History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

  Today on Remembrance Sunday, the work of the First World War poets like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sasson are still well known. In this story we look at a war poet from Kilburn who is forgotten. In 1889, Leslie Coulson was born as Frederick Leslie Allen-Coulson at 173 Loveridge Road Kilburn. His father Frederick Raymond Coulson came from a poor family in Bury Lancashire who moved to Mile End in east London. Frederick had hyphened his surname and called himself Allen-Coulson by 1883 when he married Ada Mary Ann Emery on Christmas Day in St Mary’s Stratford Bow. In 1887 when their first son Raymond was baptised in Christ Church Brondesbury, they were living in three rooms on the first and second floors of 173 Loveridge Road Kilburn (this was probably later re-numbered as today's No.70). Frederick was a warehouseman. At the time of the 1891 census, they had moved across the Kilburn High Road to 9 Dunster Gardens. Frederick now aged 26, was a shipping clerk and Ada was...