History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

    This weekend the death was announced of Murray Melvin, activist, actor and archivist. Those of you familiar with our books describing the history of Kilburn and its residents, will know he lived on the Kilburn Gate Estate in the 1960s. But his links with Camden go back to 1932, when he was born in what was then the Borough of St Pancras. His parents, Hugh Victor and Maisie Winifred Melvin, were living at 2 Marquis Road, off Camden Road. Next, they rented in Mornington Crescent and then Delancey Street in Camden Town.  Murray left school at the age of fourteen, unable to master fractions but as head prefect, a qualification he said he gained by always having clean fingernails and well-combed hair. He started work as an office boy for a firm of travel agents off Oxford Street. A short-lived job followed as an import and export clerk in a shipping office, during which he inadvertently exported quantities of goods to destinations that had not ordered them. After WWII, Hug...

In the late Victorian period, Kensal Green was still known as Kensal New Town which had been built in the 1840s, following the 1838 opening of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway which passed nearby. Viscount Howard as he was called, was a member of the local Conservative Association, and popular with the ladies of the Primrose League. He was also very well known in the Kensal New Town pubs. He lived at 72 Kilburn Lane for over 20 years, which he rented at 8sh and 6d a week.                                72 Kilburn Lane today He was born in Walsall in 1840 as William Little Howard, the son of a respectable solicitor. Aged 19 he joined the Royal Navy, and in 1862 he was a clerk at the Admiralty but was obliged to retire because he went bankrupt. He continued to spend more than he earned, and when his father disowned him, William had to live on his wits using various scams and fraud...

In June 1925, the local and national press carried a tragic story, ‘Family Wiped Out’. Kentish-born couple John William Miskin and Alice Annie Pemberton were married at Willesden Parish Church in 1907, when they were living at 240 Willesden High Road with Alice’s sister Jane and her husband Walter. They moved to other local addresses and by the time of the 1911 census they were at 392a Willesden High Road with their two children, Dorothy Jane aged 10 and William aged 7.                392 Willesden High Road today Alice told neighbour Lucy Jackman, who lived in the flat below at 392 Willesden High Road, that she was sometimes lonely and sad when John was absent from home. John was frequently away for long periods of time because he was employed as a steamship officer and by 1921 as a master mariner in the merchant navy.  He was mobilised at the start of WWI and immediately sent to the North Sea. According to official records, ‘his duties...