History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

The writer Vidiadhar (Vidia) Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad, where his father was a journalist in the local newspaper. In the 1880s the family had emigrated from India to work on a sugar plantation.  Vidia was educated at Queen’s Royal College, a high performing school in Port of Spain, which was run like a British public school. Before he was 17, he won a government scholarship to study English at University College Oxford, where he arrived in 1950.  About halfway through his degree course he became lonely and depressed. Then in February 1952, at a college play, Naipaul met Patricia Hale, who was studying history. They became a couple and Pat supported and encouraged Vidia’s writing. In 1954 he came to London while Pat went to Birmingham, her hometown, to do a further degree. Vidia desperately needed a job, and he was fortunate that in December 1954 Henry Swanzy who produced the weekly BBC Caribbean Voices, offered him a three-month renewable contract as pre...