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Well, having looked it again, it really doesn't seem too bad. There don't seem to be many loose ends, unsolved mysteries etc. Maybe try to tidy up all the untidy refs, and finally sort out the order of the attempted purchase of the CG estate, with perhaps a few more financial details. That's almost it.
Sir Joseph Beecham, 1st Baronet (8 June 1848 – 23 October 1916), was a British businessman, patron of opera, and fine art collector. His father, Thomas Beecham founded a laxative business, Beecham's Pills, and in 1866 aged around 18, Beecham joined his father's firm and gradually assumed responsibility for its management, greatly improving its profitability over some forty years. With intensive and original advertising he made the firm's products known all over the world. [2] His younger son Henry Beecham joined the firm in 1906.
From around 1910 he acquired the leases of various London theatres to further the career of his son Thomas Beecham in conducting opera and ballet; for example, he underwrote perfomances of the Ballets Russes in 1911. This patronage cost hundreds of thousands of pounds (many millions in the 21st century), which he attempted to recoup in various business ventures. One of these was to act as the middle man for the purchase of the Covent Garden Estate, London, (including the Royal Opera House) for £2 million from the 11th Duke of Bedford in June 1914.
However, severe monetary controls introduced by the British government a month later on the outbreak of World War I meant that the capital transfer to complete the sale couldn't legally be made, and the deal fell through. Worries about having to meet the enormous debt to the Duke of Bedford (around £1.25m when he died) contributed to his death aged 68 in 1916 before the purchase could be completed.
Joseph Beecham's financial affairs were so complex that after his death his executors applied to the Court of Chancery for relief. His sons, Thomas and Henry, were ordered by the court in 1917 to form a private company to complete the purchase of the Covent Garden estate, which was only finalised in 1922. Henry Beecham was convicted of manslaughter in early in 1921, having killed a young boy in a road traffic incident. He left the business and the country after serving a year in prison. In addition, Thomas Beecham was heavily in debt on his own account in connection with his opera productions, and was the subject of a Receiving Order (the equivalent today of being declared bankrupt) from 1919; his own personal debts were only discharged in 1923.
Sir Thomas Beecham only wanted to continue making music ("I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, after my fashion"), and he sold the entire business and estate to a new company with financial backing from Phillip Hill, one of the names in Hill Samuel. From 1924 Hill oversaw the transition of the original single-product Beecham's Pills company into a modern international pharmaceutical business, where Beecham chemists discovered penicillin in 1959.
He was the eldest son of Jane Evans and Thomas Beecham, a former shepherd who founded a manufacturing company to make Beecham's pills. [3] He was born in St. Helens, Liverpool, in a house adjacent to his father's first factory, which made the company's main product.
In 1866, aged around 18, Beecham joined his father's business and infused into it a highly enterprising spirit. In 1876 he was mentioned in the local directories as 'assistant chemist' at the works. [4]
In 1886 work began on a new main factory and office buildings in Westfield Street, St. Helens at an initial cost of £30,000. [5] The works were opened towards the end of 1887. [4] The St. Helens premises was one of the first factories in the UK to be powered and lit by electricity. [6] [3] Beecham was the chairman of the St. Helens Electricity Committee, which provided a cheaper electricity supply than other similar urban areas. [6]
Construction of the new factory involved knocking down the house where Beecham was born, and the same year he purchased the 'Ewanville' mansion and estate in Blacklow Brow, Huyton. This was one of the first houses in Lancashire to be lit by electricity and also had central heating installed. [7] It was later replaced by modern housing. [8]
Beecham was a keen cyclist, and the works Secretary, the Anglo-American Charles Rowed was a cycling companion. Rowed became works manager in around 1887. [4] [a]
Advertising was a primary way of increasing sales: the budget was £22,000 in 1884, growing to £95,000 in 1889. The workforce increased from 19 to 88 during the same period. [4] In 1890 the total daily output was 9,000,000 pills per day. [4]
He visited the United States in 1887 after that country and Britain became signatories to the 1883 Paris Convention which provided protection for trade marks, [11] followed by setting up factories and agencies in several other countries. [5] That year he registered the firm's trademark in the US, and witnessed a number of prosecutions for trademark infringement. He and his father Thomas Sr. regularly visited the country thereafter. [12] In 1888 Beecham appointed B. F. Allen and Co. of 365-367 Canal Street, Manhattan, as sole agent for Beecham's Pills in the US. Allen was already agent for Pears Soap. [13] [14] The same year, 1888, Beecham's sent out 7,000 letters promoting its pills in the US and Canada, and distributed photographs of US presidential candidates Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland with an advertisement for the pills on the back. [15] [16] The presidential nominees for the National Equal Rights Party were Mrs. Belva Ann Lockwood of Washington DC, and Albert H. Love of Pennsylvania. Love declined the honour, and Charles Stuart Welles was substituted as nominee. [17] Joseph Beecham's son Thomas would later marry Utica, Welles's daughter.
Joseph Beecham was given a half share in the business in 1889, and took over completely from his father in 1895. [4] [18] In 1890 Beecham made an arrangement with B. F. Allen to manufacture the pills in Brooklyn in order to circumvent a US tariff equivalent to 50% of the sale price of the pills. [11] [19] The Americans preferred sugar-coated pills.
On other transatlantic trips he took his eldest son Thomas on the SS Campania in 1893, [20] his oldest daughter Edith in 1907 on the RMS Lusitania, and his other son Henry in 1913 on the RMS Mauretania. [21] [b] Beecham may have made as many as 30 transatlantic return trips (60 crossings) in total. [19]
The firm used a variety of ingenious and sometimes humorous advertising and marketing techniques. [22] These ranged from a single line at the foot of a news column in an education journal in the USA ("Liver complaints cured by Beecham's Pills"), [23] to Beecham's Help to Scholars, packed full of useful information for schoolchildren; [24] and the 120 titles of Beecham's Photo-Folios, photographic views of Great Britain, price one penny (less than 0.5p); [25] Further afield, the French writer André Chevrillon arriving in Darjeeling in the Himalayas in November 1890 was greeted on the road from the station with advertising posters proclaiming Pears soap, Colman's mustard and Beecham's pills. [26] [27] The advertising posters for Beecham’s Pills and Colman’s Mustard were designed by John Hassall. [28] Beecham was later a director of A. and F. Pears Ltd., [29] joining the board in 1909. [19]
"Like his father, Joseph was a lusty man and felt that neither his wife nor his children understood him. He began to seek his private pleasures elsewhere." [30] In February 1899 Joseph had his wife certified as being of unsound mind (they had been married in 1873), and in March he had her detained against her will in a lunatic asylum (mental hospital) in Nottingham. [31] [c] Thomas Beecham briefly refers to his his mother's condition in his autobiography as "...a nervous malady, which first manifested itself when I was between ten and eleven, and which obliged her as time went on to relinquish more and more the care of her house and go southward to some place like Eastbourne or Bournemouth where she could be looked after until well again." [33] Two of the Beecham children, Emily and Thomas, were very much against this development when they learned about it, and made their antagonism towards their father very plain.
Beecham's oldest daughter Emily went to live at the London residence of Dr. Charles Stuart Welles, the former superintendent of the NY Polyclinic Hospital, and former US presidential nominee for the National Equal Rights Party. Beecham had been treated by Welles during a trip to the US. [34] In 1900 Welles, who had moved to London some years earlier, was employed as First Secretary of the American Embassy. [35] Welles' wife was Ella Celeste née Miles, whose brother-in-law (by her sister's marriage) was Sir Francis Cook. [d] It was Cook who strongly supported Emily and Thomas, and his solicitors recommended a legal separation. [39] Cook had also discovered that Joseph Beecham had been keeping a mistress in a house in Harlesden, N. London, a 'Mrs. Bennett' whose real name was Helen McKey Taylor. She had been a governess in St Helens, had been 'on terms of intimacy' with Beecham for the past twelve years, and was to remain his friend and confidante for the rest of his life. [31] He left her nothing in his will. [40]
Joseph Beecham was a Justice of the Peace for Lancashire; and Mayor of St. Helens between 1889 and 1899. To mark his re-inauguration in December 1899, he organised and paid for a concert with Hans Richter conducting the Hallé Orchestra. Richter cancelled at the last moment, and Beecham's son Thomas conducted instead. [41] [42] Nevertheless, when Joseph Beecham realised that Thomas was not going to back down in his support of Josephine he threw his son out of the house, and they became estranged for nine years. [32] [43] [44]
In 1901 Thomas and his oldest sister Emily helped to secure their mother's release and forced Joseph to pay her an annual alimony of £4,500. [45] (or £2,500 according to Lucas p. 19) Thomas Beecham also went to live at the Welles' house in London, where he proposed to their daughter Utica. Joseph disinherited Emily completely. Beecham fils was to exhibit the same lack of uxorious attachment in later life.
Henry Beecham, his younger son, joined Beecham's Pills as manager in 1906 - his performance has been described as "adequate but lack-lustre". [46] He was rather overshadowed by Henry Rowed, who had risen since c1887 to be the works' general director.
In 1908 alone Joseph Beecham's profit from the business was £98,200 (£5.9 million in 2008). He had inherited £40,000 (£2.4 million in 2008) from his father Thomas who died in 1907, [47] who left a total of £86,680 in his will. [48]
Gradually losing interest in the pill-making business (he had joined the firm in 1866, over 40 years before), Joseph Beecham withdrew a large amount of money from his firm, bought 9 Arkwright Road, Hampstead, London in 1909 [46] [49] [50]and filled it with quality artworks by Constable, Turner, Reynolds, Gainsborough, [51] [52] Cox and DeWint, among others. [53] The house in Hampstead, named Hill Brow (or West Brow), cost £40,000. There was a small concert hall equipped with a splendid organ. [30]
The estrangement with his son Thomas came to an end in 1909, and he began to support his son's burgeoning musical career.
The reconciliation between the Beechams took place after a performance of Dame Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers at His Majesty's Theatre in 1909. Joseph Beecham had taken to attending his son's concerts incognito, slipping out before the end. [54] According to Smyth, at a rehearsal for The Wreckers at His Majesty's Theatre, "Beecham whispered to me, "Look... the left hand of the two men hiding behind the pillars at the back of the stalls is my father!" [55] [56] Thomas Beecham conducted the first complete English performance of The Wreckers on 22 June 1909. [57] Smyth, with her extensive list of high society contacts including Empress Eugénie and even Buckingham Palace, suggested that the King should attend a gala performance of The Wreckers. Joseph duly went along to His Majesty's Theatre, and was presented to King Edward at the end. He was hugely impressed and soon met with Thomas in a lawyer's office where any animosity remaining after some ten years' estrangement melted away. [58] He and Thomas spent the rest of the day together, playing organ and piano duets together. [59]
The day before the gala performance, Joseph Beecham had met Thomas J. Barrett of Pears Soap at Christie's auction rooms, and told Barrett that he was willing to devote £200,000 to furthering the cause of national opera. [61] He also purchased a landscape by George Vincent for 1060 gns. He sent a pony and trap as a present to Thomas's house at Mursley Hall, Buckinghamshire. [62]
He leased various theatres in London to further Thomas's conducting career, including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Drury Lane theatre and the smaller Aldwych Theatre. These were all part of the Covent Garden estate, whose ultimate landowner was the Duke of Bedford until it was finally sold in 1918 to a Beecham-controlled private company. [e]
Beecham was again mayor of St. Helens from 1910 to 1912. [64] In 1911 he considerably extended the New York factory, [65] installing the latest technically advanced machinery for making pills. This was a great advance over the St Helens factory, where child labour (legal at the time) [f] was cheap and plentiful. The US Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 had outlawed manufacturers from making false claims for their products, but despite this setback, Beecham's profits more than doubled by 1913. [13]
Joseph Beecham was knighted in late 1911, with effect from 1 January 1912 [66] [67], "presumably by purchase", [68] [g] and was a member of the Walpole Society in 1912–1913. [69] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1913. [70]
Unfortunately, although his son Thomas Beecham achieved great artistic and critical acclaim as a conductor, he was a helpless spendthrift with little head for money management: a considerable portion of Joseph Beecham's fortune disappeared in a few a short years. [71] In an attempt to improve his fading finances, he became associated with some shady and unscrupulous financiers. [71] One of these was James White, a notorious high-class swindler and gambler. Beecham went into partnership with White in the Ancona Motor Co., importing American motor cars including Oakland, Oldsmobile, GMC, Kelly Springfield and Wallis agricultural tractors. [72] [73]
In the autumn of 1913, along with Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness, [h] Beecham was involved in an attempt to set up an Anglo-Bulgarian banking scheme. [79] [i] Its purpose was to provide general banking services, to act as agents in Bulgaria for British companies and to expand commercial interests with Bulgaria. [82] [j] The prospective deal was promoted by Leonce Delphin, [k] one of Beecham's sons-in-law, and Otto Fulton. [79] [l]
The whole unlikely enterprise came to naught because of Foreign Office suspicions about Otto Fulton.
Moral support of the unofficial type was often given to British commercial interests. However, negative British perceptions of stereotypes "affected decisions so that schemes by Jewish businessmen or foreign-owned banks or companies were unlikely to receive either concrete or moral support from British officials." [95]
Not even unofficial 'moral support' from the FO was likely to be forthcoming. Inquiries by the British Consul in Belgrade in September 1912 revealed that Fulton had been overheard speaking fluent Austrian German, seemed to be Hebraic and spoke English with a "slight foreign accent." A cable from the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey stated that he was "Twice bankrupt. No good." [96] [97]
Opposition to the vague and fraudulent claims made by the makers of patent medicines started to grow in the 20th century. In the United States concern about unsanitary methods of food preparation, especially the meat packing industry, led to the US Congress passing the Pure Food and Drugs Act in 1906. This also removed the protection which proprietary medicines had benefited from since the US and Britain had signed the 1887 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. This event had been the impetus for Beecham to begin the US operation in the first place. [11]
Add stuff about Resale price maintenance!
P.A.T.A. p. 533, 537-8, 543
A
Parliamentary Select Committee on Proprietary Remedies was set up: Beecham, who had been running the pill-making business since 1895 with Charles Rowed as his general manager, gave evidence to the Committee on January 13, 1913. [See also Norman supra note 19, questions 8964-9514.] He was fairly roughly handled by the committee, who viewed him as a fraudulent rogue.
[68]
According to Beecham's evidence to the Committee, by 1913 the firm was making 370 million pills a year weighing 50 tons, with an annual turnover of £360,000 [98] and an annual advertising budget of $100,000. [99] The workforce of around 100 consisted mostly of low-paid boys; [f] Business was done on a cash-only basis, which kept office staff to a minimum, and since the raw materials for the pills ( aloes, powdered ginger and chemists' soap) [100] [101] only cost £34,000, the net profits in 1913 amounted to £110,000. [6] [m]
The general conclusions of the Select Committee were:
For Sinclair Lewis the Beechams and their enterprises "embodied the conflation of capital gained through advertising, the enthusiasms of staid bourgeois society in London, and regressive culture. As such, Thomas Beecham no doubt represented to the vorticists the darkest possibilities of the amalgamation of advertising and art." Make sfn
The Vorticist publication Blast took aim at public figures like Thomas Beecham, " '" The "Opera" in this parenthesis was the Grand Season of Russian Opera and English Opera (and the Russian Ballet) brought to London's Drury Lane Theatre in 1914 by Sir Joseph Beecham, the founder of Beecham's Pills. Here the vorticists condemn the way in which English commercial interests subvert rather than support English art interests; to them, the tremendous attention of the public and press to the arrival of the Russian Opera and the Russian Ballet must have reeked of the same cultural imperialism that the Italian futurists had threatened."
Although Beecham was reportedly worth about $130,000,000 (£26m),- making him the third richest man in England, [104] he needed to recoup the massive losses which his son Thomas had incurred while staging opera and ballet from 1910 - eg the 1912 Russian Ballet season, which Joseph Beecham had heavily backed and promoted. Of the 34 operas that Thomas Beecham staged at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1910, only four had made money. [105]
Whatever the papers may have printed, Beecham never 'owned' the Aldwych Theatre, with Sir Thomas as the lessee. [106] See also a review of the 'farcical comedy', "Looking For Trouble": The Times, Tuesday, 14 May 1912. He may well have been the leaseholder of the building: which is not the same as owning the freehold, which always belonged to the Duke of Bedford, even after the sale of the Covent Garden Estate in 1918. See far below.
Beecham was made a baronet, of Ewanville in the Parish of Huyton in the County Palatine of Lancaster, in July 1914. [107] This was ostensibly for his services to the arts, but he paid a total of £10,000 (£165,000 in 2008) to the following individuals: £4,000 to Lady Cunard; £5,500 to Edward Horner, brother of H. H. Asquith's daughter-in-law Katherine Asquith; and £500 to Lady Diana Manners who quietly told her future husband Duff Cooper, who recorded it in his diary. [108]
On the same day as the announcement of his baronetcy, Beecham let it be known that he had also acquired the Covent Garden Estate from the Duke of Bedford for £2,000,000. He wasn't intending to permanently own or manage the estate himself, but was acting as a middle man for a property syndicate headed by Alexander Ormrod, a stockbroker of the firm of Ormrod & Co., Manchester. Unfortunately the First World War broke out just a week later, and the strict financial controls implemented by the British Government meant that the transaction couldn't be completed, leaving Beecham in debt to the Duke of Bedford to the tune of £2m, which hastened his death two years later. The deal and its ramifications are explained in the following sections.
The Dukes of Bedford had owned the Covent Garden estate since the execution and attainder of the 1st Duke of Somerset in 1549 during the reign of Henry VIII.
Agriculture had suffered from the general depression since the Panic of 1873, the longest and most severe until the "Great Depression" triggered by the 1923 Wall Street Crash. The Duke of Bedford was a huge agricultural landowner: Thorney estate, Woburn, Bedfordshire, Bucks, etc.- but low land prices meant there were no buyers, and landowners thus couldn't easily diversify into company securities. Although the London estates were profitable enough, the main source of his income was from his vast agricultural holdings which were becoming considerably less profitable. [109]
The following sentence is vaguely correct, but the actual timeline and reasons need sorting out from Shepherd, with lots of info about Bedford and his sell-off of most of his estates. [109]
The 11th Duke of Bedford seems to have decided to sell the Bloomsbury Estate in 1910, when Herbert Asquith's Liberal government raised land duties on urban estates. [110] This was part of Lloyd George's Land Campaign initiative, to tax the freeholders rather than the lessees. [111] [112] According to Roland Quinault,
Prothero (later Lord Ernle) also said:: "Public opinion was setting strongly against the accumulation of large landed properties in the hands of individuals. The ownership of land had lost its political importance; financial legislation had already made its tenure more unprofitable; further legislation in similar directions was threatened." [109]
The Covent Garden Estate in 1914 consisted of around 18 acres (7.3 ha) in the City of Westminster, including the well-known fruit and vegetable market itself; several theatres, including the Royal Opera House and its associated storage and rehearsal rooms, [109] the Aldwych Theatre, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the Strand Theatre; the National Sporting Club, the Waldorf Hotel and numerous restaurants and pubs; [114] Bedford Chambers; the Tavistock Hotel; and Hummum's Hotel in the Little Piazza on Russell St.; [115] numerous small shops and businesses in Floral Street, James Street & Russell Street near the market; [116] Bow Street police station and police court; and the Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church in Maiden Lane. [110]
According to Thomas Beecham, it was Joseph Beecham's shady partner "Jimmy" White who had persuaded him to buy Covent Garden in the first place; [n] the intention was to float a public company, in co-operation with a well-known firm of brokers based in northern England, to deal with the estate as a commercial proposition. Beecham Sr. was to receive back the considerable sum he had paid as deposit money, plus a monetary bonus for financing the deal in the first place. [117]
Joseph Beecham signed the contract to buy the Covent Garden Estate from the Duke of Bedford on 6 July 1914, and on 12 July he sold on the estate to Alexander Ormrod as agreed for a profit of £50,000. But before the contract could be completed World War I broke out, and the government suspended major capital transfers. Ormrod was legally prevented from transferring his syndicate's capital to Beecham, who was legally obliged to pay £2 million to the Duke of Bedford.
Although the Duke of Bedford was the owner of the estate, the negations were carried out by his agent since 1898, the "outstandingly able" Rowland Prothero. [109]
In late 1913 the property magnate Harry Mallaby-Deeley, MP for Harrow, made an offer to the financier Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, to purchase for £2 million (about £123 million in 2019) the freehold of the Covent Garden Estate. On 24 November 1913 Mallaby-Deely signed an outline agreement (or option) with the Duke to purchase the estate, with 2/3 of the finance being provided by the Duke at 4.5% per annum for up to 12 years. [109] By the following summer Mallaby-Deely had received several offers on his option, including one from Beecham which had been rejected. Beecham then made a more substantial offer, acting with James White, and backed by a Manchester stockbroker, Alexander Lawson Ormrod (a sort of sleeping partner). On completion with the Duke, Beecham was going to sell the estate straight on to Ormrod, for a further profit for Beecham of £50,000. Ormrod and his backers were to float a public company to manage the estate commercially. [109] [108]
Thus in June 1914 Beecham offered Mallaby-Deeley £250,000 (c. £15m in 2015) to purchase the option to buy the estate. [109] [118]
The association of both White and Ormrod with Beecham was made clear at the time of the deal with Mallaby-Deely. [118] The Times printed a very long article about the sale of the estate, listing all the 26 streets with properties included in the sale, and plenty of information about the Duke and Mallaby-Deeley. [119]
Beecham's offer was accepted by Mallaby-Deely in June 1914. [108] and Beecham paid him £250,000 for the option to purchase. On 6 July Beecham then signed an agreement with the Duke of Bedford to purchase the whole estate, with a deposit of £200,000, 10% of the purchase price. "Under the terms of his agreement of 6 July 1914 with the Duke of Bedford, Sir Joseph Beecham contracted to buy the estate and market for £2,000,000. He paid a deposit of £200,000 and covenanted to pay the balance on 11 November." [109] [o]
Having irrevocably committed himself to purchase the estate from the Duke on 6 July, Beecham then sold the entire Covent Garden estate to his partner Ormrod on 12 July 1914 [123] for a profit of £50,000.
When World War 1 broke out within a month, the Treasury suspended the Gold Standard, issuing paper Treasury Banknotes instead, and stopped any further transfers of capital unconnected with the war. [124] "...and new official restrictions on the use of capital prevented the completion of the contract." [117] "Capital transfers were quickly restricted, however, and Ormrod was unable to complete his purchase, while Joseph could not withdraw from his [own]". [125]
Ormrod thus found himself legally forbidden to honour the deal to purchase the estate from Beecham, [126] who was landed with not only an ageing opera house (temporarily full of furniture from the hotels and workplaces which the government had requisitioned as offices); [127] [128] but also an entire prime city-centre property estate which he had no particular desire to own.
After the deal with Ormrod fell through, Beecham made a new deal with the vendor (ie Duke of Bedford) which involved Beecham making another large cash payment, bringing the total amount he had advanced to the Duke towards the purchase to well over half a million pounds. [129] This figure seems to have amounted to £750,000, since the remaining mortgage was £1.25 million. [109] This was in addition to the £250,000 he paid Mallaby-Deely, so Beecham had already spent £1m and still needed to raise a further £1.25m.
To cover the outstanding debt, James White arranged a new source of financial backing, and also brokered an agreement between Beecham and the Duke of Bedford that everything else would stand in abeyance until the war was over. [129]
At the beginning of the war Beecham was on a committee to help arriving Belgian refugees in St. Helens, set up by the municipality and the Roman Catholic community. [130]
During the First World War, the 1st Infantry Division ( Lord Methuen's division) became humorously known as "Beecham's Pills" because they relieved so many outposts and besieged garrisons.
In May 1916 Beecham was sued for the price of a portrait of his daughter-in-law Utica, Thomas Beecham's now estranged first wife. [q]
Beecham was visited more frequently in London by his son Thomas, while a manageable scheme was being sought to place on a firm basis the delayed contract for the sale of the Covent Garden estate. According to Thomas Beecham, his father's ordeal had visibly aged him. [129] Worries about the gigantic sum of £1.25m he was going to have pay (perhaps £1 billion in 2021)[ citation needed] for the Covent Garden estate contributed to Sir Joseph Beecham's demise. He died at his home in Hampstead on 23 October 1916 aged 68, [134] and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Sir Thomas, who had been knighted in his own right earlier in the 1916 New Year Honours for his services to music as an orchestral conductor. [135]
The Times. "Death of Sir Joseph Beecham. Services to Opera". 24 October 1916, p. 11.
Sir Joseph Beecham died in 1916, and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his son Sir Thomas Beecham, to whom fell the task of settling the purchase of the Covent Garden Estate. Sir Joseph had made over the entire American pills business to Harry in ?1910? as compensation for his huge operatic generosity towards Thomas. [137] The Court of Chancery in 1917 ruled that Charles Rowed & Henry Beecham should carry on running the St. Helens factory.<C&G 1921>
Simply put, Joseph Beecham kept his cash profits in a deposit account with a particular bank. When he made losses (including his operatic/balletic ventures), he had simply borrowed more and more money on an overdraft from a different bank. Whether the two accounts should be treated as business benefits?? in favour of the beneficiaries of Sir Joseph Beecham's will (ie Thomas and Henry) was finally decided upon in WHEN, fool?." [138]
He may have been rich on paper, but he was cash-poor. Even if he hadn't been saddled with Covent Garden, he would still have been in debt to the tune of nearly 1 million pounds. The opera and ballet seasons between 1910 and 1914 probably cost him as much as £300,000. [139] NB he had said just before the reconciliation with Thomas that he was willing to spend £200,000 in the furtherance of opera. [59] (A brief notice in The Musical Times states £300,000).
A fair portion of Thomas Beecham's inheritance was spent in paying back this considerable and unforeseen debt. NB See Corley, DNB, who says his wealth at death was £1,479,447. [140] If my sums/estimates are correct, this was made up of the approx. £1,000,000 (realised by Covent Garden Estates by Thomas B, and his advisor (WHO? see Shepherd) of Jos. Beecham's personal debt, plus the v. approx value of the "residuary estate" bought by Thomas & Henry in 1917 for £575,000 (i fink, probably not in fact).
Beecham's wealth at death was £1,479,447.(Corley, DNB) But the estate's total indebtedness was £2,131,571, of which £39,763 was unsecured, including the debt of £1.25m for the Covent Garden mortgage. The assets of Joseph Beecham's estate (mostly property) were valued at sufficient to provide a surplus of £78,724.(C&G 1921 as above/below)
The affairs of the rest of of Sir Joseph's estate were so complex that the executors were forced to hand the whole business to the Court of Chancery in London. [139] [141]
And here darkness tends to descend on the whole affair. It did not help that Sir Thos. Beecham continued to conduct opera and to rack up personal debts (eg Beecham Opera Company), although he was required to discharge his father's debts to the Duke of Bedford. In 1921 his case seems to have finally arrived in the Court of Chancery, all mixed up with other cases including Woolley & Beecham v. Beecham (is this Thomas vs Henry somehow?) I'm fairly sure that the Court of Chancery is not a court of record - in other words there is no official record of the proceedings, and often only the judge's summing up is reported. Sometimes there were motions to have the proceedings in the judge's chambers (ie in private) as it served no public interest except nosiness, but the judge(s) often refused this.
The Court of Chancery was housed in the Bankruptcy Buildings on Carey Street on the north side of the Royal Courts of Justice, designed in the Italianate style by Sir John Taylor in 1893. [142] It was previously in its own building on Chancery Lane beside Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Public Record Office started to move in from 1907.
The two main judges to hear the suit were Sargant, J and Eve, J. Harry Eve in particular was quite outspoken and critical about Sir Thomas Beecham's occupation and lifestyle. On being informed that Sir Thomas Beecham had spent a fortune in advancing the cause of music in the realm, Eve asked one of those time-honoured judicial questions: "What good is it?" [143] When he expressed irritation that Sir Thomas was hard-pressed to get by on £20,000 per annum he was not being unreasonable, since a high court judge only got paid £3,000 in 1921 and the profession felt they were due an increase in their emolument. [144]
Search for "Joseph Beecham" at https://go-gale-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=TTDA&u=wikipedia&id=GALE%7CCS67308673&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco
Announcement of sale of 8 Arkwright Rd, by auction in May, on the orders of Mr. Justice Eve. See also #Art collection. Constable Salisbury Cathedral was sold in May 1917, Turner Walton Bridges, in December 1919. See #Art collection
In April 1917 Thos. and Harry agreed with the executors to purchase the residuary estate for £575,000, after discharging the estate's total indebtedness of £2,131,571, of which £39,763 was unsecured, including the debt of £1.25m for the Covent Garden mortgage. The assets of Joseph Beecham's estate (mostly property) were valued at sufficient to provide a surplus of £78,724. [146]
In 1918 Thomas (and perhaps Henry) formed a company, Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd., to legally separate the assets of the late Sir Joseph' Beecham's residuary estate from other affairs. It was registered with a capital of £500,000. On March 22 1921 Mr. Justice Astbury made a compulsory winding-up order for this company. [147]
A winding up order for Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd. was made in March 1921; this was after the errant Sir Thomas Beecham finally turned up in the Court of Chancery, in answer to a summons to give evidence about a Receiving Order which he seemed to have been evading since 1919... Having spent ?two years in the USA? Maybe not...
The liquidators were appointed in September 1921:
Although the winding-up wasn't finally completed until July 1928, the debts of both Sir Joseph and Sir Thomas had been written off by 1923.
Through the terms of Sir Joseph Beecham's will, Thos. Beecham became to entitled to 46% of the income from the pill-making business, which interest amounted to £90,000 a year gross, although he hadn't received anything yet by 1921.<C&G 1921> As part of discharging his father's debts he agreed to pay this income over five years to the executors of the Beecham estate, with 'just' £15,000 per annum for himself, later rising to £20,000 (and Henry £5,000 rising to £10,000.) The sale of Jos. Beecham's properties for around £1m, and Thomas's diverted income from the pill-manufacturing business would have amounted to $1.25m, plus interest on the loan from Parr's Bank.
Whatever Beecham's estimates of the expected income of Beecham's Pills, in 1917 the Chancery judges had authorized Charles Rowed and Henry Beecham to continue to manage the pill firm, [148] the net profit of which increased steadily to just under £150,000 in 1918/9 and £160-170,000 in 1920. [139]
Also update Owners, lessees and managers of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden -
NOW ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is to finalise the exact chronological order of events and, having extracted the relevant mostly financial information, delete/hide the excess verbiage.
The Covent Garden Estate Company was set up in 1918 to to do what? Manage the theatre? Of curse, the actual lease still belonged to the Grand Opera Syndicate Ltd.
Well, well - here's a summary of the whole affair from Thomas Beecham's appearance in Chancery in October 1921, from The Chemist and Druggist §§§ [r]
From 1918–1924 the freeholder of the theatre was the Covent Garden Estate Company. Its existence had been agreed to by all interested parties in the Court of Chancery case, and ordered by the Court in 1917, its sole purpose being to complete the contract begun in 1914 between Sir Joseph Beecham and the Duke of Bedford. [109] Its main business was to sell enough of Sir Joseph's estate (mainly property) to repay the mortgage of £1.25m from the Duke of Bedford for the Bloomsbury Estate. The remainder of Sir Joseph's property ("the residual estate") was sold to Thomas and Henry Beecham by the estate's executors in April 1917, subsequent upon their settling the rest of their father's indebtedness. [151]
The chairman of the Covent Garden Estate Company was the businessman Charles Frederick Boston (one of Joseph Beecham's many sons-in-law); [s] The other directors were Dr. Fred Duke-Wooley, [154] [t] and Sir Thomas & Henry Beecham. The main purpose of this company was to ensure that the debt/mortgage owed to the Duke of Bedford was paid off. [109] The company was backed by a loan for £400,000 by Parr's Bank of Warrington i fink.[ citation needed]
"A question how certain clauses in the will of Sir Joseph Beecham were to be construed came before Mr. Justice Eve. His Lordship decided that a sum of £258,420, which was standing at the time of the testator's death to the credit of a special deposit account at the St. Helen's branch of Parr's Bank, passed under the will as part of a bequest of the testator's business. (Re Sir Joseph Beecham, deceased ; Woolley v. Beecham.)" [159]
Few of them, it seems, had much time to devote to the task: Charles Boston had his own business to run; Henry Beecham was running the pill-manufacturing business in St. Helens; Woolley, dunno; and Thomas Beecham was conducting opera...
Although he was a director of the company, Sir Thomas Beecham continued with his operatic conducting career; but the 1920 and 1921 seasons were a critical failure and a financial fiasco. His Beecham Opera Company failed, the Official Receiver was called in, and Beecham himself was the subject of a Receiving Order in 1919/stayed for a year/1921. [160] [151] With plenty of free time, and no money for opera, Beecham devoted his efforts to tying up his father's estate. Then at CGE co offices every day.(Shepherd)
The 1919 and 1920 seasons of the Beecham Opera Company resulted in a financial fiasco. The liquidators were called in [160] and Beecham was likely to be personally petitioned for bankruptcy through his own indebtedness. [161] NB! Beecham was the subject of a Receiving Order [162] from 1919, but was never actually made bankrupt: it was more advantageous for the executors of the Joseph Beecham estate that he remain (at least technically) solvent.
In October 1920 James White made an offer to pay Sir Thomas Beecham's debts in full, to the tune of £100,000.
He retired from public musical life in 1921 for several years to sort out both his own and his late father's financial affairs. [164] Every day he went to the Covent Garden Estate Company's offices and helped to sell a million pounds worth of property.
A winding up order for Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd. was made in March 1921; this would have been when the errant Sir Thomas finally turned up to answer a Receiving Order in the Court of Chancery, which he seemed to have been evading since 1919, having spent ?two years in the USA? Maybe not... It appears that the rest of Sir Joseph Beecham's residuary estate was to be sold as part of repaying the mortgage to the Duke, and possibly settle Beecham's own debt.
It's not unreasonable that Mr. Justice Eve was irritated if Sir Thomas Beecham couldn't manage on £20,000 a year, since a high court judge only got paid £3,000 in 1921. [165] What further emoluments did the pay-rise offer?
The Times, Wednesday, 27 July 1921, p. 4, Issue: 42783. Chancery Division. Sir Thomas Beecham's Affairs.
The liquidators for Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate Ltd. (the holding company for the residual estate of Sir Joseph Beecham) were appointed in September 1921:
Although the winding-up of Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate Ltd. wasn't finally completed until July 1928, the debts of both Sir Joseph and Sir Thomas were written off in 1922 and 1923 respectively.
June 1922 - "COVENT GARDEN ESTATE. AUCTION IN MAY. Covent Garden Estate Company (the owners of what was originally this section of the Bedford estate, purchased by the late Sir Joseph Beecham) have decided to sell the whole of their properties (except the market), and have instructed Messrs. Hampton and Sons to offer the properties by auction at St. James's-Square, on May 16. The sale will include business premises in the streets radiating from Covent Garden Market, including Strand and Aldwych theatres. The properties are freehold. The rent-roll is between £15,000 and £20,000 a year, and the premises are largely leased to firms.,It is the intention of the company, if practicable, to close the estate, and the reserves will be fixed accordingly." [167]
The Times, Issue: 43089, Friday, 21 July 1922 - Sir Thomas Beecham's Affairs.
The mortgage from the Duke of Bedford was finally redeemed on 7 September 1922. [169]
The Times Issue: 43179, Friday, 3 November 1922, p. 4. Sir Thomas Beecham's Affairs.
In 1923 Beecham's personal liabilities, amounting to £41,558, were also paid in full. [171]
Law Notices - Chancery Division - Lord Chancellor's Court (Eve, J.) - re B's settlement (in camera) re Sir Joseph Beecham (dec.) - That's it.
Thus ended in 1923 this long-winded and drawn-out legal affair, which had begun with the death of Sir Joseph Beecham, 1st Baronet in October 1916. The liabilities (ie death duties and other debts) of Sir Joseph's estate were eventually paid off by 1922, and those of Sir Thomas in 1923, and the Chancery case was finally wound up. [139] Sir Thomas Beecham was thus able to receive his dividend of 45% of the the pill-making business for his lifetime.(see Chancery evidence ref) However, the fate of the Covent Garden estate, and the pill-making businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, had yet to be decided.
Joseph B in Lucas: pp 7, 20, 108, 136-7, 146, 158-9
After Joseph Beecham's death in 1916, his younger son Henry continued to run the St Helen's factory with Charles Rowed as the highly experienced general manager. The firm continued to make substantial profits, which partly contributed towards paying off Sir Joseph Beecham's substantial debts.
In 1918 Henry Beecham took ownership of Lympne Castle in Hythe, Kent and added the East Wing, which "proved an advantageous addition during the Second World War, as — on a clear day — it was apparently possible to see the launch of V1 rockets in Calais. That allowed the coastline guns to be readied in time to give them a sporting chance of shooting the rockets down as they passed over Hythe Bay." [173] [174]
Well, there are plenty of internet references to the well-known champion of Delius' music, "Sir Henry Beecham". Henry (although never knighted) seems to have bought a set of Holy Grail tapestries by William Morris, possibly a much later set than the originals woven from 1890 to c.1900, and had them at Lympne. [175] Indeed, "Final versions of The Summons and The Attainment were woven by Morris & Company between 1937 and 1932 for Henry Beecham of Lympne Castle, Kent. This version of The Attainment was sold at Sotheby's in March 1987, and The Summons is housed at the Munich Stadtmuseum. [176]
During the early 1920s Henry Beecham, describing himself as a 'wholesale druggist' in the 1921 Census, and still in his early 30s, rented Knebworth House (the seat of the Earl of Lytton) with his wife Ethel and his children Helen Audrey, Joseph and Henry, all under five. Their household comprised: the housekeeper; a trained nurse and a children’s nurse; and a personal maid, with her husband as motor mechanic. [177]
On June 24 1921, Henry Beecham was convicted of manslaughter at Hertford Assizes and sentenced to twelve months in prison. In January near Baldock he had lost control of his Vauxhall 30-98 4.5 litre sports car at a speed of between 40 and 65 mph, and skidded into a group of three children, killing a boy and seriously injuring his sister. The car was reported to have swerved at a bad bend in the road. [178] Another man and two women were also passengers in the car. Beecham had already been "frequently prosecuted for driving to the public danger." A month later he took his case to the Court of Criminal Appeal on the grounds that a) the judge had misdirected the jury, and that b) his cross-examination had led to Beecham making a statement which essentially put his own character in question. However, the appeal judges dismissed the case, saying that although the trial judge's summing-up was sadly defective, the jury must have certainly found Beecham guilty of manslaughter in any case. [179] [180] [181]
Losing all interest in the business after his conviction, Henry sold the entirety of the pill-manufacturing concern for a nominal £32,500 (£835,400) to Joseph Beecham's estate. [137] His father had given him the American business in c.1910, and the Lancashire business in his will in 1916. After getting out of prison in 1923 Henry went back to America on the SS Baltic. [182]
The Covent Garden Estate Company was sold to Beecham Estates and Pills Ltd. in 1924
Full-page announcement of Beecham Estates and Pills Ltd., and prospectus. Plus lots of details about the remainder of what the CG Estate Company still owned, and the financial state of Beecham's Pills. Some properties may have been subject to reversion of Rack rent, ie the full market value which wasn't being charged at the time. [183]
During the closing months of the Chancery case, the financier Philip Hill [184] was contacted for advice about the future of the Beechams's financial affairs. With Henry out of the business, and Sir Thomas dedicated to music-making, Hill's advised the formation of a limited company with the backing of some colleagues. The company of Beecham Estates and Pills, Ltd. was formed in May 1924. With Hill as a director and the backer, and effectively in control of the company, he bought the entire assets of the Covent Garden Estate Co., thus separating the Beecham family from direct control of the pill-making business which old Thomas Beecham had started three generations previously. [139] Check, fool!
The new company, Beecham Estates and Pills, Ltd., owned the entire pill-making businesses in St. Helens & New York (having been sold by the sole owner Henry Beecham after his conviction for a nominal £32,500 (£835,400) to Joseph Beecham's estate. ?Which may have been Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd. or less likely? the Covent Garden Estate Company) [137], and (after various properties had been sold off) the remaining Covent Garden estate. This included the Market & the Opera House, Tavistock Hotel, Bedford Chambers and numerous small shops and businesses in Floral Street, James Street, & Russell Street. [116] For more about Hill, see also Corley 1994, pp. 23–24.
Having to deal with both the Covent Garden estate and the pill-making business on either side of the Atlantic, Hill became a busy man and, to safeguard his financial interests, founded the Philip Hill Investment Trust, the forerunner of Hill Samuel. [139]
This is where Joseph Beecham's assets and debts were both adjudged to be 'business assets', whatever their monetary worth, of Sir Joseph Beecham's estate and its legatees.
The Times, Saturday, 16 April 1932: Chancery Division - Thomas Beecham was again the subject of a Receiving Order in December 1930 - his sons sued the trustees of the £500,000 trust set up in Sir Joseph Beecham's will. Neither they nor Lady Utica Beecham were getting any income, and thought they should. The trustees were Sir Harold John de Courcy, (1877-1976), Alderman of the City of London; Charles F, P. McNeill; [186] and Mr. John Robinson Stevens. [187]
After considerable development and expansion of the pill-making business, including a trained chemist WHO, I wonder?, Hill was able by 1928 to hive off the Beecham estates activities into a new company, the Covent Garden Properties Company Ltd. The patent medicine side regained its autonomy as Beechams Pills Ltd., with himself as chairman. [188] Bla bla hurrah.
Oct. 8, 1920 The Times - Sir T. Beecham's Affairs - Offer made by Mr. James White White offered to pay Sir Thomas Beecham's debts in full, with the prospective sale of some properties from the Beecham estate netting Sir Thomas the sum of £100,000.
White bought up shares in cotton mills and weaving firms, generally not to the advantage of the existing owners or shareholders. He also attempted to manipulate the price of shares of British Controlled Oilfields, a Canadian firm with interests in Venezuelan reserves. This didn't end well.
History of the Venezuelan oil industry
White had contracted to buy the site of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley and its fixtures and fittings, but it fell through and he ended his life in massive debt of around a million pounds.
The Times , Thursday, 13 October 1927, Issue: 44711 - Beecham Trust Liquidation.
Brief notes - need expanding, some to be placed in relevant sections, and proper reffing...
Smoking room at top of house - cap of Turkish design, long flowing tassel, richly coloured jacket decorated with gold-braided stripes and silver buttons(beecham p. 9) Collection of music-boxes (beecham p. 12) Enjoyed building - added a small concert hall to the Huyton house (beecham p. 13) Jos. Beecham ruled his business, giving personal attention to every side of it (beecham p 14) Enjoyed playing the organ, with the pedals and manuals quite out of synchrony - And these, it may be, were his happiest moments.(beecham p. 15) When Thomas was aged 10 and 11, his mother's "intermittent nervous malady obliged her to go southward to some place on the sea like Eastbourne or Bournemouth where she could be looked after until well again." (beecham p. 18-19) From c1888-91 Jos. made more trips to America, bring back central heating and equipping the factory/house with electric light, perhaps 1st in the country? (beecham p. 18) He had seen Lohengrin perhaps a hundred times in nearly every opera house of the world. (Beecham p. 158) By 1897 Josephine had become and almost chronic invalid, and he spent much of his abroad during the summers.(beecham p. 30) Outside of business he was a "man of pathetic simplicity and uncertain judgment." In family matters he always took advice from his lawyer or clergyman whose church he attended, his most intimate friend."(Beecham p. 31) Trip to US with Thomas in summer 1893, stayed at Astor House. + Chicago (beecham p. 27-8) 1899 - Josephine put away, complete estrangement.(beecham p. 35) Reconciliation with Thomas led to more plans to do opera (beecham p. 86) Name prominently associated with Sir Thomas's first Russian Opera season, was just as enthusiastic about the second season (beecham pp 125) Deep stuff about himself (beecham 157)
Beecham married Josephine Burnett (d. 3 Nov 1934) in 1873, against his parents' wishes (beecham 157). He had her committed to a sanatorium or insane asylum in Nottingham in 1899. She received a legal separation/divorce in 1901, freeing her from her enforced confinement.
They had eight children: [157] [190]
"Sir Joseph Beecham, Mayor of St. Helens, gave a garden-party at his residence, Ewanville, Huyton, on July 11, when there were about 1,500 guests, who had a most delightful afternoon's entertainment in spite of the somewhat dull weather. The company had also the opportunity of inspecting the fine pictures which adorn the walls of Ewanville, the collection being the companion to Sir Joseph's gallery in Hampstead, where there is one of the finest private collections in England." [195]
"It is this period - roughly bridging the period between the death of Reynolds and the advent of Pre-Raphaelitism - which is best exemplified in Sir Jos. B's collection at Hampstead."
Includes portrait of Sir Jos. himself by Sir Luke Fildes, RA - WHERE IS IT NOW?
The pictures were later sold by Sir Thomas to defray Beecham's enormous death duties, and the house was bought by the railway union ASLEF in 1921. [198] [199]
Auctions of Beecham's paintings:
Christie's London Sales 1865-1923
PAINTING SOLD,FOR £21,525 - SALISBURY CATHEDRAL, BY CONSTABLE - The Times, 17 May 1952, p. 6. "Another, 33½in. by 43½in., also done by the artist in 1826, which brought 6,200 guineas in the Sir Joseph Beecham sale in May, 1917 is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York." [200]
The Times Feb. 12, 1917, p. 3 https://go-gale-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=TTDA&u=wikipedia&id=GALE%7CCS51841100&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco
The Times, Saturday, Dec. 6, 1919 p. 16 - Turner Picture For Melbourne. TURNER PICTURE FOR,MELBOURNE. PURCHASE OF "WALTON BRIDGES". Turner's famous picture, "Walton Bridges," is going to Australia. The transfer has been arranged by Mr. Frank Rinder, Art Adviser in England to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, which already contains three examples of the master's work.,The picture measures 35 by 48 inches, and was painted about 1810 for the Earl of Essex, in whose family it remained until 1893, when it realized 4,100 guineas at Christie's. For a time, it was in the collection of the late Mr. Janes Orrock, and at his sale in 1904 it fetched 7,000 guineas. The late Sir Joseph Beecham purchased the picture at a higher sum-about £10,000. For some unaccountable reason at the Beecham sale at Christie's in 1917 the price dropped to 3,500 guineas, at which it was purchased by Mr. W. Lawson Seacode, from whom it has now been acquired by the Melbourne authorities. Australia is to be congratulated on the acquisition of what is probably the most beautiful Turner which has been in the market for a long time." [202]
Is there a statue of him, a charity, a bequest, even a road or block of flats named after him?
Christopher Furness died in 1912, leaving all his estate to Marmaduke but the shares remained in trust. Stephen W. Furness, Marmaduke's cousin (created Baronet in 1913), took over running the firm. But he died in 1914 after an accidental fall in Broadstairs of some 50-60 feet while having a cigarette out the window. [74] Marmaduke became chairman [76] During the war while Frederick Lewis was in London on war work, Furness acquired a shipbuilding firm without telling the Board, which led to considerable losses in the post-war slump. [77]
In 1926 Marmaduke married Thelma, the daughter of Harry Hays Morgan, US Consul-General at Buenos Aires: she was the mistress of the future Edward VIII, but was displaced by Wallis Simpson. Thelma's identical twin sister Gloria married Reginald Vanderbilt, becoming Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, mother of Gloria Vanderbilt. [78]
Success came from persuading people who were not ill to take the preparation. Stupendous and intensive advertising methods built sales to the highest of any proprietary preparation, and made them known in almost every country.
Joseph Beecham
, Jos. Beecham
and J. Beecham
.
Delphin - Beecham. — At Hampstead Parish Church, London, N.W., on June 8, Leonce Delphin, only son of Professor Emile Delphin, Geneva, to Jessie, daughter of Alderman J. Beecham, St. Helens and Hampstead.See also Advertisement for 'Otto', p. 24
...this development was largely a product of the 1880s, when Liberals, especially in London, had pointed to the way in which great landowners in the metropolis, like the Dukes of Bedford and Westminster, had seen the value of their urban properties soar, while they avoided contributing to the growing burden of local rates, because local taxation was paid by the occupiers of land and buildings, rather than the ultimate landowner.
2nd East Lancashire Field Ambulance: Western Command, Manchester Companies, Royal Army Medical Corps (Volunteers)[...]Captain Fred D. Woolley to be Major (dated April 1st, 1908)"..."2nd East Lancashire Field Ambulance: The undermentioned officers, from the Western Command, Manchester Companies, Royal Army Medical Corps (Volunteers), are appointed to the unit, with rank and precedence as in the Volunteer Force (dated April lst, 1908): Captain Fred Duke Woolley.
Henry Beecham
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Well, having looked it again, it really doesn't seem too bad. There don't seem to be many loose ends, unsolved mysteries etc. Maybe try to tidy up all the untidy refs, and finally sort out the order of the attempted purchase of the CG estate, with perhaps a few more financial details. That's almost it.
Sir Joseph Beecham, 1st Baronet (8 June 1848 – 23 October 1916), was a British businessman, patron of opera, and fine art collector. His father, Thomas Beecham founded a laxative business, Beecham's Pills, and in 1866 aged around 18, Beecham joined his father's firm and gradually assumed responsibility for its management, greatly improving its profitability over some forty years. With intensive and original advertising he made the firm's products known all over the world. [2] His younger son Henry Beecham joined the firm in 1906.
From around 1910 he acquired the leases of various London theatres to further the career of his son Thomas Beecham in conducting opera and ballet; for example, he underwrote perfomances of the Ballets Russes in 1911. This patronage cost hundreds of thousands of pounds (many millions in the 21st century), which he attempted to recoup in various business ventures. One of these was to act as the middle man for the purchase of the Covent Garden Estate, London, (including the Royal Opera House) for £2 million from the 11th Duke of Bedford in June 1914.
However, severe monetary controls introduced by the British government a month later on the outbreak of World War I meant that the capital transfer to complete the sale couldn't legally be made, and the deal fell through. Worries about having to meet the enormous debt to the Duke of Bedford (around £1.25m when he died) contributed to his death aged 68 in 1916 before the purchase could be completed.
Joseph Beecham's financial affairs were so complex that after his death his executors applied to the Court of Chancery for relief. His sons, Thomas and Henry, were ordered by the court in 1917 to form a private company to complete the purchase of the Covent Garden estate, which was only finalised in 1922. Henry Beecham was convicted of manslaughter in early in 1921, having killed a young boy in a road traffic incident. He left the business and the country after serving a year in prison. In addition, Thomas Beecham was heavily in debt on his own account in connection with his opera productions, and was the subject of a Receiving Order (the equivalent today of being declared bankrupt) from 1919; his own personal debts were only discharged in 1923.
Sir Thomas Beecham only wanted to continue making music ("I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, after my fashion"), and he sold the entire business and estate to a new company with financial backing from Phillip Hill, one of the names in Hill Samuel. From 1924 Hill oversaw the transition of the original single-product Beecham's Pills company into a modern international pharmaceutical business, where Beecham chemists discovered penicillin in 1959.
He was the eldest son of Jane Evans and Thomas Beecham, a former shepherd who founded a manufacturing company to make Beecham's pills. [3] He was born in St. Helens, Liverpool, in a house adjacent to his father's first factory, which made the company's main product.
In 1866, aged around 18, Beecham joined his father's business and infused into it a highly enterprising spirit. In 1876 he was mentioned in the local directories as 'assistant chemist' at the works. [4]
In 1886 work began on a new main factory and office buildings in Westfield Street, St. Helens at an initial cost of £30,000. [5] The works were opened towards the end of 1887. [4] The St. Helens premises was one of the first factories in the UK to be powered and lit by electricity. [6] [3] Beecham was the chairman of the St. Helens Electricity Committee, which provided a cheaper electricity supply than other similar urban areas. [6]
Construction of the new factory involved knocking down the house where Beecham was born, and the same year he purchased the 'Ewanville' mansion and estate in Blacklow Brow, Huyton. This was one of the first houses in Lancashire to be lit by electricity and also had central heating installed. [7] It was later replaced by modern housing. [8]
Beecham was a keen cyclist, and the works Secretary, the Anglo-American Charles Rowed was a cycling companion. Rowed became works manager in around 1887. [4] [a]
Advertising was a primary way of increasing sales: the budget was £22,000 in 1884, growing to £95,000 in 1889. The workforce increased from 19 to 88 during the same period. [4] In 1890 the total daily output was 9,000,000 pills per day. [4]
He visited the United States in 1887 after that country and Britain became signatories to the 1883 Paris Convention which provided protection for trade marks, [11] followed by setting up factories and agencies in several other countries. [5] That year he registered the firm's trademark in the US, and witnessed a number of prosecutions for trademark infringement. He and his father Thomas Sr. regularly visited the country thereafter. [12] In 1888 Beecham appointed B. F. Allen and Co. of 365-367 Canal Street, Manhattan, as sole agent for Beecham's Pills in the US. Allen was already agent for Pears Soap. [13] [14] The same year, 1888, Beecham's sent out 7,000 letters promoting its pills in the US and Canada, and distributed photographs of US presidential candidates Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland with an advertisement for the pills on the back. [15] [16] The presidential nominees for the National Equal Rights Party were Mrs. Belva Ann Lockwood of Washington DC, and Albert H. Love of Pennsylvania. Love declined the honour, and Charles Stuart Welles was substituted as nominee. [17] Joseph Beecham's son Thomas would later marry Utica, Welles's daughter.
Joseph Beecham was given a half share in the business in 1889, and took over completely from his father in 1895. [4] [18] In 1890 Beecham made an arrangement with B. F. Allen to manufacture the pills in Brooklyn in order to circumvent a US tariff equivalent to 50% of the sale price of the pills. [11] [19] The Americans preferred sugar-coated pills.
On other transatlantic trips he took his eldest son Thomas on the SS Campania in 1893, [20] his oldest daughter Edith in 1907 on the RMS Lusitania, and his other son Henry in 1913 on the RMS Mauretania. [21] [b] Beecham may have made as many as 30 transatlantic return trips (60 crossings) in total. [19]
The firm used a variety of ingenious and sometimes humorous advertising and marketing techniques. [22] These ranged from a single line at the foot of a news column in an education journal in the USA ("Liver complaints cured by Beecham's Pills"), [23] to Beecham's Help to Scholars, packed full of useful information for schoolchildren; [24] and the 120 titles of Beecham's Photo-Folios, photographic views of Great Britain, price one penny (less than 0.5p); [25] Further afield, the French writer André Chevrillon arriving in Darjeeling in the Himalayas in November 1890 was greeted on the road from the station with advertising posters proclaiming Pears soap, Colman's mustard and Beecham's pills. [26] [27] The advertising posters for Beecham’s Pills and Colman’s Mustard were designed by John Hassall. [28] Beecham was later a director of A. and F. Pears Ltd., [29] joining the board in 1909. [19]
"Like his father, Joseph was a lusty man and felt that neither his wife nor his children understood him. He began to seek his private pleasures elsewhere." [30] In February 1899 Joseph had his wife certified as being of unsound mind (they had been married in 1873), and in March he had her detained against her will in a lunatic asylum (mental hospital) in Nottingham. [31] [c] Thomas Beecham briefly refers to his his mother's condition in his autobiography as "...a nervous malady, which first manifested itself when I was between ten and eleven, and which obliged her as time went on to relinquish more and more the care of her house and go southward to some place like Eastbourne or Bournemouth where she could be looked after until well again." [33] Two of the Beecham children, Emily and Thomas, were very much against this development when they learned about it, and made their antagonism towards their father very plain.
Beecham's oldest daughter Emily went to live at the London residence of Dr. Charles Stuart Welles, the former superintendent of the NY Polyclinic Hospital, and former US presidential nominee for the National Equal Rights Party. Beecham had been treated by Welles during a trip to the US. [34] In 1900 Welles, who had moved to London some years earlier, was employed as First Secretary of the American Embassy. [35] Welles' wife was Ella Celeste née Miles, whose brother-in-law (by her sister's marriage) was Sir Francis Cook. [d] It was Cook who strongly supported Emily and Thomas, and his solicitors recommended a legal separation. [39] Cook had also discovered that Joseph Beecham had been keeping a mistress in a house in Harlesden, N. London, a 'Mrs. Bennett' whose real name was Helen McKey Taylor. She had been a governess in St Helens, had been 'on terms of intimacy' with Beecham for the past twelve years, and was to remain his friend and confidante for the rest of his life. [31] He left her nothing in his will. [40]
Joseph Beecham was a Justice of the Peace for Lancashire; and Mayor of St. Helens between 1889 and 1899. To mark his re-inauguration in December 1899, he organised and paid for a concert with Hans Richter conducting the Hallé Orchestra. Richter cancelled at the last moment, and Beecham's son Thomas conducted instead. [41] [42] Nevertheless, when Joseph Beecham realised that Thomas was not going to back down in his support of Josephine he threw his son out of the house, and they became estranged for nine years. [32] [43] [44]
In 1901 Thomas and his oldest sister Emily helped to secure their mother's release and forced Joseph to pay her an annual alimony of £4,500. [45] (or £2,500 according to Lucas p. 19) Thomas Beecham also went to live at the Welles' house in London, where he proposed to their daughter Utica. Joseph disinherited Emily completely. Beecham fils was to exhibit the same lack of uxorious attachment in later life.
Henry Beecham, his younger son, joined Beecham's Pills as manager in 1906 - his performance has been described as "adequate but lack-lustre". [46] He was rather overshadowed by Henry Rowed, who had risen since c1887 to be the works' general director.
In 1908 alone Joseph Beecham's profit from the business was £98,200 (£5.9 million in 2008). He had inherited £40,000 (£2.4 million in 2008) from his father Thomas who died in 1907, [47] who left a total of £86,680 in his will. [48]
Gradually losing interest in the pill-making business (he had joined the firm in 1866, over 40 years before), Joseph Beecham withdrew a large amount of money from his firm, bought 9 Arkwright Road, Hampstead, London in 1909 [46] [49] [50]and filled it with quality artworks by Constable, Turner, Reynolds, Gainsborough, [51] [52] Cox and DeWint, among others. [53] The house in Hampstead, named Hill Brow (or West Brow), cost £40,000. There was a small concert hall equipped with a splendid organ. [30]
The estrangement with his son Thomas came to an end in 1909, and he began to support his son's burgeoning musical career.
The reconciliation between the Beechams took place after a performance of Dame Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers at His Majesty's Theatre in 1909. Joseph Beecham had taken to attending his son's concerts incognito, slipping out before the end. [54] According to Smyth, at a rehearsal for The Wreckers at His Majesty's Theatre, "Beecham whispered to me, "Look... the left hand of the two men hiding behind the pillars at the back of the stalls is my father!" [55] [56] Thomas Beecham conducted the first complete English performance of The Wreckers on 22 June 1909. [57] Smyth, with her extensive list of high society contacts including Empress Eugénie and even Buckingham Palace, suggested that the King should attend a gala performance of The Wreckers. Joseph duly went along to His Majesty's Theatre, and was presented to King Edward at the end. He was hugely impressed and soon met with Thomas in a lawyer's office where any animosity remaining after some ten years' estrangement melted away. [58] He and Thomas spent the rest of the day together, playing organ and piano duets together. [59]
The day before the gala performance, Joseph Beecham had met Thomas J. Barrett of Pears Soap at Christie's auction rooms, and told Barrett that he was willing to devote £200,000 to furthering the cause of national opera. [61] He also purchased a landscape by George Vincent for 1060 gns. He sent a pony and trap as a present to Thomas's house at Mursley Hall, Buckinghamshire. [62]
He leased various theatres in London to further Thomas's conducting career, including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Drury Lane theatre and the smaller Aldwych Theatre. These were all part of the Covent Garden estate, whose ultimate landowner was the Duke of Bedford until it was finally sold in 1918 to a Beecham-controlled private company. [e]
Beecham was again mayor of St. Helens from 1910 to 1912. [64] In 1911 he considerably extended the New York factory, [65] installing the latest technically advanced machinery for making pills. This was a great advance over the St Helens factory, where child labour (legal at the time) [f] was cheap and plentiful. The US Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 had outlawed manufacturers from making false claims for their products, but despite this setback, Beecham's profits more than doubled by 1913. [13]
Joseph Beecham was knighted in late 1911, with effect from 1 January 1912 [66] [67], "presumably by purchase", [68] [g] and was a member of the Walpole Society in 1912–1913. [69] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1913. [70]
Unfortunately, although his son Thomas Beecham achieved great artistic and critical acclaim as a conductor, he was a helpless spendthrift with little head for money management: a considerable portion of Joseph Beecham's fortune disappeared in a few a short years. [71] In an attempt to improve his fading finances, he became associated with some shady and unscrupulous financiers. [71] One of these was James White, a notorious high-class swindler and gambler. Beecham went into partnership with White in the Ancona Motor Co., importing American motor cars including Oakland, Oldsmobile, GMC, Kelly Springfield and Wallis agricultural tractors. [72] [73]
In the autumn of 1913, along with Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness, [h] Beecham was involved in an attempt to set up an Anglo-Bulgarian banking scheme. [79] [i] Its purpose was to provide general banking services, to act as agents in Bulgaria for British companies and to expand commercial interests with Bulgaria. [82] [j] The prospective deal was promoted by Leonce Delphin, [k] one of Beecham's sons-in-law, and Otto Fulton. [79] [l]
The whole unlikely enterprise came to naught because of Foreign Office suspicions about Otto Fulton.
Moral support of the unofficial type was often given to British commercial interests. However, negative British perceptions of stereotypes "affected decisions so that schemes by Jewish businessmen or foreign-owned banks or companies were unlikely to receive either concrete or moral support from British officials." [95]
Not even unofficial 'moral support' from the FO was likely to be forthcoming. Inquiries by the British Consul in Belgrade in September 1912 revealed that Fulton had been overheard speaking fluent Austrian German, seemed to be Hebraic and spoke English with a "slight foreign accent." A cable from the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey stated that he was "Twice bankrupt. No good." [96] [97]
Opposition to the vague and fraudulent claims made by the makers of patent medicines started to grow in the 20th century. In the United States concern about unsanitary methods of food preparation, especially the meat packing industry, led to the US Congress passing the Pure Food and Drugs Act in 1906. This also removed the protection which proprietary medicines had benefited from since the US and Britain had signed the 1887 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. This event had been the impetus for Beecham to begin the US operation in the first place. [11]
Add stuff about Resale price maintenance!
P.A.T.A. p. 533, 537-8, 543
A
Parliamentary Select Committee on Proprietary Remedies was set up: Beecham, who had been running the pill-making business since 1895 with Charles Rowed as his general manager, gave evidence to the Committee on January 13, 1913. [See also Norman supra note 19, questions 8964-9514.] He was fairly roughly handled by the committee, who viewed him as a fraudulent rogue.
[68]
According to Beecham's evidence to the Committee, by 1913 the firm was making 370 million pills a year weighing 50 tons, with an annual turnover of £360,000 [98] and an annual advertising budget of $100,000. [99] The workforce of around 100 consisted mostly of low-paid boys; [f] Business was done on a cash-only basis, which kept office staff to a minimum, and since the raw materials for the pills ( aloes, powdered ginger and chemists' soap) [100] [101] only cost £34,000, the net profits in 1913 amounted to £110,000. [6] [m]
The general conclusions of the Select Committee were:
For Sinclair Lewis the Beechams and their enterprises "embodied the conflation of capital gained through advertising, the enthusiasms of staid bourgeois society in London, and regressive culture. As such, Thomas Beecham no doubt represented to the vorticists the darkest possibilities of the amalgamation of advertising and art." Make sfn
The Vorticist publication Blast took aim at public figures like Thomas Beecham, " '" The "Opera" in this parenthesis was the Grand Season of Russian Opera and English Opera (and the Russian Ballet) brought to London's Drury Lane Theatre in 1914 by Sir Joseph Beecham, the founder of Beecham's Pills. Here the vorticists condemn the way in which English commercial interests subvert rather than support English art interests; to them, the tremendous attention of the public and press to the arrival of the Russian Opera and the Russian Ballet must have reeked of the same cultural imperialism that the Italian futurists had threatened."
Although Beecham was reportedly worth about $130,000,000 (£26m),- making him the third richest man in England, [104] he needed to recoup the massive losses which his son Thomas had incurred while staging opera and ballet from 1910 - eg the 1912 Russian Ballet season, which Joseph Beecham had heavily backed and promoted. Of the 34 operas that Thomas Beecham staged at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1910, only four had made money. [105]
Whatever the papers may have printed, Beecham never 'owned' the Aldwych Theatre, with Sir Thomas as the lessee. [106] See also a review of the 'farcical comedy', "Looking For Trouble": The Times, Tuesday, 14 May 1912. He may well have been the leaseholder of the building: which is not the same as owning the freehold, which always belonged to the Duke of Bedford, even after the sale of the Covent Garden Estate in 1918. See far below.
Beecham was made a baronet, of Ewanville in the Parish of Huyton in the County Palatine of Lancaster, in July 1914. [107] This was ostensibly for his services to the arts, but he paid a total of £10,000 (£165,000 in 2008) to the following individuals: £4,000 to Lady Cunard; £5,500 to Edward Horner, brother of H. H. Asquith's daughter-in-law Katherine Asquith; and £500 to Lady Diana Manners who quietly told her future husband Duff Cooper, who recorded it in his diary. [108]
On the same day as the announcement of his baronetcy, Beecham let it be known that he had also acquired the Covent Garden Estate from the Duke of Bedford for £2,000,000. He wasn't intending to permanently own or manage the estate himself, but was acting as a middle man for a property syndicate headed by Alexander Ormrod, a stockbroker of the firm of Ormrod & Co., Manchester. Unfortunately the First World War broke out just a week later, and the strict financial controls implemented by the British Government meant that the transaction couldn't be completed, leaving Beecham in debt to the Duke of Bedford to the tune of £2m, which hastened his death two years later. The deal and its ramifications are explained in the following sections.
The Dukes of Bedford had owned the Covent Garden estate since the execution and attainder of the 1st Duke of Somerset in 1549 during the reign of Henry VIII.
Agriculture had suffered from the general depression since the Panic of 1873, the longest and most severe until the "Great Depression" triggered by the 1923 Wall Street Crash. The Duke of Bedford was a huge agricultural landowner: Thorney estate, Woburn, Bedfordshire, Bucks, etc.- but low land prices meant there were no buyers, and landowners thus couldn't easily diversify into company securities. Although the London estates were profitable enough, the main source of his income was from his vast agricultural holdings which were becoming considerably less profitable. [109]
The following sentence is vaguely correct, but the actual timeline and reasons need sorting out from Shepherd, with lots of info about Bedford and his sell-off of most of his estates. [109]
The 11th Duke of Bedford seems to have decided to sell the Bloomsbury Estate in 1910, when Herbert Asquith's Liberal government raised land duties on urban estates. [110] This was part of Lloyd George's Land Campaign initiative, to tax the freeholders rather than the lessees. [111] [112] According to Roland Quinault,
Prothero (later Lord Ernle) also said:: "Public opinion was setting strongly against the accumulation of large landed properties in the hands of individuals. The ownership of land had lost its political importance; financial legislation had already made its tenure more unprofitable; further legislation in similar directions was threatened." [109]
The Covent Garden Estate in 1914 consisted of around 18 acres (7.3 ha) in the City of Westminster, including the well-known fruit and vegetable market itself; several theatres, including the Royal Opera House and its associated storage and rehearsal rooms, [109] the Aldwych Theatre, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the Strand Theatre; the National Sporting Club, the Waldorf Hotel and numerous restaurants and pubs; [114] Bedford Chambers; the Tavistock Hotel; and Hummum's Hotel in the Little Piazza on Russell St.; [115] numerous small shops and businesses in Floral Street, James Street & Russell Street near the market; [116] Bow Street police station and police court; and the Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church in Maiden Lane. [110]
According to Thomas Beecham, it was Joseph Beecham's shady partner "Jimmy" White who had persuaded him to buy Covent Garden in the first place; [n] the intention was to float a public company, in co-operation with a well-known firm of brokers based in northern England, to deal with the estate as a commercial proposition. Beecham Sr. was to receive back the considerable sum he had paid as deposit money, plus a monetary bonus for financing the deal in the first place. [117]
Joseph Beecham signed the contract to buy the Covent Garden Estate from the Duke of Bedford on 6 July 1914, and on 12 July he sold on the estate to Alexander Ormrod as agreed for a profit of £50,000. But before the contract could be completed World War I broke out, and the government suspended major capital transfers. Ormrod was legally prevented from transferring his syndicate's capital to Beecham, who was legally obliged to pay £2 million to the Duke of Bedford.
Although the Duke of Bedford was the owner of the estate, the negations were carried out by his agent since 1898, the "outstandingly able" Rowland Prothero. [109]
In late 1913 the property magnate Harry Mallaby-Deeley, MP for Harrow, made an offer to the financier Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, to purchase for £2 million (about £123 million in 2019) the freehold of the Covent Garden Estate. On 24 November 1913 Mallaby-Deely signed an outline agreement (or option) with the Duke to purchase the estate, with 2/3 of the finance being provided by the Duke at 4.5% per annum for up to 12 years. [109] By the following summer Mallaby-Deely had received several offers on his option, including one from Beecham which had been rejected. Beecham then made a more substantial offer, acting with James White, and backed by a Manchester stockbroker, Alexander Lawson Ormrod (a sort of sleeping partner). On completion with the Duke, Beecham was going to sell the estate straight on to Ormrod, for a further profit for Beecham of £50,000. Ormrod and his backers were to float a public company to manage the estate commercially. [109] [108]
Thus in June 1914 Beecham offered Mallaby-Deeley £250,000 (c. £15m in 2015) to purchase the option to buy the estate. [109] [118]
The association of both White and Ormrod with Beecham was made clear at the time of the deal with Mallaby-Deely. [118] The Times printed a very long article about the sale of the estate, listing all the 26 streets with properties included in the sale, and plenty of information about the Duke and Mallaby-Deeley. [119]
Beecham's offer was accepted by Mallaby-Deely in June 1914. [108] and Beecham paid him £250,000 for the option to purchase. On 6 July Beecham then signed an agreement with the Duke of Bedford to purchase the whole estate, with a deposit of £200,000, 10% of the purchase price. "Under the terms of his agreement of 6 July 1914 with the Duke of Bedford, Sir Joseph Beecham contracted to buy the estate and market for £2,000,000. He paid a deposit of £200,000 and covenanted to pay the balance on 11 November." [109] [o]
Having irrevocably committed himself to purchase the estate from the Duke on 6 July, Beecham then sold the entire Covent Garden estate to his partner Ormrod on 12 July 1914 [123] for a profit of £50,000.
When World War 1 broke out within a month, the Treasury suspended the Gold Standard, issuing paper Treasury Banknotes instead, and stopped any further transfers of capital unconnected with the war. [124] "...and new official restrictions on the use of capital prevented the completion of the contract." [117] "Capital transfers were quickly restricted, however, and Ormrod was unable to complete his purchase, while Joseph could not withdraw from his [own]". [125]
Ormrod thus found himself legally forbidden to honour the deal to purchase the estate from Beecham, [126] who was landed with not only an ageing opera house (temporarily full of furniture from the hotels and workplaces which the government had requisitioned as offices); [127] [128] but also an entire prime city-centre property estate which he had no particular desire to own.
After the deal with Ormrod fell through, Beecham made a new deal with the vendor (ie Duke of Bedford) which involved Beecham making another large cash payment, bringing the total amount he had advanced to the Duke towards the purchase to well over half a million pounds. [129] This figure seems to have amounted to £750,000, since the remaining mortgage was £1.25 million. [109] This was in addition to the £250,000 he paid Mallaby-Deely, so Beecham had already spent £1m and still needed to raise a further £1.25m.
To cover the outstanding debt, James White arranged a new source of financial backing, and also brokered an agreement between Beecham and the Duke of Bedford that everything else would stand in abeyance until the war was over. [129]
At the beginning of the war Beecham was on a committee to help arriving Belgian refugees in St. Helens, set up by the municipality and the Roman Catholic community. [130]
During the First World War, the 1st Infantry Division ( Lord Methuen's division) became humorously known as "Beecham's Pills" because they relieved so many outposts and besieged garrisons.
In May 1916 Beecham was sued for the price of a portrait of his daughter-in-law Utica, Thomas Beecham's now estranged first wife. [q]
Beecham was visited more frequently in London by his son Thomas, while a manageable scheme was being sought to place on a firm basis the delayed contract for the sale of the Covent Garden estate. According to Thomas Beecham, his father's ordeal had visibly aged him. [129] Worries about the gigantic sum of £1.25m he was going to have pay (perhaps £1 billion in 2021)[ citation needed] for the Covent Garden estate contributed to Sir Joseph Beecham's demise. He died at his home in Hampstead on 23 October 1916 aged 68, [134] and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Sir Thomas, who had been knighted in his own right earlier in the 1916 New Year Honours for his services to music as an orchestral conductor. [135]
The Times. "Death of Sir Joseph Beecham. Services to Opera". 24 October 1916, p. 11.
Sir Joseph Beecham died in 1916, and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his son Sir Thomas Beecham, to whom fell the task of settling the purchase of the Covent Garden Estate. Sir Joseph had made over the entire American pills business to Harry in ?1910? as compensation for his huge operatic generosity towards Thomas. [137] The Court of Chancery in 1917 ruled that Charles Rowed & Henry Beecham should carry on running the St. Helens factory.<C&G 1921>
Simply put, Joseph Beecham kept his cash profits in a deposit account with a particular bank. When he made losses (including his operatic/balletic ventures), he had simply borrowed more and more money on an overdraft from a different bank. Whether the two accounts should be treated as business benefits?? in favour of the beneficiaries of Sir Joseph Beecham's will (ie Thomas and Henry) was finally decided upon in WHEN, fool?." [138]
He may have been rich on paper, but he was cash-poor. Even if he hadn't been saddled with Covent Garden, he would still have been in debt to the tune of nearly 1 million pounds. The opera and ballet seasons between 1910 and 1914 probably cost him as much as £300,000. [139] NB he had said just before the reconciliation with Thomas that he was willing to spend £200,000 in the furtherance of opera. [59] (A brief notice in The Musical Times states £300,000).
A fair portion of Thomas Beecham's inheritance was spent in paying back this considerable and unforeseen debt. NB See Corley, DNB, who says his wealth at death was £1,479,447. [140] If my sums/estimates are correct, this was made up of the approx. £1,000,000 (realised by Covent Garden Estates by Thomas B, and his advisor (WHO? see Shepherd) of Jos. Beecham's personal debt, plus the v. approx value of the "residuary estate" bought by Thomas & Henry in 1917 for £575,000 (i fink, probably not in fact).
Beecham's wealth at death was £1,479,447.(Corley, DNB) But the estate's total indebtedness was £2,131,571, of which £39,763 was unsecured, including the debt of £1.25m for the Covent Garden mortgage. The assets of Joseph Beecham's estate (mostly property) were valued at sufficient to provide a surplus of £78,724.(C&G 1921 as above/below)
The affairs of the rest of of Sir Joseph's estate were so complex that the executors were forced to hand the whole business to the Court of Chancery in London. [139] [141]
And here darkness tends to descend on the whole affair. It did not help that Sir Thos. Beecham continued to conduct opera and to rack up personal debts (eg Beecham Opera Company), although he was required to discharge his father's debts to the Duke of Bedford. In 1921 his case seems to have finally arrived in the Court of Chancery, all mixed up with other cases including Woolley & Beecham v. Beecham (is this Thomas vs Henry somehow?) I'm fairly sure that the Court of Chancery is not a court of record - in other words there is no official record of the proceedings, and often only the judge's summing up is reported. Sometimes there were motions to have the proceedings in the judge's chambers (ie in private) as it served no public interest except nosiness, but the judge(s) often refused this.
The Court of Chancery was housed in the Bankruptcy Buildings on Carey Street on the north side of the Royal Courts of Justice, designed in the Italianate style by Sir John Taylor in 1893. [142] It was previously in its own building on Chancery Lane beside Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Public Record Office started to move in from 1907.
The two main judges to hear the suit were Sargant, J and Eve, J. Harry Eve in particular was quite outspoken and critical about Sir Thomas Beecham's occupation and lifestyle. On being informed that Sir Thomas Beecham had spent a fortune in advancing the cause of music in the realm, Eve asked one of those time-honoured judicial questions: "What good is it?" [143] When he expressed irritation that Sir Thomas was hard-pressed to get by on £20,000 per annum he was not being unreasonable, since a high court judge only got paid £3,000 in 1921 and the profession felt they were due an increase in their emolument. [144]
Search for "Joseph Beecham" at https://go-gale-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=TTDA&u=wikipedia&id=GALE%7CCS67308673&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco
Announcement of sale of 8 Arkwright Rd, by auction in May, on the orders of Mr. Justice Eve. See also #Art collection. Constable Salisbury Cathedral was sold in May 1917, Turner Walton Bridges, in December 1919. See #Art collection
In April 1917 Thos. and Harry agreed with the executors to purchase the residuary estate for £575,000, after discharging the estate's total indebtedness of £2,131,571, of which £39,763 was unsecured, including the debt of £1.25m for the Covent Garden mortgage. The assets of Joseph Beecham's estate (mostly property) were valued at sufficient to provide a surplus of £78,724. [146]
In 1918 Thomas (and perhaps Henry) formed a company, Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd., to legally separate the assets of the late Sir Joseph' Beecham's residuary estate from other affairs. It was registered with a capital of £500,000. On March 22 1921 Mr. Justice Astbury made a compulsory winding-up order for this company. [147]
A winding up order for Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd. was made in March 1921; this was after the errant Sir Thomas Beecham finally turned up in the Court of Chancery, in answer to a summons to give evidence about a Receiving Order which he seemed to have been evading since 1919... Having spent ?two years in the USA? Maybe not...
The liquidators were appointed in September 1921:
Although the winding-up wasn't finally completed until July 1928, the debts of both Sir Joseph and Sir Thomas had been written off by 1923.
Through the terms of Sir Joseph Beecham's will, Thos. Beecham became to entitled to 46% of the income from the pill-making business, which interest amounted to £90,000 a year gross, although he hadn't received anything yet by 1921.<C&G 1921> As part of discharging his father's debts he agreed to pay this income over five years to the executors of the Beecham estate, with 'just' £15,000 per annum for himself, later rising to £20,000 (and Henry £5,000 rising to £10,000.) The sale of Jos. Beecham's properties for around £1m, and Thomas's diverted income from the pill-manufacturing business would have amounted to $1.25m, plus interest on the loan from Parr's Bank.
Whatever Beecham's estimates of the expected income of Beecham's Pills, in 1917 the Chancery judges had authorized Charles Rowed and Henry Beecham to continue to manage the pill firm, [148] the net profit of which increased steadily to just under £150,000 in 1918/9 and £160-170,000 in 1920. [139]
Also update Owners, lessees and managers of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden -
NOW ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is to finalise the exact chronological order of events and, having extracted the relevant mostly financial information, delete/hide the excess verbiage.
The Covent Garden Estate Company was set up in 1918 to to do what? Manage the theatre? Of curse, the actual lease still belonged to the Grand Opera Syndicate Ltd.
Well, well - here's a summary of the whole affair from Thomas Beecham's appearance in Chancery in October 1921, from The Chemist and Druggist §§§ [r]
From 1918–1924 the freeholder of the theatre was the Covent Garden Estate Company. Its existence had been agreed to by all interested parties in the Court of Chancery case, and ordered by the Court in 1917, its sole purpose being to complete the contract begun in 1914 between Sir Joseph Beecham and the Duke of Bedford. [109] Its main business was to sell enough of Sir Joseph's estate (mainly property) to repay the mortgage of £1.25m from the Duke of Bedford for the Bloomsbury Estate. The remainder of Sir Joseph's property ("the residual estate") was sold to Thomas and Henry Beecham by the estate's executors in April 1917, subsequent upon their settling the rest of their father's indebtedness. [151]
The chairman of the Covent Garden Estate Company was the businessman Charles Frederick Boston (one of Joseph Beecham's many sons-in-law); [s] The other directors were Dr. Fred Duke-Wooley, [154] [t] and Sir Thomas & Henry Beecham. The main purpose of this company was to ensure that the debt/mortgage owed to the Duke of Bedford was paid off. [109] The company was backed by a loan for £400,000 by Parr's Bank of Warrington i fink.[ citation needed]
"A question how certain clauses in the will of Sir Joseph Beecham were to be construed came before Mr. Justice Eve. His Lordship decided that a sum of £258,420, which was standing at the time of the testator's death to the credit of a special deposit account at the St. Helen's branch of Parr's Bank, passed under the will as part of a bequest of the testator's business. (Re Sir Joseph Beecham, deceased ; Woolley v. Beecham.)" [159]
Few of them, it seems, had much time to devote to the task: Charles Boston had his own business to run; Henry Beecham was running the pill-manufacturing business in St. Helens; Woolley, dunno; and Thomas Beecham was conducting opera...
Although he was a director of the company, Sir Thomas Beecham continued with his operatic conducting career; but the 1920 and 1921 seasons were a critical failure and a financial fiasco. His Beecham Opera Company failed, the Official Receiver was called in, and Beecham himself was the subject of a Receiving Order in 1919/stayed for a year/1921. [160] [151] With plenty of free time, and no money for opera, Beecham devoted his efforts to tying up his father's estate. Then at CGE co offices every day.(Shepherd)
The 1919 and 1920 seasons of the Beecham Opera Company resulted in a financial fiasco. The liquidators were called in [160] and Beecham was likely to be personally petitioned for bankruptcy through his own indebtedness. [161] NB! Beecham was the subject of a Receiving Order [162] from 1919, but was never actually made bankrupt: it was more advantageous for the executors of the Joseph Beecham estate that he remain (at least technically) solvent.
In October 1920 James White made an offer to pay Sir Thomas Beecham's debts in full, to the tune of £100,000.
He retired from public musical life in 1921 for several years to sort out both his own and his late father's financial affairs. [164] Every day he went to the Covent Garden Estate Company's offices and helped to sell a million pounds worth of property.
A winding up order for Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd. was made in March 1921; this would have been when the errant Sir Thomas finally turned up to answer a Receiving Order in the Court of Chancery, which he seemed to have been evading since 1919, having spent ?two years in the USA? Maybe not... It appears that the rest of Sir Joseph Beecham's residuary estate was to be sold as part of repaying the mortgage to the Duke, and possibly settle Beecham's own debt.
It's not unreasonable that Mr. Justice Eve was irritated if Sir Thomas Beecham couldn't manage on £20,000 a year, since a high court judge only got paid £3,000 in 1921. [165] What further emoluments did the pay-rise offer?
The Times, Wednesday, 27 July 1921, p. 4, Issue: 42783. Chancery Division. Sir Thomas Beecham's Affairs.
The liquidators for Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate Ltd. (the holding company for the residual estate of Sir Joseph Beecham) were appointed in September 1921:
Although the winding-up of Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate Ltd. wasn't finally completed until July 1928, the debts of both Sir Joseph and Sir Thomas were written off in 1922 and 1923 respectively.
June 1922 - "COVENT GARDEN ESTATE. AUCTION IN MAY. Covent Garden Estate Company (the owners of what was originally this section of the Bedford estate, purchased by the late Sir Joseph Beecham) have decided to sell the whole of their properties (except the market), and have instructed Messrs. Hampton and Sons to offer the properties by auction at St. James's-Square, on May 16. The sale will include business premises in the streets radiating from Covent Garden Market, including Strand and Aldwych theatres. The properties are freehold. The rent-roll is between £15,000 and £20,000 a year, and the premises are largely leased to firms.,It is the intention of the company, if practicable, to close the estate, and the reserves will be fixed accordingly." [167]
The Times, Issue: 43089, Friday, 21 July 1922 - Sir Thomas Beecham's Affairs.
The mortgage from the Duke of Bedford was finally redeemed on 7 September 1922. [169]
The Times Issue: 43179, Friday, 3 November 1922, p. 4. Sir Thomas Beecham's Affairs.
In 1923 Beecham's personal liabilities, amounting to £41,558, were also paid in full. [171]
Law Notices - Chancery Division - Lord Chancellor's Court (Eve, J.) - re B's settlement (in camera) re Sir Joseph Beecham (dec.) - That's it.
Thus ended in 1923 this long-winded and drawn-out legal affair, which had begun with the death of Sir Joseph Beecham, 1st Baronet in October 1916. The liabilities (ie death duties and other debts) of Sir Joseph's estate were eventually paid off by 1922, and those of Sir Thomas in 1923, and the Chancery case was finally wound up. [139] Sir Thomas Beecham was thus able to receive his dividend of 45% of the the pill-making business for his lifetime.(see Chancery evidence ref) However, the fate of the Covent Garden estate, and the pill-making businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, had yet to be decided.
Joseph B in Lucas: pp 7, 20, 108, 136-7, 146, 158-9
After Joseph Beecham's death in 1916, his younger son Henry continued to run the St Helen's factory with Charles Rowed as the highly experienced general manager. The firm continued to make substantial profits, which partly contributed towards paying off Sir Joseph Beecham's substantial debts.
In 1918 Henry Beecham took ownership of Lympne Castle in Hythe, Kent and added the East Wing, which "proved an advantageous addition during the Second World War, as — on a clear day — it was apparently possible to see the launch of V1 rockets in Calais. That allowed the coastline guns to be readied in time to give them a sporting chance of shooting the rockets down as they passed over Hythe Bay." [173] [174]
Well, there are plenty of internet references to the well-known champion of Delius' music, "Sir Henry Beecham". Henry (although never knighted) seems to have bought a set of Holy Grail tapestries by William Morris, possibly a much later set than the originals woven from 1890 to c.1900, and had them at Lympne. [175] Indeed, "Final versions of The Summons and The Attainment were woven by Morris & Company between 1937 and 1932 for Henry Beecham of Lympne Castle, Kent. This version of The Attainment was sold at Sotheby's in March 1987, and The Summons is housed at the Munich Stadtmuseum. [176]
During the early 1920s Henry Beecham, describing himself as a 'wholesale druggist' in the 1921 Census, and still in his early 30s, rented Knebworth House (the seat of the Earl of Lytton) with his wife Ethel and his children Helen Audrey, Joseph and Henry, all under five. Their household comprised: the housekeeper; a trained nurse and a children’s nurse; and a personal maid, with her husband as motor mechanic. [177]
On June 24 1921, Henry Beecham was convicted of manslaughter at Hertford Assizes and sentenced to twelve months in prison. In January near Baldock he had lost control of his Vauxhall 30-98 4.5 litre sports car at a speed of between 40 and 65 mph, and skidded into a group of three children, killing a boy and seriously injuring his sister. The car was reported to have swerved at a bad bend in the road. [178] Another man and two women were also passengers in the car. Beecham had already been "frequently prosecuted for driving to the public danger." A month later he took his case to the Court of Criminal Appeal on the grounds that a) the judge had misdirected the jury, and that b) his cross-examination had led to Beecham making a statement which essentially put his own character in question. However, the appeal judges dismissed the case, saying that although the trial judge's summing-up was sadly defective, the jury must have certainly found Beecham guilty of manslaughter in any case. [179] [180] [181]
Losing all interest in the business after his conviction, Henry sold the entirety of the pill-manufacturing concern for a nominal £32,500 (£835,400) to Joseph Beecham's estate. [137] His father had given him the American business in c.1910, and the Lancashire business in his will in 1916. After getting out of prison in 1923 Henry went back to America on the SS Baltic. [182]
The Covent Garden Estate Company was sold to Beecham Estates and Pills Ltd. in 1924
Full-page announcement of Beecham Estates and Pills Ltd., and prospectus. Plus lots of details about the remainder of what the CG Estate Company still owned, and the financial state of Beecham's Pills. Some properties may have been subject to reversion of Rack rent, ie the full market value which wasn't being charged at the time. [183]
During the closing months of the Chancery case, the financier Philip Hill [184] was contacted for advice about the future of the Beechams's financial affairs. With Henry out of the business, and Sir Thomas dedicated to music-making, Hill's advised the formation of a limited company with the backing of some colleagues. The company of Beecham Estates and Pills, Ltd. was formed in May 1924. With Hill as a director and the backer, and effectively in control of the company, he bought the entire assets of the Covent Garden Estate Co., thus separating the Beecham family from direct control of the pill-making business which old Thomas Beecham had started three generations previously. [139] Check, fool!
The new company, Beecham Estates and Pills, Ltd., owned the entire pill-making businesses in St. Helens & New York (having been sold by the sole owner Henry Beecham after his conviction for a nominal £32,500 (£835,400) to Joseph Beecham's estate. ?Which may have been Sir Thomas Beecham's Estate, Ltd. or less likely? the Covent Garden Estate Company) [137], and (after various properties had been sold off) the remaining Covent Garden estate. This included the Market & the Opera House, Tavistock Hotel, Bedford Chambers and numerous small shops and businesses in Floral Street, James Street, & Russell Street. [116] For more about Hill, see also Corley 1994, pp. 23–24.
Having to deal with both the Covent Garden estate and the pill-making business on either side of the Atlantic, Hill became a busy man and, to safeguard his financial interests, founded the Philip Hill Investment Trust, the forerunner of Hill Samuel. [139]
This is where Joseph Beecham's assets and debts were both adjudged to be 'business assets', whatever their monetary worth, of Sir Joseph Beecham's estate and its legatees.
The Times, Saturday, 16 April 1932: Chancery Division - Thomas Beecham was again the subject of a Receiving Order in December 1930 - his sons sued the trustees of the £500,000 trust set up in Sir Joseph Beecham's will. Neither they nor Lady Utica Beecham were getting any income, and thought they should. The trustees were Sir Harold John de Courcy, (1877-1976), Alderman of the City of London; Charles F, P. McNeill; [186] and Mr. John Robinson Stevens. [187]
After considerable development and expansion of the pill-making business, including a trained chemist WHO, I wonder?, Hill was able by 1928 to hive off the Beecham estates activities into a new company, the Covent Garden Properties Company Ltd. The patent medicine side regained its autonomy as Beechams Pills Ltd., with himself as chairman. [188] Bla bla hurrah.
Oct. 8, 1920 The Times - Sir T. Beecham's Affairs - Offer made by Mr. James White White offered to pay Sir Thomas Beecham's debts in full, with the prospective sale of some properties from the Beecham estate netting Sir Thomas the sum of £100,000.
White bought up shares in cotton mills and weaving firms, generally not to the advantage of the existing owners or shareholders. He also attempted to manipulate the price of shares of British Controlled Oilfields, a Canadian firm with interests in Venezuelan reserves. This didn't end well.
History of the Venezuelan oil industry
White had contracted to buy the site of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley and its fixtures and fittings, but it fell through and he ended his life in massive debt of around a million pounds.
The Times , Thursday, 13 October 1927, Issue: 44711 - Beecham Trust Liquidation.
Brief notes - need expanding, some to be placed in relevant sections, and proper reffing...
Smoking room at top of house - cap of Turkish design, long flowing tassel, richly coloured jacket decorated with gold-braided stripes and silver buttons(beecham p. 9) Collection of music-boxes (beecham p. 12) Enjoyed building - added a small concert hall to the Huyton house (beecham p. 13) Jos. Beecham ruled his business, giving personal attention to every side of it (beecham p 14) Enjoyed playing the organ, with the pedals and manuals quite out of synchrony - And these, it may be, were his happiest moments.(beecham p. 15) When Thomas was aged 10 and 11, his mother's "intermittent nervous malady obliged her to go southward to some place on the sea like Eastbourne or Bournemouth where she could be looked after until well again." (beecham p. 18-19) From c1888-91 Jos. made more trips to America, bring back central heating and equipping the factory/house with electric light, perhaps 1st in the country? (beecham p. 18) He had seen Lohengrin perhaps a hundred times in nearly every opera house of the world. (Beecham p. 158) By 1897 Josephine had become and almost chronic invalid, and he spent much of his abroad during the summers.(beecham p. 30) Outside of business he was a "man of pathetic simplicity and uncertain judgment." In family matters he always took advice from his lawyer or clergyman whose church he attended, his most intimate friend."(Beecham p. 31) Trip to US with Thomas in summer 1893, stayed at Astor House. + Chicago (beecham p. 27-8) 1899 - Josephine put away, complete estrangement.(beecham p. 35) Reconciliation with Thomas led to more plans to do opera (beecham p. 86) Name prominently associated with Sir Thomas's first Russian Opera season, was just as enthusiastic about the second season (beecham pp 125) Deep stuff about himself (beecham 157)
Beecham married Josephine Burnett (d. 3 Nov 1934) in 1873, against his parents' wishes (beecham 157). He had her committed to a sanatorium or insane asylum in Nottingham in 1899. She received a legal separation/divorce in 1901, freeing her from her enforced confinement.
They had eight children: [157] [190]
"Sir Joseph Beecham, Mayor of St. Helens, gave a garden-party at his residence, Ewanville, Huyton, on July 11, when there were about 1,500 guests, who had a most delightful afternoon's entertainment in spite of the somewhat dull weather. The company had also the opportunity of inspecting the fine pictures which adorn the walls of Ewanville, the collection being the companion to Sir Joseph's gallery in Hampstead, where there is one of the finest private collections in England." [195]
"It is this period - roughly bridging the period between the death of Reynolds and the advent of Pre-Raphaelitism - which is best exemplified in Sir Jos. B's collection at Hampstead."
Includes portrait of Sir Jos. himself by Sir Luke Fildes, RA - WHERE IS IT NOW?
The pictures were later sold by Sir Thomas to defray Beecham's enormous death duties, and the house was bought by the railway union ASLEF in 1921. [198] [199]
Auctions of Beecham's paintings:
Christie's London Sales 1865-1923
PAINTING SOLD,FOR £21,525 - SALISBURY CATHEDRAL, BY CONSTABLE - The Times, 17 May 1952, p. 6. "Another, 33½in. by 43½in., also done by the artist in 1826, which brought 6,200 guineas in the Sir Joseph Beecham sale in May, 1917 is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York." [200]
The Times Feb. 12, 1917, p. 3 https://go-gale-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=TTDA&u=wikipedia&id=GALE%7CCS51841100&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco
The Times, Saturday, Dec. 6, 1919 p. 16 - Turner Picture For Melbourne. TURNER PICTURE FOR,MELBOURNE. PURCHASE OF "WALTON BRIDGES". Turner's famous picture, "Walton Bridges," is going to Australia. The transfer has been arranged by Mr. Frank Rinder, Art Adviser in England to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, which already contains three examples of the master's work.,The picture measures 35 by 48 inches, and was painted about 1810 for the Earl of Essex, in whose family it remained until 1893, when it realized 4,100 guineas at Christie's. For a time, it was in the collection of the late Mr. Janes Orrock, and at his sale in 1904 it fetched 7,000 guineas. The late Sir Joseph Beecham purchased the picture at a higher sum-about £10,000. For some unaccountable reason at the Beecham sale at Christie's in 1917 the price dropped to 3,500 guineas, at which it was purchased by Mr. W. Lawson Seacode, from whom it has now been acquired by the Melbourne authorities. Australia is to be congratulated on the acquisition of what is probably the most beautiful Turner which has been in the market for a long time." [202]
Is there a statue of him, a charity, a bequest, even a road or block of flats named after him?
Christopher Furness died in 1912, leaving all his estate to Marmaduke but the shares remained in trust. Stephen W. Furness, Marmaduke's cousin (created Baronet in 1913), took over running the firm. But he died in 1914 after an accidental fall in Broadstairs of some 50-60 feet while having a cigarette out the window. [74] Marmaduke became chairman [76] During the war while Frederick Lewis was in London on war work, Furness acquired a shipbuilding firm without telling the Board, which led to considerable losses in the post-war slump. [77]
In 1926 Marmaduke married Thelma, the daughter of Harry Hays Morgan, US Consul-General at Buenos Aires: she was the mistress of the future Edward VIII, but was displaced by Wallis Simpson. Thelma's identical twin sister Gloria married Reginald Vanderbilt, becoming Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, mother of Gloria Vanderbilt. [78]
Success came from persuading people who were not ill to take the preparation. Stupendous and intensive advertising methods built sales to the highest of any proprietary preparation, and made them known in almost every country.
Joseph Beecham
, Jos. Beecham
and J. Beecham
.
Delphin - Beecham. — At Hampstead Parish Church, London, N.W., on June 8, Leonce Delphin, only son of Professor Emile Delphin, Geneva, to Jessie, daughter of Alderman J. Beecham, St. Helens and Hampstead.See also Advertisement for 'Otto', p. 24
...this development was largely a product of the 1880s, when Liberals, especially in London, had pointed to the way in which great landowners in the metropolis, like the Dukes of Bedford and Westminster, had seen the value of their urban properties soar, while they avoided contributing to the growing burden of local rates, because local taxation was paid by the occupiers of land and buildings, rather than the ultimate landowner.
2nd East Lancashire Field Ambulance: Western Command, Manchester Companies, Royal Army Medical Corps (Volunteers)[...]Captain Fred D. Woolley to be Major (dated April 1st, 1908)"..."2nd East Lancashire Field Ambulance: The undermentioned officers, from the Western Command, Manchester Companies, Royal Army Medical Corps (Volunteers), are appointed to the unit, with rank and precedence as in the Volunteer Force (dated April lst, 1908): Captain Fred Duke Woolley.
Henry Beecham
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