Jack Becker: Music Man of Adelaide with 1930s boys bands; changing tune on his background in strong bid for status
Jack Becker, as conductor of his Adelaide Drum and Fife Band and the Adelaide Boys Military Band (in nautical mode, at right), in the elaborate scarlet uniform he adopted in the mode of Harold Hill from Meredith Willson's musical The Music Man.
Jack Becker became The Music Man of Adelaide in the 1930s. The Becker story had parallels with the plot of Meredith Willson’s 1950s The Music Man where hustler salesman Harold Hill charmed a midwestern American town into buying instruments and uniforms for a boys band he promised to teach – without formal musical training.
While Harold Hill sold a vision of 76 trombones leading the big parade, Becker did deliver on giving Adelaide what was reputed to be the world’s biggest boys’ military band. Also, without formal musical training, Becker started the Adelaide College of Music – more like the “Adelaide college of popular music” under his control – that continued into early 1960s with an enrolment of almost 10,000 pupils, either in the city or 171 branches and subbranches in the suburbs.
Becker moved on from the college in the late 1940s to other ventures – often controversial. But, by the 1950s, his wealth had hit a million pounds – a huge sum in that era. With his wife, Becker was an avid social climber, winning honours such as being made a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and, in 1962, made a knight (to recognise a $100,000 donation to the academy, increased to $200,000 in 1961). Jack Becker became Sir Jack Ellerton Becker.
Becker’s pursuit of status with wealth involved changing the tune of his actual background. He was born in 1904 at his parents’ modest house, called “Ellerton”, in the Adelaide suburb of North Unley. His father was a clerk with carriers H. Graves & Co.– not, as he widely claimed, a “leading city accountant”. Nor had Becker, as he had convinced some at the academy, had he attended Unley High School and spent five years studying science at Adelaide University.
He glossed over a possible German heritage by telling reporters that his grandparents were English or Scottish and one journalist turned Becker’s wife working-class background into being from Tasmanian landed gentry.
What was true about Becker was drive for money and his unusual capacity for charming people and inspiring confidence.