History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

    This weekend the death was announced of Murray Melvin, activist, actor and archivist. Those of you familiar with our books describing the history of Kilburn and its residents, will know he lived on the Kilburn Gate Estate in the 1960s. But his links with Camden go back to 1932, when he was born in what was then the Borough of St Pancras. His parents, Hugh Victor and Maisie Winifred Melvin, were living at 2 Marquis Road, off Camden Road. Next, they rented in Mornington Crescent and then Delancey Street in Camden Town.  Murray left school at the age of fourteen, unable to master fractions but as head prefect, a qualification he said he gained by always having clean fingernails and well-combed hair. He started work as an office boy for a firm of travel agents off Oxford Street. A short-lived job followed as an import and export clerk in a shipping office, during which he inadvertently exported quantities of goods to destinations that had not ordered them. After WWII, Hug...