User:MinorProphet/Draft subpages/Joseph 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.
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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.