As rags to riches tales go — I might mention Lord Nuffield, or even Dick Whittington — the story of Thomas Beecham, founder of the famous powders company that in 1989 became the multinational SmithKline Beecham, and in 2000 GlaxoSmithKline, must rank among the most spectacular ever.

Thomas Beecham, grandfather of the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, was born in Curbridge, near Witney, in 1820. He was the son of a depressive shepherd, called Joseph, who had been forced into an unhappy marriage to his mother, Sarah, just two months before his birth; and his only formal education consisted of a year at school from the age of seven.

The school he attended was the National School in Witney, just over a mile’s walk away, which the Church of England-based National Society had set up in the Town Hall; then at the age of eight he was sent out to work as a shepherd. He earned 1s 6d (seven-and-a-half new pence) per seven-day week, and he lived for the most part in a shepherd’s shelter on Curbridge Down.

I read all this in Beecham’s from pills to pharmaceuticals (Crucible £14.99) by Anthony Corley, a member of the Centre for International Business History at the Henley Business School — who has also, incidentally, contributed almost 100 entries to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, mostly on business leaders.

He notes that conductor Sir Thomas Beecham wrote that “the minutiae of commerce never fail to be tedious in narrative”, but I can vouch unequivocally that this particular company history is an exception. It’s anything but tedious.

High in the Cotswold hills, Thomas Beecham continued his own self-education and would surely have endorsed Sir Walter Scott’s view that “all men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education”.

He wrote later: “Very early in my teens I took charge of the entire flock and stuck to it until I was 20 years of age.”

In about 1833, he moved to Cropredy, near Banbury, where he worked for a progressive farmer called William Chamberlain and took up residence in a shepherd’s cottage on the 400-acre farm.

Perhaps he noticed during his lonely upbringing exactly which herbs and plants kept his flocks healthy, or perhaps he picked up information from “wise women” who picked plants from hedgerows to make potions; anyway he soon earned a reputation for curing animals and humans alike — and also took to casting horoscopes and telling fortunes.

In his words, he started making “decoctions [liquid medicines] of a human kind”. Then, being the innovator he was, he invented a grinding machine called a kibbler out of old knives and agricultural implements to turn vegetable matter into a sort of dough — which he then fashioned into strips, to be cut into pills, using a board with hollows in it to act as a mould.

He peddled these pills around the Oxfordshire markets to which he tramped long distances to buy and sell sheep.

In 1840, he took his first life-changing step: he gave up shepherding and moved into his uncle’s three-room cottage in Kidlington.

There he concentrated more on pill production, contributing what money he could to the meagre shepherd’s wages that his uncle and cousin earned.

He also took jobs: first as a postman, collecting and delivering post from nearby Gosford, and blowing a horn around Kidlington as a signal for people to give him letters to take back to Gosford; second as a part-time gardener at the Kidlington mansion Hampden House.

Then he took another momentous step: like many during the Industrial Revolutuion he moved to Lancashire, first to Liverpool and then St Helens — where there were plenty of people feeling unwell.

He married the first of three wives (the third of whom claimed he tried to poison her) and in time set up a pill factory. He was joined in the business by his son Joseph — later Sir Joseph — who proved he had a flair for business to rival his father’s.

But Thomas Beecham’s great talent was for advertising. There is the story (true or untrue) of the Lancashire clergyman who asked the company to supply some hymn books in return for being allowed to show an ad on the flyleaf.

When the books arrived the clergyman was surprised to see no advertisement — until, that is Christmas, when the congregation found themselves singing: “Hark, the Herald angels sing,/Beecham’s pills are just the thing/Peace on earth and mercy mild;/two for a man and one for a child.”