History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

In July 1907 the Daily Express ran a series of front page articles about a woman in West Hampstead who they dubbed the ‘Queen of Madagascar’. She was Elizabeth Horne who had lived with her husband Frederick at 18 Greencroft Gardens since the late 1880s. Elizabeth was the daughter of Alexander Cowie, a Scotsman who had opened a boys’ school in Box Villa, Marlborough Road St. John’s Wood in 1829. They were a very religious family and her brother William became the Archbishop of Auckland in New Zealand . Elizabeth was born in 1837 and she married Frederick Warlters Horne in Hampstead in 1879. Born in Norwood in 1854, Frederick worked in a merchant firm set up by his father who traded goods with Spain and Portugal . The 1907 Exposé The Daily Express said that, ‘As a result of an exhaustive inquiry made by a special representative of the Express, the public are now placed for the first time in possession of the full facts’. The articles revealed a ‘secret syndicate’ where M...