From London to Melbourne

Joseph Edward Nathan, founder of the company from which Glaxo Laboratories grew, was born in London on 2 March 1835. He was the sixth son of a wholesale tailor, Edward Nathan, and his wife Rachel. Family tradition held that Nathan père was, or became, ‘a charming old man with very little brains’, while the mother ‘was a highly intelligent woman with not a great deal of education’. The Nathan family lived in Houndsditch, an area of east London just outside the boundaries of the City and for many centuries a centre of the clothing trade. By the early nineteenth century Houndsditch had a large Jewish population – they built a synagogue there in 1809 – and there were many small factories, warehouses and businesses in the area. From the age of about twelve, Joseph Nathan helped his father in his small business of making suits and clothes which he then sold in and around London. Even at that early age Joseph showed signs of business acumen and entrepreneurial zeal; from the travellers who sold cloth to his father, he learned of the possibilities of an export trade and urged his father to launch into this line. He succeeded in persuading the old man to buy a tail-coat and silk hat to make himself more presentable, and sent him to drum up connections for export business; but Edward Nathan had no heart for expansion and nothing came of the venture.