ABSTRACT
Thomas Beecham was the grandson of the man who founded the business that became universally famous under the title of Beecham’s Pills. Old Thomas (1820–1907) patented the formula he had invented, adopted the neat advertising slogan ‘Worth a Guinea a Box’, and from small beginnings the business grew into a substantial empire. After he retired in 1895, his son Joseph assumed control, and Beecham’s Pills became an international concern, factories overseas being needed to meet the worldwide demand for an estimated ten million pills a day. Young Thomas, the second child and elder boy in Joseph’s family of ten children, was born on 29 April 1879 and was musical from the start. He began to take piano lessons at the age of six and, for some years afterwards, during which he travelled widely in Europe and America and listened to music of all kinds and styles, began to see his future as a concert pianist or, more possibly, as a composer of opera. He first stood on a conductor’s rostrum at the age of 20, conducting local forces in his home town of St Helens in Lancashire, but less than a month later took charge of a concert by Manchester’s famous Hallé Orchestra which his father had hired to celebrate his re-election as mayor of the town. It had not been planned like that, but when the Hallé’s conductor Hans Richter declined to be hired along with his players, young Thomas volunteered and his enthusiasm and determination won his father round. More conducting experience was gained when he took his first operatic score along to a London impresario with a view to its performance, and instead ended up directing performances of operas including Carmen and Faust in suburban London theatres. In 1905, he hired an orchestra to give a concert of his own in London, and the next year announced a series of four concerts to be given under his direction by 40 of the best players in London. Unfortunately his programmes of 18th-century music failed to draw, so he cancelled the last concert and straightaway enlarged the ensemble to symphonic proportions. He and his ‘New Symphony Orchestra’ then moved operations to London’s principal concert venue, Queen’s Hall, and in the final months of 1907 were beginning to attract attention.
