History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Horace Goldin, was born as Hyman Elias Goldstein the son of Emmanuel Goldstein, a Jewish fruit grower, on 17 December 1873 in Vilnius. Now the capital of Lithuania, it was then part of Russia. His father emigrated to join his brother in the US about 1881, leaving his family behind until he could provide for their passage. Hyman eventually arrived in Nashville Tennessee in 1889 where his parents ran a store. He had been fascinated by conjuring ever since watching a Gypsy magician when he was a boy and in 1894, he took the bold step to quit working as a travelling salesman and become a professional magician.  Hyman adopted the stage name Horace Goldin, and began working in cheap dime museums and similar venues. After the English conjuror Herbert Albini taught him his clever version of the ‘egg in bag’ trick, Goldin’s career prospered but his first major success was with an illusion called Dreyfus Escapes from Devil’s Island, based on the notorious French case. Throughout his career G...

Researching the old newspapers, I was surprised to find that a ‘kinematographer’ had lived briefly in West Hampstead. In this story we look at his career in films. In March 1915 he was looking for work and put an advert in the section ‘Engagements Wanted’ in the trade magazine The Bioscope. It read: Alphonso Frenguelli, camera artist, disengaged, eight years experience, 78 Harvard Court, Honeybourne Road, (West Hampstead) As an important cinematographer and film director at the start of the silent pictures era he was not out of work for long.  He was part of the large Frenguelli family in Rome, where his father was an official artist in the Vatican. Alphonso Goffredo Frenguelli was born there in August 1894. He got into the developing film industry and was the managing director of Celio Films, and then chief cameraman for the famous Cines Co. of Rome. He won the gold medal for cinematography two years in a row at the Italian International film exhibition.  Frenguelli was the l...

Today the long building in Cricklewood Broadway at Nos. 249-289 near Mora Road, includes the Leyland SDM decorating and DIY centre, a Gym and several other businesses.  This is the intriguing story of how the site was used by various companies over time. It has been re-built and the numbering has changed. Site of Rolls Razor factory from the 1954 OS Map British Caudron, Cricklewood The French Caudron Brothers began building their own design of aircraft in 1910. William Hugh Ewen was a pioneer Scottish aviator who formed the W.H. Ewen Aviation Co Ltd, with a flying school in Lanark in June 1911. They moved to Hendon the following year, where in April he obtained a license to manufacture the French Caudron aircraft. When he left the company, its name was changed to British Caudron, and in January 1915 they took over the building in Cricklewood Broadway previously built for Messrs Morgan and Sharp, car body builders (Morgan & Sharp only appear in the 1914-1915 Street Directory). W...

While we all enjoy or endure the current heat wave, spare a thought for Edith Armitage, a young dress maker who bared all – well, almost all – in public, in 1899. Not once but twice!  The papers noted August 1899 was the driest August since 1866. Early September, like now, enjoyed some fine weather and around midnight on the 5th, passersby were surprised to see a young woman on Lisson Street close to Lisson Grove, ‘with nothing whatever on save an under garment’. They called a policeman, who took some time before he could catch the girl, ‘promenading between lamp-posts, which she evidently mistook for trees’. The tongue in cheek reporter said that Edith had clearly been struck by ‘the strange hallucination that Lisson Grove was the Garden of Eden’, and that she had been found ‘in a state of attire closely resembling that worn by her famous ancestress’, in other words, Eve.  ‘It was a delightfully cool costume, but at the same time, she carried her other garments under her arm’...

For many years Daisy Witherick was the landlady of The Volunteer pub at the end of Baker Street, near the present Sherlock Holmes museum. The pub became famous for her cockatoo parrot which held court in the lounge and swore loudly at all the customers.  The actor-producer duo of Robert Atkins and Sydney Carroll, who founded the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 1932, held their auditions at the pub. They liked to see how the actors delivered their lines when bombarded with constant abuse from the parrot. In August 1933 the famous parrot was taken to the HMV Columbia Studio (now the Abbey Road Studios), to make a record. The microphone was carefully positioned close to the parrot. For a moment Cockie surveyed the studio in general and the mike in particular, and then apparently having arrived at a conclusion about the recording process, poured out a string of ripe language. It is not a surprise that Columbia decided not to issue the record. At the end of October 1938, Cockie went f...