Joss Ackland in West Hampstead

There were many tributes to this well-known actor who died yesterday, aged 95.

He spent some of his childhood in West Hampstead which he wrote about in his autobiography ‘I must be in there somewhere’ (1989) Hodder & Stoughton.

Born Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland in 1928, Joss Ackland was three years old when his family moved from North Kensington into the basement flat at No.86 Hillfield Road. He wrote:
‘I was a young boy in West Hampstead where I could travel from my house to the foreign lands of Mill Lane - to the outer space of my primary school (Beckford) with the exciting knowledge that the great planet of West End Lane was in the distance, and my spaceship was eventually able to take me by bus to the fantastic world of the cinema, near Golders Green’.

Then there was the massive State Cinema on Kilburn High Road, where the film was preceded by an hour’s variety show of ‘ventriloquists, high wire acts, musical saws, conjurors and always lines of beautiful high-kicking girls’.

His first theatre visits were to the Golders Green Hippodrome: ‘Open-mouthed I gazed in wonder as a new world opened up before me’.

‘I discovered another great excitement – the public library. Hour after hour I would spend there, with its pungent smell of print and warm leather, trying to decide which two books to take home’. This was West Hampstead’s first purpose-built library on the corner of Westbere and Sarre Roads, forced to move in 1940 after the building was gutted by an incendiary bomb.

Joss wrote about the shops in Mill Lane: ‘I remember the little row of shops around the corner. The sweet shop with liquorice bootlaces - all different colours; Mickey Mouse toffees – twopence a quarter; packets of Imps - tiny sweets made from liquorice with menthol, with the kick of a mule; penny slabs of chocolate - brown and white; packets of sherbet with liquorice straws; bottles of Tizer and fizzy tablets that exploded in the mouth. There was a chemist that smelt of camphor and a grocer where the salty rashers of bacon blended with the sweet icing smell of biscuit animals, and a hardware store with bundles of wood to light fires and the smell of paraffin lamps, and of course, the newsagent and toy shop with copies of the Buzzer, Magnet, Gem, Champion and Film Fun and many others, sometimes with magnificent free gifts’.

In 1938 the family moved to 110 Fordwych Road. Fortunately, their stay was a brief one. The proximity of this road to a major railway line meant that several nearby properties suffered bomb damage during WWII. On 2 October 1940 a high-explosive bomb destroyed Nos.100-110 and damaged every property north to Minster Road. Eleven people were killed. After the war Joss visited Fordwych Road, ‘to be greeted only by an empty space’, this was later filled by blocks of flats.

He was not an academic achiever, and was unable to follow his brother to Haberdashers' Aske's School. But he passed the entry exam for Dame Alice Owen's School in Islington and in order to shorten his journey to school, the family left West Hampstead and moved to Stoke Newington.

Later Joss studied drama at the Central School of Speech & Drama and married the actress Rosemary Kirkcaldy (d. 2002). They had seven children, 34 grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren.

He spent a few years in Africa, where in addition to acting roles he also managed a tea plantation. The couple returned to the UK in 1957 and Joss’s career began to take off.

He appeared in hundreds of productions on stage, TV and cinema screen. He was with Alec Guinness in the TV serial ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ and he portrayed C.S. Lewis in ‘Shadowlands’. Some of the films he has appeared in are ‘White Mischief’ and ‘The Hunt for Red October’. Joss Ackland was awarded a CBE in 2001, for services to acting.

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History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

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