more times than any other football club, they eventually settled at the Loftus Road ground.

During the period 1896 to 1901 two athletics clubs, Queens Park Harriers and Finchley Harriers used the athletics track at Kensal Rise.

Kensal Rise was one of nine London velodromes in use between 1880-1908, but the cycling boom had pretty much ended by 1914.

William Thomas Ecclestone was a builder and publican of the Coach and Horses Stonebridge, the Chequers in Alperton and the Canterbury Arms in Kilburn. At 38 stone he modestly claimed to be ‘the second heaviest man in the world’ and was popularly known as ‘Jolly Jumbo’. He was interested in sports and had sponsored races at Kensal Rise from 1899. At the Coach and Horses, he had a gym and looked after visiting boxers, including the first black world heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson when he came here in 1911.

In 1905 Jumbo took over the lease of the grounds after QPR had left the previous year. He supported the Willesden Cottage Hospital and raised money for them each year. On New Year’s Day 1911 with tremendous publicity, he became the heaviest man to fly when he went up in the famous aviator Claude Grahame-White’s plane to fly over the Kensal Rise grounds. Ecclestone died aged 52 in April 1915 at the Kings Head Hotel in Brighton.

In 1916 several boxing matches were held at the grounds. The biggest was the world flyweight championship fight between the tiny Welshman Jimmy Wilde (known as The Mighty Atom, or The Ghost with a Hammer in His hands) and Johnny Hughes of Bloomsbury. On 10 June Wilde knocked out Hughes in the 10th round of the 20 scheduled. There was good weather that day; the crowd watched in the open air and the advertised undercover seating for 3,500 was not needed. 

Wilde who started work in the Rhondda coal mines as a pit boy, had an incredible record of 152 bouts, 146 victories, and 100 knockouts. This included the longest unbeaten sequence of 103 fights achieved in just over four years, with matches about every two weeks.

Edward PoW, presenting Jimmy Wilde with a medal

The painting by William Howard Robinson depicts the occasion when Jimmy Wilde outpointed the American Joe Lynch in March 1919. At the end of the bout, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) stepped into the ring and congratulated the tiny Welshman on his victory. This was the first time Royalty had officially entered a boxing ring and thereby gave official patronage to a sport which had been illegal in the days of bare knuckle fighting and was still looking for acceptance.

OS map showing the stadium in 1913 surrounded by streets

In May 1917, the Kensal Rise ground was taken over by the Government for the Army and it seems to have not been used after the end of the War. The grounds were demolished, and Leigh Gardens and Whitmore Gardens were built on the site in the late 1920s.

My thanks for help with this article to Simon Inglis the author of ‘Played in London’ (2014), and Cliff Wadsworth of the Willesden Local History Society.