History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This is a story about the creator of the famous Bentley car, and the Cricklewood factory they built on the corner of Oxgate Lane and the Edgware Road.  Walter Owen Bentley, or as he liked to be known ‘W.O.’, was born on 16 September 1888 at 78 Avenue Road, a large 14-room house in Hampstead. (It was destroyed by a landmine in 1940 and the site has been absorbed into the school complex at the corner of Avenue and Adelaide Roads). Walter was the youngest in the family of six sons and three daughters of Alfred Bentley, a successful businessman and his wife, Emily Waterhouse who was born in Adelaide. Her father was a Yorkshireman, who had gone to Australia and made his fortune in mining and banking before returning to England. After prep school in Bracknell, Walter, like his five brothers, attended Clifton College, an independent boarding school in Bristol. In 1905, aged sixteen he left to begin an apprenticeship with the Great Northern Railway locomotive works at Doncaster. He and his...