History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Today in Kimberley Road, near Paddington Old Cemetery, there is a large modern block of flats called Kimberley Court. This covers the site of the Welbeck Works which were built here in 1904 by a remarkable man called Frederick Richard Simms. Born in 1863 in Hamburg and educated in Germany and London, his grandfather was a merchant from Manchester who established a trading company in Hamburg to supply the Newfoundland fishing fleet.  Fred went into business making suspension cars and in 1889, while supervising the assembly of an overhead cableway at Bremen he met Gottlieb Daimler the car manufacturer. Fred negotiated the British patent rights for Daimler engines and in 1890 set up Simms & Co, consulting engineers, which introduced Daimler engines into Britain. The work was carried out by the Daimler Motor Syndicate, which Simms founded in 1893 and then sold to the financier H. J. Lawson in 1895. This laid the foundations for the British motor industry, with the Daimler works a...