It is the time of year – and the years of our time – that many of us are reaching into the medicine cabinet for the Beecham’s Powders. The travelling salesman Thomas Beecham opened his first factory ‘for the rapid production of medicines’ in 1849 in St Helens, Lancashire. His son Sir Joseph Beecham expanded the company to such success that he entered into an agreement with the Duke of Bedford to purchase the Covent Garden estate for £2,000,000. Sir Joseph died with more than half of this amount outstanding in mortgage, and his two sons, Sir Thomas, the renowned conductor, and Henry were left to sell off property to find the remainder of the money.
During this time – the early 1920s – Henry Beecham, ‘wholesale druggist’, in his early 30s, rented Knebworth House with his wife Ethel, five-year-old daughter Helen, four-year-old son Joseph, and newborn Henry. Their household comprised Alice, a ‘trained nurse’; Ethel, a ‘children’s nurse’; Louise, a ‘housekeeper; Margaret, a ‘personal maid’; and Margaret’s husband George, a ‘motor mechanic’. How do I know this? Because last month the 1921 Census was published.
The Beechams seceded control of the family company soon afterwards, but it continued to thrive, subsuming products such as Lucozade, Macleans toothpaste and Eno antacid, until being subsumed itself in 1989 as SmithKline Beecham, and in 2000 as GlaxoSmithKline. And there the Beechams connection to Knebworth House continues on into the future, as it is Glaxo’s Pharmaceutical Research & Development chimney stacks that, 100 years on, Knebworth House’s windows now look out at across Knebworth Park. Henry Beecham could not have envisaged that when, having filled in his Census form, he looked out of these windows on that Sunday, April 24th, in 1921.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH