History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Trinidadian Desmond Allum came to London to study law in 1958. He worked in hotel kitchens and the Post Office and studied law at night. He qualified and was called to the Bar in the summer of 1962 and then got a job with the Inland Revenue. In 1964 and 1965 he lived at 116 Greencroft Gardens in West Hampstead.  His friend George Hislop was born in Tobago. He played cricket for Trinidad and represented the West Indies at the Empire Games held in Cardiff in 1958. The following year he came to London to train as a teacher. In September 1962 he started work as a PE teacher at the Hillcroft Secondary School in Tooting Bec.  The Incident On the evening of 31 January 1963 Allum and Hislop had visited friends at 351b Finchley Road (now redeveloped as part of the JW3 Centre). They left and were walking down Finchley Road towards the underground station on their way to Balham. At 9.25pm they were stopped and questioned by two plain clothes detectives who asked them to turn out their po...

This is the story of Arthur Andrews, a career burglar who was responsible for numerous burglaries in our area. In the summer of 1896 he broke into 35 Christchurch Avenue in Brondesbury, 186 Willesden Lane, and 27 Anson Road in Cricklewood. He met Ada Insull while she was in service in West Hampstead and gave her presents including a clock, jewellery and flowers. Arthur promised to marry her and she gave up her job, but the next time she saw him he had been arrested and was in court. Fanny Nisbett, a laundress in Church Street Edgware Road, also became acquainted with Andrews that summer. They went to the Earls Court Exhibition with Fanny’s friend Kate Baker and her boyfriend Harry Bucking who was a sailor. On the way Andrews offered Harry a silver box with a spirit lamp for heating curlers as a present. The sailor declined saying he did not curl his hair. This caused considerable laughter in court as his hair was only the naval regulation length of an eighth of an inch. One evening at ...

This is a shocking story about racism which led to a landmark legal case and is a tribute to a remarkable man who lived in Kilburn at the end of his life. The famous cricketer, Learie Constantine was born in Trinidad in 1901 into a family of cricketers, including his father and a brother. He played for Trinidad and Tobago from 1921, and the West Indies from 1923 to 1939, including several test matches against England. The cricket commentator, John Arlot later said that during his first tour of England in 1923, ‘Constantine learnt much that he never forgot, by no means all of it about cricket: and he recognised the game as his only possible ladder to the kind of life he wanted’. Eventually he became a professional cricketer after struggling hard to make a living in Trinidad, with no permanent job to support his wife Norma and daughter Gloria. His bowling and batting performances in England in 1928 got him noticed. The way Constantine played set him apart from the restrained form of cric...