Jack Becker, Adelaide's Music Man, woos state education department, wins Boosey & Hawkes contract, forms band
Adelaide Drum and Fife Band, comprising the best of the South Australia's schoolboy players, was first formed by Jack Becker in 1928.
Jack Becker, The Music Man of Adelaide, started his drive for wealth and status in the early 1920s at the age of 16 when he decided to cash in a the popular music craze by opening a studio in a rented room in the city’s Victoria Square. He taught himself to play the banjo and other band instruments from a handbook. He spent his evenings and Saturday afternoons at the studio giving lessons, often just one step ahead of his pupils.
At the same time, Backer was apprenticed to jewellery makers S. Schlank & Co. (that also employed the young Marcus Oliphant, future nuclear scientist and state governor). In 1921-22, the Schlanks sent young Becker to attend Chemistry I lectures at the School of Mines and Industries – not Adelaide University, as he later suggested to others.
At 20, Becker left Schlanks for a sales job at Saverys musical instrument shop in Rundle Street, Adelaide city. He shone as a salsman to the extent that Saverys allowed him to use a room to continue his after-hours music teaching. The second income enabled Becker to buy a steerage passage in 1926 to the United States of America in 1926. After some sightseeing, Becker used a letter of introduction from Saverys to get employment at the Conn musical instrument factory in Indiana for four months.
Back in Adelaide, Becker joined Allans's music store and saw the chance to increase sales if he could promote an increase in fife and drum bands in South Australia's schools. From around 1900, a few schools had small groups ,accompanying pupils marching into morning class and, in secondary schools, for cadet corps drills
With Allans's blessing, Becker persuaded the South Australian government education department that every school ought to have a band with more children involved. Becker found that British instruments could be imported more cheaply than American and sold with a bigger markup.
Allans financed Becker’s extensive travel promoting school bands being formed while selling and giving basic instructions in the fifes that English firm, Boosey & Hawkes made to Becker’s own specifications. In 1928, Becker formed the nucleus of what was to become the Adelaide Drum and Fife Band, comprising the best of the state’s schoolboy players. It rehearsed every Saturday in the Cheerup Society's hut in Elder Park. This band enabled Becker to show that steel fifes could be used to play, not just simple patriotic melodies like “The Song of Australia” and “Rule, Britannia!”, but much more interesting music in up to six parts.
Education department director from 1929, W.J. (“Plugger”) Adey was captivated. Hundreds of teachers were brought to Adelaide to see and hear what could be done. Becker also showed that small towns and rural districts that couldn’t afford to a regular brass band could use of their school band for processions and on other public occasions. Soon there were bands in 53 metropolitan schools and 250 more in the country.
To the amazement of many, Boosey & Hawkes rewarded Becker, not Allans, with the South Australian agency for its products. Meanwhile, Becker had resumed moonlighting, reopening his own music teaching studio.
In 1928, at St Augustine's Anglican Church in Unley, Backer had married another Allans employee, Gladys Sarah Duggan, from an Irish Catholic working-class family in Tasmania. Becker had already started to look a wider money-making ventures in 1930 when he made his his first venture into pastoralism, forming, with two others, the Leabrook Pastoral Company that ran a Dorset Horn stud at Lower Light. Livestock was cheap in the Depression, and Becker hoped for good profits when the economy recovered.
In 1932, Becker quit Allans to devote more of his energies to his own studio that he named the Adelaide College of Music.