Thank you for joining me again, on this third stage
of our journey through the history of “the Welsh Harp” (our local reservoir –
not the musical instrument!). In Part 2, we saw how the enterprise of W.P. Warner
had made the name of his tavern synonymous with the reservoir beside it. This
time we’ll explore changes, on and around the reservoir, into the 20th
century.
1. The Kingsbury dam and its overflow,
c.1900. (Brent Archives online image 1341)
At first, not much changed. The area of water was
mainly surrounded by the meadows of local farms, and attracted visitors to the
countryside just beyond the expanding urban sprawl of London. Water flowing
over the dam to feed the River Brent was a popular sight, across the fields of
Gravel Pit Farm at Neasden. West Hendon had developed slightly, but there was
still lots of open space nearby.
2. Cool Oak Lane, with its causeway and
bridge across the reservoir's northern arm, c.1900.
(Barnet Local Studies Centre image 3284)
(Barnet Local Studies Centre image 3284)
The Metropolitan Railway’s Neasden Works expanded, with a new power station to supply its
electric trains, which were introduced from 1905. The Canal Company, which
still owned the reservoir, refused to let the Metropolitan use water from its
Feeder for cooling purposes, so they had to sink two wells for that purpose. It
was the First World War that finally brought more industry to the area.
The airfield at Hendon already had a small aircraft
factory, run by the Grahame-White company, when the war broke out in 1914.
Other companies making planes for the rapidly developing aerial warfare were
soon active in the area, such as the Aircraft Manufacturing Company (“Airco”) in Colindale and Kingsbury, Handley Page
in Cricklewood and later Hooper & Co in North Wembley. In 1917, Handley Page designed a prototype
seaplane, hoping to sell it to the Royal Navy, and their R200 was test-flown
from the Welsh Harp. They did not receive an order, so
the seaplane never went into production.
3. Scale drawings of the Handley Page R200
seaplane. (Courtesy of the R.A.F. Museum, Hendon)
By 1917, the slopes of Dollis Hill down to the
reservoir were also the home of the Mechanical Warfare Department. Its role was
to design and test tanks, for use to try and break the trench warfare stalemate
on the war’s western front. By 1918, one of the designs it was working on was a
modified version of the Mark IX tank, and on a misty morning in November 1918
the world’s first amphibious tank was tested on the Welsh Harp reservoir.
4. A Mark IX amphibious tank entering the
Welsh Harp, November 1918. (Image from the Tank Museum)
Earlier this year, a friend interested in military
history sent me a link to a short film that includes (at the end) footage of
this test. It had been used as part of a French article on First World War
tanks, and was described as a ‘Duck Tank being tested on the pond of Dolly
Hill’! This “top secret” Department remained at Dollis Hill until 1921, before
being moved to Hampshire. Its main buildings, surrounded by a high wall, were
in the Humber Road area. It is remembered in the street name, Tankridge Road,
and a section of the wall remains at Walton Close.
5. Remaining section of Mechanical Warfare
Department wall, Walton Close, Dollis Hill, c.2010.
6. Aerial view of the reservoir in 1919,
with West Hendon beneath the plane’s wing, and Dollis Hill beyond.
The local aircraft industry was badly hit when the
Government scrapped its contracts for planes once the war had ended. One
company at Hendon made use of the unwanted aircraft to offer pleasure flights
to paying customers. The photograph above appeared with an article on the
subject in “Flight” magazine, in June 1919, and shows a view across the
reservoir to Dollis Hill.
7. The railway viaduct, seen from the
Edgware Road bridge, 1921. (Barnet Local Studies Centre image 871)
The 19th century had seen first canals,
then railways, develop as important methods of transport. This scene from 1921,
of the Midland Railway viaduct crossing the eastern arm of the reservoir, was
soon to change dramatically as the rise of motor vehicles meant a need for
better roads. The North Circular Road was constructed during the 1920s to help
heavy commercial traffic avoid having to drive through Central London. Its
proposed route would take it just south of the Welsh Harp, and by 1926 this
section of the reservoir was filled in, and the River Brent put into a culvert,
so that the road could pass under the brick arches of the viaduct.
8. New housing at Dollis Hill, and over the
reservoir at Kingsbury, late 1920s. (Brent Archives image 570)
The construction of the North Circular Road opened
up the northern slopes of Dollis Hill for development, and by the late 1920s
new streets were appearing between Brook Road and Links Road. These can be seen
in the photograph above, together with what must be the start of the Post
Office Research Centre at the top of the hill. Across the reservoir, new
suburban homes were also being built in the Church Lane and Wood Lane areas of
Kingsbury. In 1928, Willesden Urban District Council bought 40 acres of land on
the Kingsbury side of the Welsh Harp, planning to use it as a cemetery, which
would lead to disputes that lasted until 1965!
The rapidly growing population at Neasden and
Dollis Hill prompted Willesden Council to open a recreation ground on their
side of the Welsh Harp. They also built a Neasden branch library, overlooking
it, at the corner of Aboyne Road and the North Circular, which opened in 1931.
In keeping with a growing fashion for open air activity, this had a reading
terrace at first floor level.
9. The reading terrace at Neasden Library,
1931. (Brent Archives online image 2926)
One of the open air activities which had grown in
popularity at the Welsh Harp during the 1920s was “sunbathing”, although it was
not popular with everyone. By 1930, there was growing opposition among local
residents to the visitors who came to the reservoir’s banks to bathe in the
nude. One man complained to the Council that, while walking home to the Edgware
Road from Old Kingsbury Church on a Sunday evening, they had come across ‘a
bunch of stark naked men…. Hardly a pleasant sight for a man to have to pass
with his wife!’
Matters came to a head one weekend in June 1930,
when 40 men and women of the Sun-Ray Club (‘some wore no clothes, others wore
slips or bathing drawers’) were confronted by a crowd of around 200 local
people. Despite the presence of four policemen, who told them that the
sunbathers were on private land, with permission from the owner, and that they
had no right to interfere, the crowd attacked the bathers and drove them away.
Kingsbury Council dealt with the issue in a more dignified way, when they
received a deputation (not a new idea) from the National Sun and Air
Association in May 1931, although they also decided against sunbathing!
10. Extract from the minutes of a Kingsbury
Urban District Council meeting on 6 May 1931. (Brent Archives)
On the reservoir itself, the Brent Sailing Club was
formed at the Old Welsh Harp Inn in 1930. A less tranquil use of the water also
began the same year, when the London Motor Boat Club held its first speedboat
racing event at the Welsh Harp. Larger speedboats were also used to give thrill
rides for paying customers, as shown in this newsreel film from 1932.
11. A motor boat race on the Welsh Harp
reservoir in 1937. (From the collection of the late Geoffrey Hewlett)
The 1931 speedboat racing season had celebrity
guests at its opening, the aviator Amy Johnson and actress Anna Neagle. Amy had lived at Roe
Green for nine months, before the solo flight to Australia that made her
famous, and then had a flat at Vernon Court in Hendon Way. By coincidence, it
was Anna Neagle who starred as Amy Johnson in a film about her life, after her
tragic death in 1941, while flying as a wartime pilot in the Air Transport
Auxiliary.
12. Anna Neagle and Amy Johnson at the Welsh
Harp, April 1931. (From: ‘Amy Johnson – Queen of the Air’)
The south-east corner of the reservoir saw rapid
industrial development along its main roads, and on the reclaimed land, in the
late 1920s and through the 1930s. One of the factories by the junction of the
North Circular and Edgware Roads made mattresses. The company was Staples, and
the busy corner was soon known by that name. The traffic lights here became
well-known for the jams that built up, as seen below in 1937.
13. Staples Corner in 1937, with the mattress
factory bottom left. (Barnet Local Studies Centre image 4920)
When war came again in 1939, Dollis
Hill again had a part to play. Secret underground bunkers were built for the
Admiralty at its Citadel office building, on the corner of the Edgware Road and
Oxgate Lane, and for the Cabinet at “Paddock”, beneath the Post Office Research
Station in Brook Road. It was rumoured that a flying boat was moored on the
Welsh Harp, ready to fly Churchill and other key leaders to safety from their
reserve War Room if necessary, but I have no proof for that story. It was the
research station that developed the first electronic computers, used at
Bletchley Park for code-breaking during the war, and Tommy Flowers, who led the
team that made them, is remembered by the modern street name, Flowers Close.
14.
The aftermath of the West Hendon bombing, February 1941. (Barnet Local Studies
Centre image 5105)
It was not those
key targets that were hit during the Welsh Harp’s worst bombing raids of the
Second World War. Early in 1941, Germany was testing new designs of
high-explosive bombs, and dropping a single bomb in a raid, so that its effects
could be seen afterwards. One of these exploded above the Ravenstone Road area
of West Hendon on the evening of 13 February 1941, flattening 40 homes, killing
more than 80 people and making around 1,500 homeless. At the opposite end of
the reservoir, a V2 rocket hit one end of Wykeham School in March 1945. Luckily
no children were there at the time, but seven people were killed in nearby
homes.
Just as it had during the First World War, the
reservoir played its part between 1939 and 1945. A Hendon Sea Training Corps
was formed in 1941, and its young volunteers learned some boating skills on the
Welsh Harp, as well as on land at a school in Algernon Road. Production at many
factories was changed, to produce equipment for the war effort. Hickman’s works
on the North Circular Road had been shopfitters, but by 1943 their carpenters
were building wooden landing craft, which were tested on the reservoir before
being handed over to the Royal Navy. LCAs were “Landing Craft, Assault”, which
carried a platoon of up to 36 soldiers, from ships around ten miles offshore,
onto the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
15. The Hickman's workers aboard a completed
landing craft, 1943/44. (Image shared by the son of a worker)
Next weekend we’ll visit the Welsh Harp in more
peaceful times. I hope you will join me then, for the final part of this
series.
Philip Grant
