History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

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...

Bird in Hand, West End Lane (Dick Weindling, August 2018) No.12 West End Lane was the Bird in Hand, first named in 1831 as a beerhouse run by James Paty, who had just gone bankrupt. He is described in the proceedings as a retailer of beer at Kilburn, formerly a timber dealer and stagecoach proprietor of Paddington Green. From 1840 to at least 1861 the owners of the beerhouse were William and George Verey who ran the Kilburn Brewery in the High Road near today’s Brondesbury Overground station. Members of the same family ran the Bird in Hand for 70 years. It backed onto a crowded set of mainly working-class streets between Belsize Road and West End Lane , with more of the same across the High Road in Willesden. In 1861, Ellen Lovegrove was living with her uncle, a publican in Child’s Hill. She married William Grantham in 1866 but he died three years later at the Bird in Hand where he was almost certainly the beerhouse keeper.  Ellen took over and the following ye...