History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This is the story of the famous artist Frank Dicksee who lived at No. 3 Greville Place from 1897 until his death in 1928. Greville Place is off the Kilburn end of Maida Vale, and the house has now been sub-divided. The unusual Dicksee family name is traced back to Frank’s grandfather Richard Cox. He and his brother John were unwillingly press-ganged into the Navy in 1807. After several miserable years at sea, they deserted and used Richard’s nickname of ‘Dick C’ to become Dicksee. They returned to Swallow Street in Soho where they worked as ‘boot closers’ making the leather uppers of shoes, hidden in the cellar under their house. They were only able to lead a normal life in 1815 when an amnesty was granted on naval deserters.  Richard’s son Thomas Francis Cox was born in 1819, and the family moved to 23 Howland Street in Bloomsbury when Swallow Street was demolished to build Regent Street. The family latter changed their name from Cox to Dicksee.  Thomas Dicksee showed an earl...

Pepper’s Ghost was a famous visual illusion which astonished the Victorian public before the invention of cinema. It was created by John Henry Pepper and Henry Dircks and the G host first appeared at the Royal Polytechnic Institution on 24 December 1858. The link to our area is that John Henry Pepper lived at two addresses in Kilburn from 1856 to about 1871. He was born on 21 June 1821 at 7 Great Queen Street Holborn, the son of Charles Bailey Pepper, a civil engineer. John Henry was educated at King’s College School and then became a pupil of the chemist John Thomas Cooper at the Russell Institution. In 1840, at age of 19 he was appointed assistant lecturer at the Granger School of Medicine. Five years later he married Mary Ann Benwell. They had no children of their own, but adopted Mary’s nephew William Henry Welsh, who worked with Pepper as his assistant. John Henry Pepper, c1870   Pepper was a very good speaker, and in 1847 he gave his first lecture at the R...