The famous child actor, Freddie Bartholomew, was born on 28 March 1924 at 17 Radcliffe Avenue Harlesden. His father Cecil Llewellyn Bartholomew had travelled to Canada in 1913 and joined the Canadian Army in November 1915. He was sent to fight in France and Belgium where he was injured and had his right leg amputated. He was discharged in January 1918 and returned to his parents in Warminster Wiltshire. In 1919 Cecil married Lilian May Clarke. They first lived at 300 Earlsfield Road Wandsworth and had two daughters, Eileen born in 1920 and Hilda in 1922. A year later they had moved to Harlesden where Freddie was born. When Freddie was three and a half, he was sent to live with his maiden aunt Millicent (also spelled as Myllicent), who had pleaded to be allowed to bring him up at Carlton Villa Warminster, the home of his grandparents. ‘Aunt Cissie’ encouraged Freddie’s acting and he appeared in local amateur shows. She enrolled him at the Italia Conti children’s theatre school in Lamb’s...
This is the story of how a Cricklewood factory played an important role in exposing a fraudulent spiritualist medium in the 1920s. Photographic Dry Plates To record an image, early photographers used wet plates which had to be processed straight away. In 1871 Richard Maddox coated a glass plate with a gelatine emulsion of silver bromide. He found these plates could be stored until needed, and after exposure in the camera, taken to a darkroom for development at leisure. Joseph Acworth Joseph Acworth was born in Chatham in 1853 and was interested from boyhood in the experimental sciences. He began working in the laboratories of the Royal College of Chemistry in South Kensington, (now part of Imperial College). Acworth became fascinated by the photographic dry plates which Maddox had invented, and he worked in the labs of the newly created Britannia Dry Plate Company at Ilford. He went to the University of Erlangen in Germany where he...