History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This the story of a 1950s swindle to get money from young couples desperate to buy their own homes. The brains of the scheme lived in West Hampstead, Kilburn and Willesden. On 11 September 1956, five men appeared at the Old Bailey charged with fraud. They were William Frederick Montgomery (46) a clerical assistant of 2a Riffel Road Willesden, John Frederick Attenborough (54) the company negotiator of Albion Street Dunstable, Herbert Henry Skelly (35) master builder of Manor Road Dagenham, Richard Neel (46) travel agent of Beckenham Road Beckenham, and Ernest Rea (79) the company director of Katherine Road East Ham. They were charged with conspiring together between February 1953 and January 1955, to defraud people to buy a home from the Harmsworth Building and Construction Company Ltd. 120 prospective buyers paid deposits totalling £23,184 (today worth about £870,000), for homes that were never built. All five men pleaded ‘not guilty’. Deposits were not returned, and the company went t...

During our work on a new book for the Willesden Local History Society, we found that Sydney Galvayne, and son Frederick were living at the Model Farm, Neasden in 1891. 1894 OS Map showing site of the Model Farm in Neasden (Marked X) Sydney was shown in the census as a horse farmer and his son Frederick was described as a Professor of Horsemanship. In 1891 they advertised as ‘Galvayne and Son, The Model Farm and Horse Depot Neasden’ with 70 large horse boxes. This was intriguing as Neasden was still a remote village and the Galvaynes were born in Australia. Sydney first appears in the online newspapers at the end of November 1884 as Professor Galvayne ‘the celebrated Australian scientific horse trainer’. He was opening his first school at the Corn Exchange in York and giving demonstrations of how to break previously difficult horses of the local gentry to harness in a few minutes. In his ‘Galvayning’ method a string from a strap on the the horse’s head was tied to its tail causing i...

This was a famous stud farm run by the Tattersall family who today are still one of the leading sellers of thoroughbred racehorses. It was part of Upper Oxgate which was off the Edgware Road beyond Cricklewood at the corner of today’s Oxgate Lane. In 1838 the Duke of Buckingham sold 96 acres of the Roberts estate to Edmund Tattersall. He carried out an extensive building conversion of the old houses on the property, some dating back as far as 1670, to create his stud farm. The illustration of the property is by George Tattersall, a talented artist member of the family, from his book on ‘Sporting Architecture’ (1841). Wealthy racehorse owners could send their mares to Willesden Paddocks for 12 shillings a week to be ‘covered’ by resident stallions at the stud: the fee in 1853 was 15 guineas. This area on the outskirts of London was popular for horse breeding and there was another stud farm at Neasden. Willesden Paddocks, George Tattersall, 1841 ‘Voltigeur’ and Sir Edwin Landseer ...

In April 1898 three boys appeared at the Harlesden police court. They were Henry Wills (16) no fixed abode, Frank Griffin (16), 90 Roundwood Road, and Thomas Chinnery (14), of 9 Rucklidge Avenue.  In a field at night, they had used a stolen spade to dig what they called a ‘cave’ which was five feet, by 4ft and 3ft deep. The hole was covered by a roof of corrugated iron and zinc sheets with the earth from the hole piled on top.  They had stolen food valued at £1 11s 3d, from Joseph Bayley grocer’s van parked at 94 Burns Road Harlesden. The haul consisted of, condensed milk, tea, coffee, sugar, jam, tinned salmon, sardines, golden syrup, rice, cocoa, oatmeal, candles, and matches.  Then they raided a dovecot in the garden of 20 Charlton Road belonging to Francis Amos Willett, and stole 20 of his pigeons. The boys lived in the cave for over a week, dining well on the stolen food and cooking pigeons in a bucket over a fire.  On Saturday morning 24 March, Francis Willett ...

Many of our blog stories have recalled the hardship and pain caused by the tough living conditions among Victorian working people in Kilburn and Willesden, where illness, poverty and poor housing were the norm for many streets. For some people, the festive season over Christmas made little difference to their lives and may even have made matters worse. James and Ellen Doggrell In December 1893 (George) James and Ellen (Eleanor) Doggrell were at 10 Steele Road off Acton Lane, close to the Grand Union Canal. They had no children and rented a single room on the ground floor of the small terrace house which has since been demolished. James was born in 1858 in Bath, Somerset. His father George was an agricultural labourer and he had moved his family to Acton by 1881, to a district generally referred to as ‘Lower Place’. It’s hard to imagine Willesden or Acton and Harlesden as rural neighborhoods, with country lanes and fields divided by hedges or ditches. But that was the case in the 1880s ...