West Hampstead Life

Author: Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms

  • The Detmold twins: Artistic genius and depression

    The Detmold twins: Artistic genius and depression

    Charles Maurice (known as Maurice) and Edward Julius Detmold were twin brothers with outstanding artistic ability who worked at the Sherriff Road Studios between 1902 and 1905.

    They were born at 97 Upper Richmond Road on 21 November 1883. Their parents Edward Detmold and Mary Agnes Luck had married in 1881. Mary was brought up by her uncle, Dr Edward Barton Shuldham. He was born in Bengal where his father was an officer in the Indian Army. Mary’s parents may have died when she was a child: in 1871, aged 10, she was living in Croydon with Edward and his wife Elizabeth, who had no children of their own. Dr Shuldham was to play a major role in the Detmold story.

    Edward was the son of Julius Adolph Detmold, a colonial merchant from Hamburg; ( Detmold is a town in Germany). It seems Edward decided not to enter the family business. Instead, in 1876, Julius placed his son as a ‘pupil’ with farmer Samuel Butcher in Hampshire, to learn the business. Ostensibly, theirs was a partnership but Julius remained in control. When the business failed in March 1879, Julius settled its debts by paying 20sh in the pound and the bankruptcy was annulled. Butcher said he’d always had sole management of the farms and was paid money for Edward’s keep. There’d never been any profits. Samuel later took Edward to court, accusing his ex-partner of stealing papers and other property from his farmhouse. Butcher said Detmold had threatened him and his wife Jane: “He placed himself in a fighting attitude and said “I’ll punch your head and thrash you both within an inch of your lives.” Detmold countered, saying he believed the papers were the property of his father. Both parties were bound over to keep the peace for six months.

    A couple of years later, the 1881 census showed Edward still living in Hampshire, where he was sharing a house with his brother Henry. Henry was an artist while Edward had remained a farmer, with 250 acres employing five men and two boys. Dr Shuldham and his wife Elizabeth were the witnesses when their niece Mary Luck married Edward a few months later. The newly weds moved in with the Shuldhams in Upper Richmond Road and their first child, Nora was born the following year. The 1883 baptism record of twins Charles Maurice and Edward Julius describes Edward as a stockbroker, so he’d abandoned farming. He tried various jobs and became an electrical engineer: in the 1908 phone book he is listed as ‘Electrical Signs’, at 7 Warwick Lane.

    The Dictionary of National Biography entry for the Detmold twins says their mother probably died shortly after their birth. This is wrong, Mary died in 1954. Rather, it looks as though the marriage failed and in 1888 Edward left and the three children and their mother stayed with Dr Shuldham.

    Dr Shuldham graduated from Trinity College Dublin and was a physician at St James Homeopathic Hospital and the editor of ‘The Homeopathic World’. He wrote several medical books and was interested in stammering. Lewis Carroll, a convinced homeopath and a stammerer was a friend of Shuldham. Several of Shuldham’s medical books are in the British Library: The Family Homoepathist (1871), Headaches: their causes and treatment (1875), Clergymans Sore Throat (1878), Stammering and its rational treatment (1879), and The Health of the Skin (1890).

    Shuldham was also an artist and the Victoria and Albert Museum has a landscape by him in their collection. He loved natural history and Japanese painting and agreed to educate the twins after their father had left. Part of each year was spent at Ditchling in Sussex. The Detmold boys showed early artistic talent and some time after the age of six, they briefly studied drawing at the Hampstead Conservatoire in Eton Avenue. This was the only formal training they received, but Dr Shuldham took them on regular sketching visits to the Regent’s Park Zoo and the Natural History Museum. Their uncle Henry Detmold, an artist of some renown, played an important role in helping the twins develop their natural talent. They won prizes in a nationwide art competition before they were eleven years old.

    Dr Shuldham moved to Hampstead from south London and is shown at 15 Frognal (renumbered as 42) from 1891 to 1896, and then at ‘Katwych’ 49 Fairhazel Gardens, (1897 to 1906). This was followed by a series of moves downhill – literally and in terms of the value of the property he occupied. From 1906 to 1910 the family was at 13 Inglewood Road in West Hampstead. By the time of the 1911 census he was at 5 Priory Court in Mazenod Avenue and then he moved to number 7 where he stayed until his death in 1924, aged 86. Rather surprisingly, previously relatively wealthy, he left only £14 to Mary Agnes Detmold.

    Number 42 Frognal (on the left), is a substantial 14 room house and one of a pair of semi-detached Victorian properties. Originally the roof line and front entrance would have mirrored number 40, (right).
    Number 42 Frognal (on the left), is a substantial 14 room house and one of a pair of semi-detached Victorian properties. Originally the roof line and front entrance would have mirrored number 40, (right).

    As child prodigies, at the age of 13, Edward and Maurice Detmold were the youngest people to exhibit watercolors at the Royal Academy. These were displayed ‘on the line,’ in other words at eye level, a great accolade. They also sent drawings to the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, where the doorman, seeing two children, refused them entry. He asked; “Whose pictures do you want to see – your father’s?’” They replied, “No, our own.” He fetched the secretary, who let them in.

    Edward Julius Detmold, pencil sketch by Maurice, 1899, NPG
    Edward Julius Detmold, pencil sketch by Maurice, 1899, NPG
    Maurice Detmold, pencil sketch by Edward, 1899 NPG
    Maurice Detmold, pencil sketch by Edward, 1899 NPG

    Working jointly on their illustrations and etchings, in 1899 they produced a book of illustrations for Pictures from Birdland, which had rhymes by Edward Shuldham. With money from their sales, they bought and installed a printing press at their studio in Sherriff Road and produced a large number of prints. Their talent was obvious: a June 1900 review of work then on display at the Fine Art Society, described the “clever boy artists” as possessing “very remarkable genius. No reproductive process could quite do justice to their skilful brushwork and the quaint charm of their coloured etchings.” This critic concluded: “If they are not entirely submerged by juvenile success, if they are strong enough to survive precocious popularity and its attendant vices, they are sure to be heard of again.”

    In 1903, at the age of twenty, they created a portfolio of sixteen superb watercolors for Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Their original drawings are in Kipling’s home ‘Batemans’ in Burwash, Etchingham, East Sussex, and the British Library has a set of the astonishing prints in the rare book collection which I went to see.

    Kaa the Python, illustration for The Jungle Book by Maurice Detmold, 1903
    Kaa the Python, illustration for The Jungle Book by Maurice Detmold, 1903

    A review of the their work in 1907 said: “Many mediums are within their authority: etching, drawing, fresco and glass-painting, brushwork and wood-printed blocks in the Japanese fashion. In everything they do there is evidence of close observation, accuracy, strength and a wonderful sense of composition.”

    But their productive partnership came to a sudden end in April 1908 when Maurice Detmold committed suicide. He was found in his room in Inglewood Road by his brother, in the bedroom they shared. Maurice was lying on the bed with a bag over his head and a cotton wad soaked in chloroform. There were three bottles of chloroform nearby and two dead cats in a box. He had left a suicide note which read: “This is not the end of a life. I have expressed through my physical means all that they are capable of expressing, and I am about to lay them aside – Maurice.”

    The body was identified by his father Edward Detmold. At the inquest Dr Shuldham said the boys had lived with him since they were young. He said they were about to go to the country (presumably to Ditchling). He had given the brothers chloroform before to kill half-starved stray cats, so he was not suspicious when Maurice asked for more. When Edward Julius was asked if he knew why his brother had killed himself, he replied: “I cannot tell, except that he had done all that he wanted to do. He was most cheerful as a rule, and was exceptionally successful in his work.”

    The verdict of the jury was: “suicide whilst of an unsound mind.” Maurice’s suicide appeared to re-unite his parents Edward and Mary, who started to live together again. The 1911 census shows them in number 5 Priory Court , a block of flats in   Mazenod Avenue. Dr Shuldham and his wife occupied number 7 with their unmarried daughter Nora. Edward Julius, Maurice’s brother, was still living with the doctor but he later moved in with his parents. They left Priory Court for 137 Broadhurst Gardens , about 1932, where Edward Detmold senior died in 1938.

    The captive, by Edward Detmold, 1923
    The captive, by Edward Detmold, 1923

    Edward Julius Detmold was stunned by his brother’s death, but he continued to work at the publishers Hodder and Stoughton and at the Rossetti Studios in Flood Street into the 1920s and 1930s, creating etchings, drawings and paintings, and coloured block prints. Then he largely withdrew from public life. After the death of his father the family moved in 1940 to ‘Bank House’, a large house on the edge of Montgomery, North Wales where Edward lived with his mother and sister Mrs Nora Joy, the artist Sidney Lawrence Biddle and the musician Harold Rankin Hulls. Biddle and Hulls had lived with the family in West Hampstead. His mother Mary died at Bank House in 1954. Three years later on the morning of Monday 1 July 1957, like his brother Maurice almost fifty years before, Edward committed suicide. He shot himself in the chest and died of a haemorrhage.

    At the inquest Hulls said that he had owned the single-barreled shotgun which Detmold had used to kill himself, and he kept it in his bedroom. The local doctor said he had treated Detmold for arterial disease which caused fainting attacks, and depression was a common symptom in such cases. Then the coroner read a statement from Mrs Joy who was too upset to attend the inquest. She said that after Hulls had left, her brother had returned to the house and kissed her and gone into his room. This was not unusual because they were an affectionate family. Then she heard the sound of a shot and she rushed into his room. Her brother staggered towards her and fell at her feet. She said that in the past year Edward had lost the sight in one eye and the other eye was deteriorating rapidly. This, combined with his blackouts, had caused considerable depression. The coroner’s verdict was: “death by self-inflicted gunshot wound while the balance of the mind was disturbed.”

    The Roc which fed its young on elephants, for The Arabian Nights, by Edward Detmold, 1924
    The Roc which fed its young on elephants, for The Arabian Nights, by Edward Detmold, 1924

    The twin’s art work, influenced by Japanese prints, particularly those by Hiroshige and Hokusai, was highly original. In 2002 at a Sothebys book auction The Arabian Nights with illustrations by Edward Detmold, was estimated to reach between £100,000 to £150,000. Today their work is greatly prized.

  • When the King of the Cheap Jacks and the Midget Queen met James Joyce

    In August 1878 Charles Augustus James appeared in court because he had set up his caravans on the corner of Percy Road and Pembroke Road (later renamed Granville Road) in South Kilburn. He traded here as a hawker or ‘cheap jack’ selling various goods. Thomas Diggins, a builder from Devon who lived and worked on the new houses in Pembroke Road, had taken out a summons to stop James trading. James had previously set up his vans nearby on vacant ground in Malvern Road but had been evicted by the owner. So he hired the land in Pembroke Road, moved the vans to the new site and issued the following handbill:

    The enemy is defeated. We are not going away – not likely. CA James, the King of all cheap jacks, begs respectfully to inform his friends and customers that he has taken his stand in Pembroke Road Kilburn, where he will sell by auction every night, at seven o’clock pm, a large stock of splendid goods and a £5,000 stock of gold and silver watches of best quality. Working men come in thousands, and support the people’s friend.
    James clearly knew how to pull the punters. ‘Hundreds and thousands’ of people assembled around the van every night, blocking the road and requiring large numbers of police to control the crowd. James carried on a roaring trade till eleven and twelve at night. When the summons was served, he read it out to the crowds and offered them gin and tobacco. When he was taken to the High Court James presented a petition in his favour signed by 500 people. He said he’d done all the trade he could in the neighbourhood and was moving on, so the case was adjourned.
    James was born in Redditch near Birmingham, in 1850. His father’s jobs – as a needle maker and carpenter – give no clue as to James’ choice of career. By the age of twenty, he’d opted for a nomadic life, working as a travelling salesman-cum-auctioneer from a van, selling goods and taking a percentage from the sales. Sometimes he stayed in lodgings and in 1872 when he married Phoebe Elizabeth Wilson, he was at 15 Austin Road, Battersea. She was a local girl, born in Lambeth and the couple lived at 12 Miles Streetclose to the Oval for a while. After leaving Kilburn, their caravan took the James family to Luton (1878), then Pontardawe South Wales, where their daughter Phoebe was born in 1880. Later they were in Chesterfield and London (1881) where his wife Phoebe died during the latter part of the year. Then back to South Wales where Charles’ ‘American Auction Mart’ in Pontypridd went bankrupt in 1882; Newport (1882) and Nottingham, where Charles married his second wife Minnie Penelope Yates, in 1883.

    James appeared in court at Nottingham in September 1883 charged with stealing a ledger belonging to Thomas Harrison, a travelling salesman who said he had £5,000 of stock in different parts of the country. He employed various people including Charles James, on a salary and commission to sell the stock from their vans. Harrison was dissatisfied with the accounts that James had supplied and made a surprise visit to Nottingham. But when he arrived at Dame Agnes Street, he found James had gone to the Derby Races and the van was locked. So Harrison broke in and waited five hours until James returned at 9.00 that evening. A scuffle broke out and Harrison took James to court, whereupon James coolly handed over the ledger and was released without charge.
    The move to Dublin
    We don’t know why, but by 1892 James had moved to Dublin where he finally settled down, becoming a respected citizen and successful businessman. He took over a disused tailor’s shop at 30 Henry Street and commenced trading. Henry Street was off O’Connell Street in the heart of the city. In February 1892 an advert for ‘Liberty Hall, 30 Henry Street’ appeared, promoting ‘Liquid Electricity: the lightning cure for pain,’ the latest American cure for ‘all kinds of diseases.’ While James’ name doesn’t feature, this was almost certainly his first attempt at moneymaking in Dublin. The enterprise didn’t last long and by July he’d returned to his roots as a skilled salesman.  The local press announced the ‘World’s Fair Stores’ at 30 Henry Street where James sold hardware and ‘other useful items,’ and everything cost six and a half pence. Toys were particularly good crowd pullers at Christmas time. He cleverly took the name from the forthcoming World’s Fair in Chicago and the Stores traded for many years. But this wasn’t enough for James. He placed an ad in the ‘wanted’ columns for a ‘small waxwork exhibition or figures suitable for same’ and in December announced the opening of the ‘World’s Fair Waxworks’: Admission to the waxworks was 2d, and for children, a penny. Over the years he added new figures; the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Death of Nelson’ were first exhibited in 1893. The Henry Street building was on four floors and even had space for a small theatre. James prospered and the family were living comfortably in Strand Road East Pembroke, in 1901 and 1911. By 1912 they had moved to the large mansion ‘Washington Hall’ on Merrion Strand.
    Marcella the Midget Queen and other acts
    Charles diversified and added extra value to his business. He installed machines such as Kalloscopes that showed stereo photographs, and placed a regular advert in ‘Era’ the entertainment trade paper: ‘always an opening for Refined Freaks and Novelties.’ James avoided the trouble and expense of having to reply to enquiries by saying, ‘Silence a polite negative’. Frank and Emma De Burgh, the American Tattooed Couple and Madame Jelly, the Armless Lady appeared in 1893. ‘Not Wax but Living’ boasted the promotional material, to distinguish such acts from the static exhibition.
    Frank and Emma De Burgh were one of the most famous husband and wife attractions. Tattooed in New York City and first exhibited in Berlin in 1891, they took the show biz world by storm. Their tattoos mainly depicted religious scenes or texts, such as The Last Supper and The Calvary.

    In June 1893, James advertised the attractions of Monsieur Erskine, shadowographer and Marcella, the Midget Queen. As publicity, he released a balloon from the building and said that anyone returning it to Marcella would receive a five shilling reward. As late as 1899 some people who hadn’t seen her were uncertain if Marcella might be a waxwork: but she was a real person. She was born with dwarfism as Elizabeth (Lizzie) Ellen Paddock in Liverpool on 7 October 1877. Her father George, who came from Gloucester, was a boot closer who sewed the upper part of the shoes. In the 1881 census they were living at 4 Bolton Street Liverpool. This was a small house shared by 14 people. After George’s death in 1888 his widow Elizabeth was left to bring up their five children. She died in 1893 and at this point Lizzie became Marcella, The Midget Queen with Charles James in Dublin. Her card said she was ‘The Smallest Lady Vocalist in the world.’ She sang the songs of the day in the theatre at the top of 30 Henry Street and the audience joined in. Lizzie came on stage in a little carriage drawn by a pony. She had a sweet voice and a good sense of humour. In her contract dated 9 July 1894 she agreed to perform from 2 to till 5, and 6 till 10 pm for the sum of £2 10 shillings a week. It also included the cost of third class fares from Liverpool, where her family still lived, to Dublin.

     

    Marcella the Midget Queen, or Lizzie Paddock (Victor W. Pitcher)

    Sometimes Lizzie helped out in the shop on the ground floor where she sat on a high chair behind the counter. James and his wife were very kind to Lizzie and she became part of their family. In the 1901 census she was living with Charles, his wife Minnie, their son Ernest and daughter Phoebe, at 36 Strand Road, East Pembroke. Phoebe and Lizzie became close friends and did charitable work, where Marcella was much in demand for fundraising events such as Mother’s Union socials. In 1909 Phoebe married German born Victor Zorn, a travelling salesman in toys and fancy goods. In the 1911 census they were at 6 Oak Avenue in Chorlton-cum-Hardy a suburb of Manchester, and Lizzie was visiting them. After Victor’s death, Lizzie lived with Phoebe in the select Donnybrook district of Dublin. Lizzie died in South Dublin in 1955 at the age of 77 and was buried in Deansgrange Cemetery, (Grave Number 99F).
    James and Philanthropy
    Business thrived and James became famous in Dublin for his annual New Year treats which he gave to the city’s poor: he paid for outings and parties. The Dublin paper Freeman’s Journal for 30 December 1899 said that he would again give out a considerable number of free tickets, each of the holders would receive a 4lb loaf of bread, a quarter pound of tea, and a pound of sugar. In his will James ensured this philanthropy would continue after his death.
    In August 1896 thieves broke in and stole all the money from the automatic machines, but they couldn’t get into the safe. In the waxworks room they stole the coat covering the effigy of Mr Parnell and had fun, placing him in a ‘pugilistic position’. Unfortunately, the figures of Bismark, Lady Dunlo (the famous music hall beauty Belle Bilton) and others were smashed.  
    In 1899 James stood for election in the Dublin Union Board and became a JP. In April 1900 ‘Era’ reported that for his 50thbirthday, James was given a silver card case from Eugenie ‘the scientific palmist’ and a handsome dressing gown from Marcella.
    In April 1902 the waxworks suffered a serious fire and all the images, apart from Sleeping Beauty who was protected by a glass case, were destroyed. The cost of the damage was about £1,500 and James had new figures made by Tussauds in London.
     

    Henry Street in ruins after the Easter Rising in 1916

    The Easter 1916 Rising destroyed much of Henry Street which was at the heart of the fighting around the General Post Office. Number 30 was just behind the Post Office. People broke in and took various costumes and uniforms from the waxworks. They also stole mouth organs, melodeons and fiddles which they played in the streets. When some of the wax effigies were put in the windows, immediately a fusillade of bullets came through and the people hiding inside had to duck down until the firing ceased. James Connolly, the Commander of the Dublin Brigade, humorously said, ‘Well boys, ‘tis all over, we bagged three of their Generals’. Then pausing for effect he said, ‘We captured them in the waxworks!’
    Charles Augustus James died at his home, Washington Hall in Dublin on 30 March 1917. He was a wealthy man and left £12,064, worth about £540,000 today to his widow Minnie.
    Charles James, his wife Minnie and Marcella at Washington Hall (Victor W. Pitcher)
    James Joyce and ‘Ulysses’
    James Joyce clearly knew about and had visited the waxworks in Henry Street several times. There are allusions to it in ‘Finnegans Wake’ where Biddy Doran is a kind of performing freak. Also when Kate takes charge of a waxworks there is the sentence, ‘She may be a mere Marcella, this midget madgetcy, Misthress of Arts’.
    In his other great novel ‘Ulysses’ Joyce writes with admiration about,
    ‘The financial success achieved by Charles A. James … at his 6 and 1/2d shop and worlds fancy fair and waxworks exhibition at 30 Henry Street, admission 2d, children 1d’.
    At another point his hero Leopold Bloom visits the waxworks and talks about Marcella.
    ‘Giants, though that is rather a far cry, you see once in a way, Marcella, the midget queen. In these waxworks in Henry Street I myself saw some Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged, they couldn’t straighten their legs if you paid them.’
    So Marcella and Charles James were immortalised in Joyce’s novels.
    James Joyce
    Back to Kilburn
    Back in South Kilburnan illegal fair was set up in September 1880 with swings, shooting galleries, and a steam roundabout with an organ. Once again a cheap jack was selling goods, but he’s not named so we don’t know if this was Charles James. Complaints were made to the police about the nuisance and the noise, but rather surprisingly the magistrate decided it did not constitute an illegal fair.
    The following year the 1881 census shows that James William Chipperfield had parked three caravans in Pembroke Road. The vans were home to twenty five people, 11 of them members of the famous Chipperfield family who occupied a van that advertised their ‘Exhibition of Varieties’. James William senior described himself as a musician, as did his son – also called James William – who went on to become a menagerie proprietor and animal trainer: ‘I can train anything from a rabbit to an elephant.’ The family tradition continues right up to today’s Chipperfield Circus.
    With thanks to Prof. Tim Conley of Brock University, St Catherines Ontario Canada, for his 2010 paper, ‘Marcella the Midget Queen’ in the James Joyce Quarterly, Vol 48 (1), which includes photos supplied by Victor W. Pitcher, a relation of Marcella.

  • Did Foyles start in Kilburn?

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    Celine Castelino, a friend of ours, told us she’d found information on the Internet which said that Foyles Bookshop started in Kilburn. We were intrigued and decided to find out if this was true.

    Many of us know Foyles which has been trading in the Charing Cross Road for over a century. You may even remember the system they used for years – of selecting a book, taking it to the counter and being given a ticket to pay a cashier in a small booth, then returning to the department to collect your purchase!

    William Henry Foyle was a wholesale grocer, born in Finsbury. In 1876, aged 24, he married Deborah Barnett. He gave his address as     9 Curtain Road, Shoreditch. They had six children and two of their sons, William Alfred Foyle (1885-1963) and Gilbert Samuel Foyle (1886-1971) formed the book company. Deborah died in 1894 and William married Lilian Eleanor Murray the following year. In the 1901 census the family was living at 13 Fairbank Street, Shoreditch.
    The business is born
    William Alfred Foyle’s first job in 1902 was as a clerk in the office of famous barrister Edward Marshall Hall KC, who collected old silver. He frequently sent Foyle to the salerooms. Books were Foyle’s interest and he started bidding for any interesting lots. 

    The Foyles story is that when William and Gilbert failed their civil service exams in 1903, they decided to sell their textbooks from their parents’ kitchen table. Their first wholesale sale was on 14 July 1903. It must have been successful as the brothers decided to open a bookshop in Islington, moving briefly to Peckham before setting up in Cecil Court, off the Charing Cross Road in 1904.

    Foyles Bookshop in 1906
    By 1906 they were at 135 Charing Cross Road and later they moved to 113-119, their present site. Initially William and Gilbert traded in second hand books and only began selling new books in 1912.
    William and Gilbert on a tandem.
    Unfortunately Kilburn can’t claim to have witnessed the start of this world famous business. The electoral registers show that their father William was living at 13 Fairbank Street from 1885 to 1906, so when the boys started trading they were living in Hackney, not Kilburn.
    The Kilburn connection
    But there is a Kilburn connection. In 1907 William snr moved from Hackney to Kilburn, taking over number 145 Kilburn High Road, between Glengall Road and Priory Park Road. Previously occupied by tailor William Edwin Lee, it became W. and G. Foyle, second hand booksellers, the local branch of the business. They were there from 1907 to 1926. Gilbert lived over the shop with the family; his older brother William lived at 35 Estelle Road in Gospel Oak.
    William retired in 1945 when he was 60. By then he’d made a great deal of money, enough to buy the 12th century Abbey of Beeleigh in Maldon where he amassed a great library. He died there on 4 June 1963, leaving £118,989 to his daughter Christina who took over the bookshop business.
    William Alfred Foyle
    His grandson Christopher recalled William in retirement being chauffeur driven to London in his Silver Wraith Rolls-Royce and handing out £5 notes to members of staff! William had shoulder length white hair, wore a cravat with a diamond or pearl pin, a gold fob watch and waistcoat. Every Friday he would take friends and family to lunch at a restaurant in Piccadilly. In a Guardian interview Christopher said:
    ‘The orchestra would see him walking in and immediately change to his favourite tune, which was the Happy Wanderer. So we would troop in with him and sit down. And I thought it was so wonderful, when one was about eight years old; smoked salmon, wonderful things like that.’
    Christina built a formidable reputation. As a teenager she began the tradition of the Foyles literary lunch at the Dorchester Hotel and during the Depression, she was regularly sent to plead with creditors for more time to pay bills. She even wrote to Adolf Hitler and asked that rather than burn books, would he sell them to Foyles! 
    But many thought Christina wilful even cruel, refusing to give staff contracts and firing them on a whim. She never married and ran the business for 54 years. Christopher said:
    ‘She identified with the shop completely, personally. She and the shop were like one and the same, a bit like queen and country, and, in fact, the way she talked about the business in the latter years of her life, it was clear to me and to others that really she saw it ending at her death.’
    Christina Foyle, by Hannah Berry (2013)
    The shop almost did die with Christina. She’d presided over the business like Miss Havisham, stuck in the past with no electric tills or proper accounting systems. Gradually all the branches and book clubs, the publishing and library supply division that Foyles had run in its heyday, were closed.
    In July 1949, twenty-two year old Ian Norrie (later the owner of the High Hill Bookshop in Hampstead), was interviewed by Christina and given a job. The way the shop was run left much to be desired. Sent to work in the philosophy department where the authors and titles were unfamiliar to him: ‘I asked the manager if I might put the books in alphabetical order. The request, although obviously regarded as eccentric, was granted.’ When transferred to the new book department, ‘I promptly antagonised the manager by serving too many customers. I think he was paid commission only on the bills he wrote out, so I was banished to the end of a murky avenue and ordered to dust and tidy a section of depressed fiction.’
    Next Ian was sent to music and drama, where he’d originally hoped to be placed. ‘Instructions were issued, each accompanied by a prod in the ribs by a long, sharp pencil. I was to sell hard, not look idle, not be idle, not chatter with the girls from the Post Department, and above all, not address the manager by his Christian name.’ Although he had no experience, Ian was allowed to price the huge number of second-hand books that came in daily and were stacked against radiators and bookcases as the shelves were already bulging. He concluded, ‘working at Foyles, although a valuable experience, was not quite what I had expected of the ‘World’s Greatest Bookshop’.
    Christopher Foyle worked in the business for much of the 1960s but left when it became clear his aunt was never going to allow him any real responsibility. Instead, he went on to build a successful air freight business. Then six days before her death in 1999, Christina handed over the business to him and his brother Anthony. Turnover had dropped to £9.5M and was declining at the rate of 20% a year. Christopher said they had a difficult choice to make: ‘It was either selling it, closing it or turning it around. It had about £4M in the bank and no debt and well, I thought, we’ll try and turn it around. It was partly, I have to say, sentimental reasons, partly commercial.’
    The first thing they did was issue staff with contracts. Then they turned their attention to the Charing Cross Road shop which was very run down. ‘It looked terrible. Physically it was ghastly. There was paint coming off the walls, the whole place was a mess. There was no financial management of any kind. There were three elderly ladies writing up the figures in manual ledgers.’
    In 2000 the Foyle brothers discovered a massive fraud that had been going on for years. Legal action was issued against ten employees. Two senior staff were suspended; the company secretary and general manager of the Charing Cross Road shop, and his assistant manager. Both were accused by Foyles of conspiring with others to defraud the bookshop. There was evidence of a complex invoicing and commission scam which stretched back 17 years. They had secretly siphoned off millions of pounds for books which were never delivered to the shop. The money paid for lives of luxury, helping them to buy homes and meals at expensive West End restaurants. After two years the matter was eventually settled out of court.
    Christopher and Anthony managed to save Foyles. The company is now profitable and their annual turnover is about £24M. This year Foyles announced the flagship store will move to 107-109 Charing Cross Road, the former home of Central St Martins College of Art and Design, in Spring 2014.

  • Bizarre stories from Kilburn


    In this posting we have collected several rather odd stories from Kilburn which we think will intrigue and amuse you.

    Stealing a baby’s clothes
     In July 1867 Jane Cox, who lived at 15 Bridge Street in Kilburn (now demolished), left her two year old child sitting on the step of nearby Number 7. But when she looked again the child had gone. Some time later a gentleman riding his horse found the baby, naked and crying beside a pond. He took the child to the police who returned it to a grateful Mrs Cox. But what had happened?
    It seems that two children, Mary Anne Taylor aged 10, and Mary Rogers aged 9, were responsible for kidnapping the two-year old. In court, it was said both girls had ‘respectable parents’ and lived at 3 Alpha Place, a section of Canterbury Road in Kilburn. After stripping the baby, the girls went to Charles Tilley, a marine store dealer at 2 Carlton Place, and threw the clothes they’d stolen onto his scales. The girls told Tilley that their mothers had sent them to sell the clothes to buy soap and he gave them a penny for them as rags.
    The magistrate decided to send Tilley for trial as a receiver of stolen goods: ‘You knew you were doing wrong, and you lead children into crime,’ but we couldn’t find what happened to him. Bizarrely, even though Sergeant Perry said the girls told him they’d considered throwing the baby into the pond, there was no mention of them being reprimanded! A year later ‘Charles Tyler’, marine store dealer of 2 Carlton Place, was prosecuted for using illegal weights, but not fined because of his poverty.
    In his book ‘Dickens’ London’ (1987), Peter Ackroyd writes that stealing children and or their clothing was common in mid-Victorian London. In ‘Dombey and Son’, Florence Dombey loses her nurse and is kidnapped by an elderly rag and bone vendor, ‘Good Mrs Brown’. ‘I want that pretty frock, Miss Dombey, and that little bonnet, and a petticoat or two, and anything else you can spare’. After being held for a few hours the woman returns Florence to the streets, dressed in rags.
    That Baby!
     In 1887 the following unusual story appeared in the newspapers.
    The train was just about to start. There were three of us in the carriage – myself and two ladies – when a young man thrust himself in, carrying a baby. He looked very young to be engaged in such a manner. Young men of about 22 years of age (and he looked no older), do not travel about on the underground railway carrying babies: at least, I had never seen any till now. He seemed very awkward with it, and it protested every now and then. The two ladies began talking, and I listened.
    ‘How nice it is for young men to be so domesticated!’
    ‘Yes, indeed. What a little darling it is too – so quiet.’
    ‘A-a-a! ha a! ha a a!’ remarked the little darling.
    ‘Shut up,’ said the young gentleman, pinching it.
    ‘Baahaaahaaa!!’
    The ladies assumed a threatening aspect.
    ‘Sir’, said one of them, ‘babies in convulsions are not usually treated in that manner, and unless you desist at once I shall feel it my duty to call the guard.’
    ‘I’ll do what I like,’ said the young man, and taking the baby by its long robe, began to swing it round and round, so that its head came in contact with the door frame, after each revolution, the shrieking became terrific.
    I got up and pushed him away from the door. Before I could put my head out of the window to summon the guard, however, he laid his hand on my arm, and laid the baby on the seat of the carriage.
    ‘Look here, old man’, he said. ‘You may call the guard if you like, but recollect that this baby is mine, therefore I’ve a right to do what I like with it. It’s mine – I paid for it.’
    ‘You what, sir?’ I gasped.
    He sat down violently and said, ‘Why what?’
    Bang! The train stopped. He got out, leaving on the seat a broken Yankee Rubber Baby.

    This was a clever if strange advert for the ‘Yankee Rubber Baby’, a bizarre American import which first appeared in newspapers in 1881, available from an address in Brighton. After a gap of several years, in 1885 the same advert again appeared, this time with the logo, ‘The Kilburn Rubber Company’. But we haven’t been able to find out the address of the firm. The unlikely claim was made that ‘even experienced fathers are deceived by these laughter-producing infants and no home can be a really happy one without their cheering presence.’ The ‘novelty’, which was available as a boy or girl baby, disappeared from sale around 1893.
    One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!
     Here is a bizarre death. On Good Friday 30 March 1888, sixteen year old Cecila Finch, the daughter of a Kilburn bus conductor, ate no fewer than twelve hot cross buns. Unfortunately, they swelled up in her stomach, obstructed her bowel and she died after one of her intestines collapsed. Poor Cecilia was buried a week later in Hampstead Cemetery.
    The Cross-Dresser
     One night in 1896 a policeman saw a man in the Edgware Road, Kilburn carrying a bridle and halter plus other items. He stopped and asked him what he was doing and was very surprised when a woman’s voice said: ‘Sir, what has that got to do with you? It is my property.’ By the light of his lantern he realised he’d stopped a woman dressed in man’s clothing. She said, ‘I was going horse riding’. The policeman arrested the woman for stealing the equipment, value 15 shillings. When 39 year old Mary Anne Hester appeared in court, she said in ‘an educated voice’ that she’d told the policeman: ‘Take them home and tell the servants that I shall not go riding this morning. I left my blue shirt in the stable.’ This was greeted by much laughter, but the magistrate was not amused and sentenced Mary Anne to a month’s hard labour.
    This picture of the Kilburn incident shows considerable artistic licence and refers to Tottie Fay, who was a character in a music hall song, and an actress. It was also one of the names adopted by a woman of notorious drunken behaviour, arrested several times in 1892, who despite her dishevelled appearance, always said she was ‘a perfect lady’.
    Body Parts
    In February 1967 a waiter from the nearby Apollo Restaurant at 250 Kilburn High Road, was walking his Alsatian puppy late one night when he came across the gruesome remains of a woman’s severed arm, at the corner of Burton Road and Kilburn High Road.  

     Nicos Sotiriou and his puppy Jenny (Kilburn Times)
    Then another forearm and nearly 100 pieces of flesh were found in Grangeway near the entrance to Grange Park. There was pink nail polish on the fingers. The police sealed off the area and a forensic search was carried out. A Home Office pathologist confirmed that while the flesh was probably animal, the forearms were certainly human. After several weeks, the police concluded it must have been a macabre hoax using body parts stolen from a medical school or hospital.

  • A Kilburn shooting: The interfering mother-in-law

    This dramatic picture from the Illustrated Police News show the scene outside 42 Iverson Road on the morning of Sunday 28 July 1889. But there’s a fair degree of artistic license. The four people shown were related by marriage: Leonard Handford who is holding a revolver to his head, was married to Sarah Elizabeth (shown on the ground at his feet). She was the daughter of Daniel Deveson and Elizabeth Deveson, (the couple on the right). Number 42, ‘Kent Villa’, was the Deveson’s family home. Daniel had been born in Kent, hence the choice of name.

    Deveson had worked as a butler before running a dairy on the Edgware Road, but he was now retired. His daughter Sarah Elizabeth (born 1855), had been married before to Charles Kohler in 1876. He was a merchant with a violent temper, according to Sarah, and the marriage quickly fell apart. In her divorce papers she said that he had attacked her and she left him after just eight months of marriage. She lived with her parents in Iverson Road. She had met Leonard Bowes Handford (born 1856), when his parents moved from Lambeth to 27 Gascony Avenue. Both families were Baptists, and attending the same Chapel in Iverson Road. Charles’ father Ebenezer was a schoolmaster, turned clerk, and then lithographer.

    Sarah and Leonard were married on 20 August 1887 and their son Archibald George Handford was born the following year. Sarah’s second marriage had also not gone well, and by the time of the assault the couple had been separated for several months. Sarah said her husband began drinking soon after Archie was born. In May 1889 Sarah began divorce proceedings. Leonard had moved out of Kent Lodge but he hadn’t gone far, renting a couple of rooms from William Butler at 26 Iverson Road. At his trial it became apparent Leonard couldn’t disconnect from his family – he tried but failed to see his son on his first birthday – and he desperately wanted reconciliation. A local policeman believed there was ‘great sympathy’ for Leonard in the neighbourhood.

    The Brondesbury Baptist Chapel stood at the Kilburn High Road end of Iverson Road. Sarah and her parents had been to a Sunday morning service and were walking home. A witness saw Leonard leave Number 26 and approach first Sarah then her mother Elizabeth, shooting them both in rapid succession. Handford then turned the gun on himself, firing a single shot to his temple.

    Possibly because the revolver had a small bore, neither woman fell unconscious in a pool of blood, as shown in the illustration above. The news report said Leonard pursued Sarah before shooting her, when she turned to face him. In fact, she was shot before she ran away from her husband. Her mother also managed to put some distance between herself and her attacker after being shot, before collapsing.

    Leonard was taken to St Mary’s Hospital Paddington, in a very critical condition. But both women were helped into Kent Villa and attended at home by local doctors. Sarah had been shot through the cheek, the bullet lodging in her soft pallet before she swallowed it. Her mother’s wound was more serious, the bullet having passed through her cheek and out again through her neck. Luckily, neither woman required hospital treatment.

    Leonard was considered well enough to appear at the first Magistrate’s hearing in early August 1889 where he was charged with intent to murder and attempted suicide. At the second hearing he still appeared very weak, but his head was no longer bandaged. Although Mrs Deveson was too ill to attend, Sarah’s wound had healed and she gave evidence at a further hearing on 30 August. She said Leonard had threatened to kill her on several occasions by blowing her, and their son Archie’s brains out.

    Extracts were read out from letters written by Leonard before the assault, which were discovered by police at his lodgings. He blamed his treatment at the hands of the Devesons for driving him to actions ‘he would not have otherwise have done.’

    When he married Sarah and against the advice of friends, he had moved into Number 42, because Elizabeth had been so upset at the thought of loosing her daughter. But he said the Devesons had treated him badly; ‘when my son Archie was born everything I did was laughed at, and they said that I was worse than a Kilburn dustman.’

    Leonard accused his father-in-law of being mean while his mother-in-law was both unkind and interfering. So far as Sarah was concerned, Leonard started by saying he had married a ‘splendid woman’ who’d been treated very cruelly by her first husband. But he went on to complain she’d become ‘bad tempered and self willed and on one occasion locked herself and baby in a spare room away from him.’

    Sarah had started divorce proceedings, citing his ‘drunken and violent habits,’ which Leonard said were all lies. But he did admit he was sometimes what he called ‘elevated’, and needing a ‘stimulant’ before he could face going home. He ended his letter:

    Sorry, sorry indeed, to leave my child an orphan: but a woman who has promised to love and cherish, in sickness and health, rich or poor, and turns on her husband like a worm, is not a fit person to have charge of any child – at least one of mine. I hope he may be well cared for. I always looked on marriage as a very solemn thing. My wife, having been through the fire, evidently thought, to say the least, lightly of it.

    Leonard was tried at the Old Bailey on 16 September 1889. His landlord, William Butler, said Leonard had been very depressed when he separated from Sarah. He slept badly, ate very little and had begun drinking heavily. Butler also said he warned Daniel Deveson that Leonard had a revolver. The defence tried to prove that while Leonard had meant to kill himself, shooting at Sarah and Elizabeth had been a spur of the moment decision. Leonard was found guilty, but the jury recommended mercy on the grounds of his health, and he was sentenced to 14 years in prison on the Isle of Portland.

    Both mother and daughter recovered from their wounds; Elizabeth died, aged 83, fifteen years after the shooting. Sarah was still living with her parents at 42 Iverson Road, along with her son Archibald, in the 1891 census. They’d moved to 6 Cavendish Road by 1901, where Sarah continued to use the surname ‘Handford.’

    She had however obtained a divorce from Leonard in 1890, the court awarding her custody of Archibald as Leonard was ruled unfit to act as his guardian under any circumstances. Despite this, in the 1891 census return for Portland Prison, Leonard described himself as ‘married.’ More curious was his choice of profession, shown as ‘artist/sculptor,’ rather than the clerk he’d always been. After he was released, Leonard returned to live with his parents in St Johns Wood, working as a wool broker’s clerk, and still claiming to be married. He died in Lambeth Infirmary in March 1909 and was buried in his parents’ grave at Hampstead Cemetery. He was still in love with Sarah and he left her £266 in his will, worth about £22,000 today.

    Sarah and son Archie were still at Cavendish Road in 1911, when he was working for a photographer. Sarah had inherited a considerable amount of money from her father and when she died on 21 May 1929 at 19 Exeter Mansions Brondesbury, she left £10,786 (today worth about £511,000), to her son. Archie had moved to Croydon and was married there in 1914. He ran a photographic company, Archie Handford Ltd.

    Archie at Croydon Camera Club about 1936

    In the 1950s he formed ‘Chorley Handford’, a very successful aerial photographic company which was taken over by Skyscan in 2009. http://www.skyscan.co.uk/

    They still have a large collection of old photos from Chorley Hanford. Archie died in Croydon in 1979.

  • ‘Bloody Camden’


    Next month, we’re doing an illustrated talk about our latest book ‘Bloody Camden’, in the Bloody British History series published by The History Press. The talks will be at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town and at West End Lane Books.


    The book covers the whole of Camden, an area that stretches from Highgate and south as far as Holborn. We describe bloody and dastardly deeds and also some bizarre stories, beginning with Roman Camden, through to the Second World War and ending in the 1950s. 
    We hope you can make it.
    • The Owl Bookshop, Tuesday 4 June, 6.30 to 8.30
    207-209 Kentish Town Road NW5 2JU
    Tel: 020 7485 7793
    • West End Lane Books, Tuesday 25 June, 7.30 to 9.00
    277 West End Lane NW6 1QS
    Tel: 020 7431 3770
    (The venue may be West Hampstead Library)
    Please contact the shops to book a seat.

  • The centenary of Grange Park, Kilburn


    On the 1st of May 1913, the gates to Kilburn Grange Park were thrown open to the public for the first time, but without any fanfare or celebration. The fact that Kilburn still has this fantastic open space owes more to good luck than careful planning.

    The park takes its name from a large mansion, The Grange, which was built in 1831, despite claims about it being a much older property. The house stood facing Kilburn High Road, where the Grange Cinema, now used by the Universal Church, stands today.
     

    Kilburn in 1893 showing The Grange

    The Peters family were there from 1843. Thomas Peters was a successful and wealthy coach builder who made coaches for Queen Victoria. The last occupant was Mrs Ada Peters, the widow of his son John Winpenny Peters. Ada died in the house on 5 February 1910. For pictures and more information about Ada and her lover the Marquis de Leuville, see the previous story posted on the Blog on 6 Dec 2012. Our ebook, The Marquis de Leuville: a Victorian Fraud? can be downloaded from Amazon and other ebook sites.

    The Grange was the last of the large houses. The flood of suburban building had long since surrounded the property, leaving the house and its extensive grounds marooned in a sea of small streets and tight terrace housing. Most of today’s streets had been built. Population densities were high on both sides of the High Road, where living conditions were often cramped and insanitary.
    In the centre of the poorest and most crowded part of Kilburn stands the Grange. Round it stretch rows of small houses, and house after house built for one family is occupied by three. Hundreds of children live nearby. It is estimated that there are 4,000 children under the age of fifteen years of age in the Kilburn Ward of Hampstead. The streets are the only open space outside the playgrounds of the Council schools.
    What the area lacked was a public open space. As a small boy Warwick Edwards remembered visiting the Grange during the summer of 1911.
    One day it was thrown open to us schoolchildren and with wide eyed curiosity we roamed the grounds which were in a state of undisplined nature with much entangled undergrowth. The house and its surroundings, so near the hustle and bustle of the High Road, yet such a different world!
    The Grange, from The Graphic 1901 (Marianne Colloms)
    The first hopes that the space could be made into a public park were raised in 1901 when Mrs Peters decided she didn’t want a school built on the edge of the grounds, in Kingsgate Road. She encouraged local residents in the belief they could purchase the grounds as a park. Unfortunately her actions took no account of the facts. Anticipating future demand, the London School Board had already bought the land in 1892, renting it back to the Peters family until the school was needed. But even worse, Ada failed to mention her legal status following her husband’s death in 1882. Under John’s will Ada only had rights to live at the Grange during her lifetime as a ‘tenant for life’. She could not sell it and the property would revert to the Peters family when she died.
    A local Grange Open Space Committee was formed in April 1901 to resist the ‘mutilation’ of the grounds: the short-lived campaign gained popular support before collapsing in June 1901, as Mrs Peters first prevaricated and finally had to admit she couldn’t deliver. The School Board was forced to take her to court in 1902 to obtain possession of the site, and by October the foundations for Kingsgate School were laid.
    After Ada was buried alongside her husband at Kensal Rise Cemetery, the Peters family regained possession of the Grange and its grounds. Locals knew the estate was one of the last chances Kilburn would ever have to acquire a ‘green lung,’ accessible to thousands of residents. So for a second time, plans were made and meetings called. But a new set of problems had to be overcome. First and foremost were the intentions of the Peters family.
    Just a couple of weeks after Ada’s death, the local paper reported that the nine and a half acre estate was for sale. Things got off to a promising start when the agents acting on behalf of the Peters family contacted Hampstead Council to ask if the authority was interested in buying it as an open space, reminding them of the unsuccessful but hugely popular campaign of 1901. Councillors asked for a three month option to buy, giving them time to get an independent valuation of the property.
    Meantime the house contents were disposed of in a 50 page catalogue, and the sheer volume of goods meant the auction lasted  three days. On 12 April 1910 more than 300 items of furniture went under the hammer, followed by 600 paintings, clocks and bronzes the next day.  Finally there were around 1,000 items of less valuable plate, china and kitchen equipment plus all the outdoor effects such as statues, six carriages built by Peters and Sons and a Merryweather fire engine. The sale commenced each day at 1pm, and the lots were knocked down at a rapid rate. The house was earmarked for demolition so where possible, its structural components were sold for salvage. This included the door to the billiard room, purchased by local developer and publican Richard Pincham. He installed it as the new entry to a function hall on the first floor of his Railway Hotel on West End Lane.
    Some of the contents from the Grange house sale, April 1910
    The agent’s response to Hampstead Council was swift – the Peters refused an option to purchase and had decided the property would be publically auctioned, ‘to have the question of price fixed by competition,’ but by deferring the sale to 24 May, they hoped this would give the Council ‘nearly the three months required.’ Hampstead promptly cancelled any valuation and decided that they’d pass the whole matter over to the LCC. The LCC considered that while the ‘back land’ might be suitable for an open space, the development value of the frontage to Kilburn High Road was too high, so this should be excluded from any park plan. The Kilburn Chamber of Trade agreed with this proposal, pointing out business premises ‘would contribute to the Borough Rates’. Presumably because the Grange estate stood on the boundary between the Boroughs of Hampstead and Willesden, and was also fairly close to Paddington and St Marylebone, the LCC also advised Hampstead to ask for financial contributions towards the purchase price from adjoining authorities. Hampstead and Willesden drew up broadly similar financial plans to acquire the land. On 6 May a deputation attended the LCC. Councillors from both Hampstead and Willesden, thelocal MP accompanied by representatives of Middlesex County Council and the Metropolitan Gardens Association, bluntly outlined the situation: ‘they desire to point out that unless the present opportunity of acquiring this estate is embraced all chance for providing an open space for Kilburn will disappear.’
    The Grange sale particulars show the Peters’ intention was crystal clear, to maximise the value of their freehold property by selling it for development.

    The auctioneer opened proceedings promptly at 2pm on the 24 May 1910, by suggesting many uses for the property. He said it was eminently suitable as the site for a skating rink, theatre, cinema, music hall, aeroplane factory, exhibition ground or residential flats, any of which would result in ‘untold wealth for the lucky purchaser,’ (in the words of a slightly tongue in cheek report that appeared in the local press). The auctioneer asked for an opening bid of £40,000, but just £10,000 was offered and had to be accepted as an opening bid, despite his pleading for a ‘more worthy’start. Slowly £22,000 was reached, with incremental bids of £1,000, and then the bids went up by £500, until the price stuck at £30,000. ‘Not all the cajoling from the rostrum could get a further bid, and with a crest-fallen look the auctioneer withdrew the property, stating that the reserve price was £35,000.’ The Peters’ desire for the price to be fixed by competitionhad fallen short of their expectations.
    This reversal in the family’s fortunes meant plans for an open space could be taken seriously again. Bizarrely, this wasn’t raised at the next meeting of Hampstead Council held just a few days later. A councillor who asked if the Trees and Open Spaces Committee ‘were aware that the children of Kilburn had already taken possession of the Grange,’ got no reply. Local residents had already held packed meetings to promote the idea and were appalled at the possibility the land could be built on and, ‘disappear before the march of modern progress.’ They continued to campaign and fund raise.
    In fact, the Council had already re-opened negotiations with the Peters family, offering to buy eight and a half acres of the land plus an access strip from the High Road. The reply was conditional but positive: while the Peters wanted to sell the estate as one lot, they would be willing to sell the ‘park’ land for £18,000 so long as the plots fronting the High Road was sold at the same time and simultaneous contracts exchanged. This was still a considerable amount of money, but working on an anticipated £5,000 from the LCC plus £4,000 from their own funds and private donations (over £500 already collected), Hampstead Council again approached the agents acting for the Peters.
    Then, as a local paper put it, their representatives ‘had an unpleasant surprise’ when at the end of June, theywere told the Grange estate had been sold privately for an unnamed sum. The new owner was Oswald Stoll, a major name in the entertainment world. But again, fortune smiled on the park campaigners, when it was hinted that plans were being made for the plot on the main road but the land behind might still available.
    The wheels of local government moved slowly and locally, fund raising limped on. It seems surprising in view of the obvious need for open space that money flowed in so slowly, but so far as personal donations were concerned, Kilburn pockets weren’t deep and many people had no cash to spare. The name of at least one notable local benefactor, Sir Henry Harben, who had given large sums to good causes in the past, was missing. The Middlesex County Council pledged £1,000 but the Corporation of London declined to contribute. The local MP pointed out that while Hampstead had spent £40,000 in the past acquiring open spaces, ‘nothing had been done for Kilburn.’ Personal donations had only reached £667 by early August.
    What followed was a series of proposals and counter proposals. In October, Stoll’s agents contacted Hampstead Council. They offered five and a half acres of land at an asking price of £12,500. This would lie on either side of a proposed new road, running from the High Road across the estate, to make a junction with Hemstal Road. The Council agreed but only if the price was reduced to £10,000, (and this had to include financial contributions from other authorities). Stoll’s agents agreed to the Council’s offer but their further condition was for Hampstead to pay half the cost of creating the new road.
    Stoll wanted to erect a Coliseum on the Kilburn High Road frontage. He already owned and operated the well-known London Coliseum in St Martins Lane. He put in an early application to the LCC for a music and dancing license, which Hampstead Council decided to oppose, a move hardly calculated to ease negotiations over the land. The agents suggested Hampstead reconsider its opposition and spelt out in no uncertain terms that the low price for the back land was conditional on the high returns expected from the Coliseum, the implication being no license, no land. They issued a further lightly veiled threat, that the value of the five and a half acres would be considerably in excess of £10,000, if ‘cut up’ for building. The Trees and Open Space committee of the Council added further pressure, concluding ‘the loss of the present and probably last opportunity of acquiring an open space for Kilburn would be calamitous.’
    Hampstead Council caved in. They agreed to all Stoll’s terms for purchase and to rescind their opposition to his license for a ‘Kilburn Coliseum.’ This didn’t please a large number of local residents: although desperate for the open space they disliked the idea of a massive music hall so close to their homes. 
    The decision was taken out of Hampstead’s hands a few months later, when the LCC agreed to purchase around eight and a half acres of the Grange estate for £19,500 and maintain it as a park. This is equivalent to about £1.6 million today. Hampstead Council’s contribution was £5,500 with Middlesex County Council and Willesden Council each pledging £1,000. Donations accounted for a further £690 with £105 from the Metropolitan Gardens Association.
    Contracts were exchanged on 4 April 1911, and as originally conceived, the park covered seven acres. The LCC earmarked half an acre to enlarge the site of Kingsgate Road school and reserved an acre along Messina Avenue in case it was needed for ‘tramway purposes’ (but agreed to add this to the park in 1914). ‘Kilburn Gardens’ was proposed for the park by the LCC, but Hampstead’s suggestion that the name of the old house should be perpetuated was adopted, hence it became ‘Kilburn Grange.’ The grounds were opened informally for much of the summer of 1911 while plans for its layout were completed, these included; 
    An ornamental garden, children’s playground, model yachting pond, band stand, footpaths, drainage, etc., and at a later stage, children’s gymnasium, tennis courts, bowling green, and accommodation for refreshments.
    Existing trees were to be kept, and three entrances planned: from Hemstal Road, Messina Avenue and the High Road.
    It took a while to complete the landscaping, during which time the grounds were generally closed; in fact nearly two years elapsed before the LCC informed Hampstead Council the park would be opened to the public on 1 May 1913, but, ‘it was not proposed to hold any opening ceremony.’ This seems a rather damp squib, unworthy of the success of the lengthy campaign.

    Marianne Colloms postcard

    What happened to the land bordering the High Road? There was never any suggestion that the house would be kept. The site was used for a short length of road, a few shops and the impressively domed Grange Cinema. This opened in 1914 on the High Road corner of Messina Avenue, the march of modern technology having overtaken Stoll’s earlier plans for a music hall.

    Postcards like the one above, were produced of the Grange Park and the Cinema. Marianne has several of these cards. One from an unnamed writer, was posted during the First World War to Bert.
    It read as follows:

    My Dear Bert,
    At last I am sending a few cards, I can’t get a very choice selection, as Kilburn is not particularly pretty place, but I will get a few more next week, the Grange pictures are new to you, as that is a new place since the old place was pulled down. I could not get one of the Cinema yet, but I hope you will come over to see for yourself. The war still seems to be going strong, but I guess old Kaiser Bill won’t realise the height of his ambition. Joe has got in the Royal Fusiliers and is at Colchester now, he hopes to go to the Front soon.

    The park was an important open space for Kilburn. Concerts of military and popular music were played on the bandstand during the summer months. Dick Weindling remembers playing football there most evenings, and in the summer the path around the paddling pond was the running track for him and his friends in the 1950s. As a keen athlete, he had a stop watch and details of the best times for one, two and four laps were kept in a notebook. In the 1950s and 1960s young men from the large Irish community often played a form of Shinty on the grassed area, violently hitting a small ball with sticks.
    One last proposal to extend the park was made in 1972, when it was suggested that nearly all the houses in Gascony and Messina Avenues, between the High Road and Kingsgate Road, should be demolished. Grange Park would have been extended south across the cleared site, which would also have provide spaced for Kingsgate School to expand.
    Kilburn and the Grange Park, 1935


  • Making money in Kilburn


    In 1935 Scotland Yard was warned by the German police that forged English £5 notes were being sold there at half their face value. Detective Inspector George Hatterill, who spoke several languages, was sent to Berlin to track down the source of the notes. He found they were a very high quality forgery of a new and unknown type. To trap the gang, Hatterill posed as an English buyer based in Antwerp, engaged in smuggling and gun running. In his autobiography he says he was comfortable playing this role because he’d previously worked in Antwerp as the liaison officer between Scotland Yard and the Belgium police. His contact introduced Hatterill to the gang and he had several meetings in East Berlin cafes. He paid for all the drinks and flashed a roll of bank notes, to convince them he really meant business. Finally it was agreed that 1,000 Bank of England £5 notes would be ready in a week. At this point the German police raided the homes of the gang members and arrested them all, but they couldn’t find the forger.
    Three years later in April 1938, the Bank of England discovered some forged £5 and £10 notes which they sent to Scotland Yard. The paper, watermarks, and printing were all excellent and it took an expert to tell there was anything wrong with them. The only information was that the forgeries had come from Paris, but after spending ten days with the French police, Hatherill failed to find the source of the notes. His superiors were unimpressed by how little he’d achieved. About a fortnight later Hatherill was reading the French newspaper Le Matin, and saw that a man had been arrested in Paris for trying to change forged English bank notes. The police found £475 worth of £5 and £10 notes on him. When Hatherill returned to Paris and compared the notes, he found they were identical forgeries to those sent to the Yard by the Bank of England. At first, the man who was about 40, refused to say anything. Hatherill spoke to him in several languages and eventually found out that he understood English, but spoke it and his native German with a strong Württemberg accent. Although the man denied ever having been to England, Hatherill was convinced he was lying because he used colloquialisms which could only have picked up by living there. All the labels on his clothes which might identify the prisoner had been cut off, but Hatherill found a single laundry mark ‘K157,’ on his shirt.
    Hatherill returned to London with the man’s photograph and fingerprints but couldn’t find him in official records. So he sent out a request to every police station in London for inquires to be made about the laundry mark. It turned out that scores of people had a K157 laundry mark and Hatherill spent a week going round all the addresses, armed with a photo of the man he’d interviewed in Paris. Eventually he followed up a report concerning a Mr Beckert, who lived at 2A Shoot-Up Hill. This is the first house north of Maygrove Road and is opposite the Kilburn Tube Station. When Hatherill got there he found that the house was empty with an agent’s ‘To Let’ sign. Alongside the front door was a name plate inscribed ‘F. Beckert – Photographer’. Hatherhill could barely contain his excitement when the house agent identified the photo as Frederick Beckert, a German who’d lived at number 2A with his niece and disappeared owing a considerable amount of rent. Hatherill spoke to the next door neighbour who was able to provide yet more important information. She said Beckert’s niece was called Beatrice and she had a boyfriend who worked in a local garage. She also said that an odd job man used to work at the house and that he lived in Burnt Oak. Beatrice had vanished before the neighbour could speak to her about the smoke and smuts that had poured out of the Beckert’s chimney and ruined clean laundry in her garden. That had happened about two weeks ago.

    2a Shoot-Up Hill, February 2013
    Hatherill traced the odd job man, Charles James Groves, of Dale Avenue Edgware, who said he’d worked for Beckert since February 1932. When the bills mounted up Beckert would lock himself in the front room of the basement, sometimes for three or four days, then he would go abroad for about a week. When he returned he paid the bills and the man’s wages. Hatherill thought it was pretty obvious what had been going on. But he was puzzled that Beckert had been hard at work for five or six years while the first forged English notes had only been recovered by the Bank of England a month earlier. He decided to have another look in the basement of 2A. He imagined what he would have done if he had been in Beckert’s shoes while forging bank notes. Presumably, some of the notes would have been spoilt and burnt in the stove. Then he noticed a crack between the floorboards and the stove. When he prised up the boards he found two photographic plates for a German 20 and 50 Reichsmark note. Hatherill remembered the forgeries he had seen in Berlin in 1935. Quickly taking up more of the boards, he found partly melted printing plates for English and Belgium banknotes.

    Basement of 2a Shoot-up Hill, 2013
    Hatherill’s next move was to visit the Aliens Registration Office where he obtained photos of Beckert and his niece Beatrice. Then he started a tour of the local garages to trace Beatrice’s boyfriend. He came across a young man who said he’d never heard of her but Hatherill’s instinct told him the man was lying, and eventually he admitted that he did know Beatrice. He told Hatherill she’d gone to Belgium, to 62 Rue de Brabant, Brussels. He also showed Hatherill two suitcases which Beatrice had left with him. One was full of ties but the other contained wallets with labels from all over Germany, obviously bought by Beckert in the course of changing his forged notes. Having warned the young man not to communicate with his girl friend, Hatherill travelled to Brussels and met up with his old friend, Monsieur Louwage, the chief of the Belgian police. When he heard Hatherill’s story and saw the plates, Monsieur Louwage hit the roof. He explained that forged Belgian francs had flooded the market over the last two years. They were so good they remained undetected until they reached the National Bank and no-one had been able to find the forger. Hatherill and the Belgian police went immediately to 62 Rue de Brabant where they arrested Beatrice, who was just about to leave for Germany. In her handbag Hatherill found a telegram from her boyfriend in Cricklewood telling her the police were after her! Beatrice denied any knowledge of her uncle’s whereabouts or his forgeries. She said she’d left London two weeks ago, after waiting without news of him for a month. But after further questioning Beatrice broke down. She said she had no idea of her uncle’s activities until she became alarmed by his prolonged absences abroad. Needing money to pay the bills, she found a key to the basement where she discovered some spoiled forged banknotes. Thinking he had been arrested, Beatrice burnt all the paper and negatives, thus causing the smoke which had ruined her neighbour’s washing. She’d also tried to melt the zinc printing plates on the stove and dropped the remains through the cracks in the floor.
    Hatherill went to Paris to get Beckert extradited to England. Beckert repeatedly denied his identity until he was told Beatrice had been arrested in Brussels. Then his manner changed. He agreed to tell Hatherill everything, as long as Beatrice was released. In fact no action was taken against her and the Belgian police let her go a few weeks later. Beckert said he had been experimenting with colour photography but found it so expensive that in order to keep going he started forging German banknotes. In 1934 or 1935 he noticed that shopkeepers were carefully examining the notes he gave them, so he switched to forging Belgian notes instead. When the same thing happened in Belgium at the beginning of 1937, he moved on to printing English banknotes which he cashed in France.
    On 21 June 1938at the Old Bailey, Friedrich Beckert, aged 40, was charged with forging banknotes to the value of £5,000 as well as a large quantity of Belgian francs. It was said that he was a highly skilled colour photographer, who came to England in 1927 and learned photography. He had occupied the basement flat of 2A Shoot-Up Hill from 1931 until June 1937 when he left without notice. Beckert pleaded guilty. He said he’d started his Kilburn company in 1932 but his partner did nothing except draw money from their business, which failed. Hatherill gave evidence concerning Beckert’s background. It turned out he’d been arrested for armed robbery in Germany in 1920 and placed in a mental institution for observation. The doctors concluded he wasn’t a lunatic but sent Beckert to another institution, from where he absconded in 1921. He was arrested a further three times after that, but escaped on each occasion. His defence counsel suggested Beckert was ‘not quite normal’. He’d been a steel worker in Luxembourg but made up his mind he wanted to learn photography. By 1929 he was the manger of a coloured snapshot company at a salary of £10 a week. When the firm failed, he began forging notes.
    Beckert was given four years imprisonment at Parkhurst. When his sentence ended he was interned as an alien, and after the War he was deported.
    Art, Beauty and Commerce Ltd
    Beckert took out a patent for obtaining colour separation negatives in January 1932. The British Journal of Photography shows that his company was called ‘Art, Beauty and Commerce Ltd’ and was registered on 15 December 1936. The capital was £500 in one pound shares. The directors were named as Frederick Beckert, 2 Shoot Up Hill; photographic artist, John H. Thwaites, 106 Saltram Crescent, engineer, and Miss Beatrice Beckert, 2 Shoot Up Hill.
    Arrest in France
    On 1 July 1937 Beckert presented an English £10 note at the Rosenberg Bank in the Rue Laffitte Paris. He said he was from London but didn’t have his identity card with him. Suspicions were aroused and the police were called. Beckert suddenly dashed out of the bank and broke open the door of a flat in a neighbouring building where he was arrested. Three hundred counterfeit English £10 notes were found on him. In court in December 1937, he admitted the forgery, but said he was of weak intellect and a medical report confirmed this. He was sentenced to six months in prison.
    George Hatherill
    George Hatherill was an unusual and highly skilled detective. He was born in Dulwich in 1898, and as a boy, he spent a lot of time at his local library in the Peckham Road. Occasionally, he exchanged opinions with another boy he met there called C.S. Forester, and Hatherill became a devoted reader of his books. By the time he was twelve, Hatherill had taught himself French and German. He joined the Metropolitan Police in 1920 and rose through the ranks, where his proficiency with language led to a posting in Brussels. Hatherill became a member of the Murder Squad and later Commander of the CID. Although he was due to retire, when the Great Train Robbery took place in August 1963 Hatherill was put in charge of the case. He finally retired in 1964 and died in Torbay in 1986.

    George Hatherill

     Gideon of Scotland Yard

    The prolific crime writer John Creasey, who wrote more than 600 novels, knew George Hatherill well and he based his character, ‘Gideon of Scotland Yard’, on him. Between 1955 and 1990 Creasey wrote 26 Gideon novels under the pseudonym of J.J. Marric. In 1958 the great American film director John Ford came to England and made ‘Gideon’s Day’, staring Jack Hawkins in the tile role. A 26-part TV series called ‘Gideon’s Way’, staring John Gregson, ran from 1964 to 1966. 
    John Creasey
    John Ford, 1946
    Jack Hawkins, John Ford, and cast of Gideon’s Day, 1958
    John Gregson, Gideon’s Way, 1965

  • The artist and his stepfather


    In 1912 an artist moved into ‘Glencairn’, 46 West End Lane, a large detached house between Acol and Woodchurch Roads. His name was Albert de Belleroche. Born in Swansea in 1864, Albert was the son of Edward Charles, the Marquis de Belleroche, whose family, one of the oldest Houses of Europe, was connected to the Royal Family of France. His Huguenot ancestors left France for Britain after the Revocation des Edit de Nantes in 1685. Albert’s mother Alice was the daughter of Desire Baruch of Brussels. His parents’ marriage was unhappy and they separated. Albert was only three when his father died and he was brought up in Paris by Alice and his stepfather, William Harry Vane Milbank whom Alice married in March 1871. Described as possessing ‘almost legendary beauty’, Alice entertained lavishly at their home in the Avenue Montaigne. 

    ‘The artist’s mother’, Mrs Milbank, lithograph by Albert Belleroche

    Mrs Harry Vane Milbank, by John Singer Sargent

    In 1882, Milbank had commissioned Carolus Duran, a noted portrait painter, to paint his wife. While the work was in progress, Alice gave a dinner party for Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales. At the party Duran saw sketches by the young Belleroche and suggested that he should study at his studio. However, Belleroche wasn’t happy with the formal structure provided by Duran, and he only stayed a short time. Albert believed that art could not be learned in schools but rather in museums among the masters. Botticelli, Vermeer, and Frans Hals were his favourite painters.
    During that year, Belleroche attended a banquet given in honour of Duran by his students. It was here that he first met the American John Singer Sargent, a former student of Duran, whose early successes at the Salons were the talk of Paris. Belleroche and Sargent were to become life-long friends, and shared various studios in Paris and London. Their affiliation was one of mutual admiration, sympathy of taste and artistic direction. What Sargent was able to do drawing freely and spontaneously with charcoal on paper, Belleroche would go on to do with lithographic crayon on stone. It was Belleroche who encouraged and instructed Sargent in his experiments in lithography. Of the seven lithographs known to have been executed by Sargent, two are portraits of Belleroche, both done in 1905.
    Albert de Belleroche, by John Singer Sargent, 1905
    Ellen Terry, John Singer Sargent, 1887
    The Café de la Rochefoucauld and the Restaurant l’Avenue were their favourite Parisian haunts until Sargent’s permanent move to London in 1886. Among their friends who used to gather there were Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. In 1882, Belleroche painted Lautrec’s portrait as a souvenir of their friendship: they were both eighteen years old.
    Albert Belleroche fits many of the romantic conceptions of an artist in Paris in the 1890’s. He had a studio opposite the Moulin Rouge, and like Lautrec, he enjoyed the freedom and life of Montmartre. Here he met Lili Grenier, the model made famous by Lautrec, but soon to pose almost exclusively for Belleroche and become his mistress for almost ten years. He painted such personalities of the quartier as the dancer Cha-U-Kao; femme fatale and spy Mata Hari; Olympia, the model immortalized by Degas, and the famous Japanese wrestler, Taro Myaki. 
    Lili Grenier, by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1888
    Belleroche was reserved, even critical of his own work; he discouraged visitors to his studio and he painted out of passion, not financial reward. He was of course fortunate not to need the money. Commissioned portraits never appealed to Belleroche. Given his social position and his special talent in portraiture, he could have enjoyed the fame of Helleu and Sargent, whose commissions were growing in demand. However, Belleroche believed that when an artist accepted a portrait on commission he risked becoming a slave to the sitter. And because Belleroche was financially independent, he could choose his subjects, selecting only personalities who appealed to him.
    Lili with a feathered hat, Belleroche, 1907
    The turning point in Belleroche’s career came in 1900 when he realised that instead of painting, lithographs were his true medium. His drawings on stone with a greasy wax crayon have the appearance of being literally drawings on paper. Belleroche produced his most creative work and he considerably advanced the technique of lithography. His hand was so sure that he did not need preparatory sketches, but could draw directly on the stone. By 1904, his work was receiving critical acclaim as well as the respect and admiration of his peers, such as Renoir. At that year’s Salon d’Automne an entire room was devoted to his work. Degas bought one of Albert’s lithographs and a painting was acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg.
    Belleroche, then aged forty five, married the beautiful Julie Emilie Visseaux in 1910, at All Saints Church, St John’s Wood. She was twenty eight and the daughter of his friend, the sculptor Jules Edouard Visseaux. His previous lover Lili Grenier, was furious and tried to break up the couple, which helped Belleroche’s decision to leave Paris. He returned to England to live, as his mother had done before him, following the death of her husband. Alice took up residence in fashionable St John’s Wood, at 11 and then 22 Grove End Road, where she died in 1916. She lived well with seven servants. Alfred and Julie lived with her in 22 Grove End Road and then in 1912 they moved to 46 West End Lane, where they stayed for about six years. In 1918 they moved to a 13th century house at Rustington in Sussex where they raised their three children. His son William (1913-1969), became active in the art world as a painter and a writer. Belleroche continued to make lithographs, although after World War I he worked only intermittently and in seclusion.
    Hampstead, by Belleroche, 1916 (Probably looking towards Christchurch)
    In the 1930’s, Belleroche presented large collections of his lithographs to the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels; and the British Museum in London. A smaller collection was given to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. In 1933, the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels held a major retrospective exhibition of 291 lithographs and published an extensive catalogue of the exhibition. In conjunction with this honour, King Albert of Belgium awarded Belleroche the order of Chevalier de l’Ordre de Leopold.
    At the outbreak of World War II and the bombing of the coast, Belleroche moved his family north to Southwell in Nottingham where he lived a simple life in retirement. In a small rented room over an electrician’s shop, he kept a makeshift studio where he stored the work of his Montmartre days. No one was allowed in and this became his retreat, full of memories of his life in Paris. Belleroche died in 1944 at the age of eighty in Southwell, after a long illness.
    His previous home at 46 West End Lane was one of the houses destroyed by the VI flying bomb in June 1944.
    Harry Vane Milbank
    Albert’s stepfather William Harry Vane Milbank had a very colourful life.
    Generally known as Harry Vane Milbank, he was born in 1849, the son of Sir Frederick Acclom Milbank, M.P. After attending Eton, Harry held a commission as Cornet (2nd Lieutenant) in the Royal Horse Guards until the end of 1870. By the time he turned 21 on 29 December 1869, Harry was already in debt to the tune of £30,000. Around the time of his marriage to Alice on 1 March 1871, Harry went into voluntary bankruptcy, owing his many creditors over £76,000. An early report appeared in January when Harry was being pursued for money by a photographer. In early April, his bankruptcy by arrangement with creditors was agreed. At the time, the judge called it ‘a case of a young man with splendid expectations,’ able to raise the money to pay off his creditors in full, which he intended to do. Harry was expected to inherit what a friend called ‘pots of money’ on the death of his father and his grand-uncle, the Duke of Cleveland. Alice must surely have known about Harry’s financial problems. But was she aware he’d only recently tried to marry someone else? Harry owed over £1,000 to a Piccadilly dress shop, for clothes supplied to Mabel Gray between February 1870 and January 1871, when Mabel was ‘living under the protection’ of Milbank. The Times politely called her a ‘celebrity’ but in reality Mabel was a notorious ‘demi-mondaine’ of the 1860s, a lady supported by a number of wealthy lovers. Her real name was Annie King, and she’d worked as a shop girl in London’s West End before embarking on her new career. Mabel’s photographs sold in huge numbers, ‘a beautiful creature, tall, slender, elegant, refined, she wore outrageously costly but prefect toilettes and some of the best diamonds in London.’ It took the ‘robust intervention’ of his father and the Duke of Cleveland, to prevent Milbank marrying Mabel Gray. It was rumoured that they had bought her off with a large sum of money.

    Mabel Gray
    When Mabel died of tuberculosis in 1871, the papers recalled their alliance, without naming him:
    ‘At one time she was engaged to be married to the heir to one of the oldest English dukedoms, but by the strenuous interference of his friends, and the granting for life to her of a liberal provision, what would have been a gross mesalliance was fortunately prevented.’
    But the reporters were also generous to Mabel:
    ‘Many stories are told of her eccentric extravagance, but let the soil lie lightly on her remains, for in times of biting distress Mabel Gray was a woman whose charity covered a multitude of sins.’
    As well as spending money and gambling, Harry was a noted duellist, fighting 18 duels and killing four men. He came to particular prominence in the press in 1892 as the second of the American Hallett Alsop Borrowe who was challenged to a duel by James Coleman Drayton over his wife Augusta. 
    By now, Harry had been ill for some time. He travelled to Switzerland hoping for a cure but died in Davos in October 1892, of a haemorrhage. He left only £100 in his will, a ‘nominal personal estate’ as one paper put it. It was said the reason the Duke of Cleveland left Harry none of his vast fortune was due to;
    ‘the sad tales of Harry Vane Milbank’s career on the Continent which from time to time reached home. Those who remember the fast society of Paris of 20 years ago will well recall the personality of the handsome, dashing officer in the Blues, who brought down to his duelling pistol more than one rash opponent.’
    In addition to the tributes which might be expected, given the man and his lifestyle – Harry was a sportsman, a crack rifle shot and an accomplished huntsman – one paper noted he was also a keen scientist. Harry’s body was brought back to England for burial and Albert Belleroche attended the funeral. Alice’s floral tribute was a conical wreath over six feet in diameter, covered with white flowers and heliotrope.

  • Safe blowers in West Hampstead


    What are the chances of finding two safe blowers in West Hampstead? Even more unlikely is the fact that they were both living there in 1955. But surprisingly, there is no obvious link between the men. 

    At the end of the story you will find out all you need to know about blowing up a safe and how to make your sex life go with a bang! Read on.


    At the beginning of February 1955 two separate gelignite raids took place.
    The First Raid at Stanstead
    On the night of 3-4 February thieves blew open the safe in the wages office of Skyways Ltd at Stansted Airport, and stole cash and National Health stamps. Leading from the safe to the door were two strands of wire, and in the passage the police found a live unused detonator.
    The next day, presumably acting on a tip-off, detectives went to a house in West End Lane. The number was not given in the newspaper reports and it was rather oddly called a bungalow, but there’s no obvious house like this in the road. Edward Rice, aged 34, opened the door and said, ‘I have been expecting this. You are lucky because I was going to leave here tomorrow. Things were getting too hot.’One hundred and twelve one pound notes were found on Rice, together with other stolen goods. When charged, Rice simply said ‘I plead guilty.’
    Edward Thomas Rice was a professional criminal, born in 1921 in Shoreditch. His father, Thomas Edward Rice, a printer, was an associate of criminals and Edward lived in a slum area for many years. In 1932 the family were at 45 Falkirk Street, Shoreditch, sharing a house with at least 13 adults. His mother, Mary Ann, died when Edward was 17 and soon after this his father turned him out of their home. Rice had several minor convictions before being sent to Wandsworth prison in 1940, where he wasn’t segregated as a first offender but mixed up with hardened criminals. On his release he was called up for the Royal Navy, but this did not suit him and he went AWOL on a number of occasions.
    In March 1954 Rice was sentenced in Manchester to ten years imprisonment for housebreaking, wounding and conspiracy. In November he managed to escape from Strangeways prison with five other men. They’d been making coal bags in a workshop outside the main wall and escaped through the skylight, having previously sawn through one of the bars. Over the next few months a nationwide search was carried out, and all the men were caught apart from Rice, who remained on the run. That December on Boxing Day, four detectives were sure they’d found Rice when they arrested a man who was doing an old-time music hall act in a Nottingham pub. They said, ‘You resemble Edward Rice the escaped convict.’ The man replied, ‘Don’t be silly, I’m Henry Green.’ They found a revolver and four rounds of ammunition in his pocket. Asked about the gun, the man said, ‘I have a lot of enemies, but I am not Rice.’ This was true, he wasn’t Rice, but neither was he Henry Green. His real name was Leslie MaxleyEpstein, aged 32, a musician of no fixed abode.
    On the night of 26-27 January 1955 a garage, belonging to Louis Alfred Yull, a land clearance contractor in Edmonton, had been broken into and gelignite and detonators, which he was legally using, were stolen. When the police searched the garden of the house in West End Lane they found five sticks of gelignite buried there. Rice later said ‘I got the jelly and dets off some fellows. Some of it came from the job in Edmonton.’ He had been renting the house under the name of Smith.
    In March 1955 Rice appeared at the Old Bailey where he pleaded guilty to charges of receiving gelignite and detonators, and receiving tobacco and cigarettes stolen from British Railways while in transit. Rice admitted his guilt but refused to name the other men involved. He was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment, to serve concurrently with his previous 10 years.
    The Second Raid in Piccadilly: The Ferret and the Monkey
    On Sunday night 6th February 1955, thieves broke into the strong room of Martins Bank at their prestigious branch in 23 St James Street. When the manager opened up on Monday morning he found the robbers had blown a hole through the 22 inch reinforced wall and used gelignite to blow open the safe, stealing over £20,600, (worth around £425,000 today). This was the first time gelignite had been used to blow open both a bank’s safe and its strong room which was covered in brick and plaster dust from the explosion. Two of Scotland Yard’s top detectives were put in charge of the case: Chief Superintendent Edward Greeno and Superintendent Herbert Sparks. It was evident the thieves had entered from the adjoining building, then squeezed through a window of the women’s toilet opposite the strong room. An iron bar across the window had been bent back using a crowbar allowing a small opening. Herbert Sparks thought that Alfred Fraser, known as ‘The Ferret’, had the expertise but more important, he was small enough to have got through the narrow gap. Fraser had just been released after serving a sentence for attempted safe-blowing at the Hounslow Labour Exchange. His address in Fordwych Road was put under observation.
    Over the following weeks, Fraser bought a Daimler limousine and began negotiations for a greengrocer’s shop in Paddington. He was seen in the company of known criminal Howard Lewis, 29, nicknamed ‘The Monkey’, who’d also bought a new car and was spending a lot of money. When the police arrested 43 years old Fraser it was alleged that he said, ‘That bastard Lewis has been talking. Have the others been tumbled?’ Cash from the bank was found in his pockets and at his house. More banknotes were discovered when Lewis’s home was searched, some stuffed inside a gramophone horn. While the police were there the phone rang and after Lewis had answered, the police took the phone from him and heard Fraser’s wife saying, ‘What shall I do with the money?’ Forensic evidence showed that brick dust and glass shards from the bank were present in the homes of both men. A third suspect, Percy Horne, a scrap metal dealer, was charged with receiving stolen money.
    The three men appeared at the Old Bailey in May 1955. They all pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ and gave alibis, claiming the forensic evidence had been planted by the police. The jury found Fraser and Lewis guilty, and they received sentences of ten years and seven years respectively. The jury could not agree about Horne and he was released. Fraser who was born in Marylebone in 1912, was a persistent criminal with seventeen previous convictions since 1927. During his wartime military service he had deserted four times.
    Two years later Martins Bank took the unusual step of suing Fraser for the missing money. He defended himself at court in July 1957, again claiming the money found on him was a loan from Percy Horne to buy the greengrocery business and that the police had framed him because of his criminal past as a jewel thief. The jury did not believe Fraser and found in favour of Martins Bank, saying that he owed them £19,602. He had no money to pay but the costs of the trial were awarded against him.
    Safe Blowing
    Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in 1867. Then in 1875 he found that a more stable form called gelignite could be made by mixing gun cotton with wood pulp and saltpetre or sodium nitrate. This putty-like explosive was widely used in WWII and became a particular favourite of criminals after the War.  In 1950 even school children in Dorset were playing with sticks of it which they had stolen from a quarry.
    A website called the Peterman run by a Scottish safeman provides interesting information about gelignite and safe blowing. http://www.peterman.org.uk/

    This photograph of a complete safe-blowers kit shows a stick of gelignite and two different types detonator: an aluminium one with a fuse attached, and a copper one which has two wires extending about 6 feet to a longer shot firing cable. A pen-light torch battery is all that is required to fire the detonator. The lolly stick is commonly used to tamp and shape the jelly. The other item really is a condom. A ‘packet of three’ was a common sight on the prosecution table in the High Court. They were pushed into the gap between the back of the safe door plate and the front of the lock cap. Through this is packed the charge with a detonator, and everything is then held in place with some plasticine.