Octavius Beale

Octavius Beale (23 February 1850 – 16 December 1930) was an Irish-born Australian piano manufacturer and a philanthropist.

Beale formed a company to import sewing machines and pianos in 1879, after which he established Australia's first piano factory in Annandale, 1893.The factory ceased production in 1975.

He served as president of the New South Wales Chamber of Commerce and a trustee of the Australian Museum, and the Bank of New South Wales (Westpac).

In 1903, Beale was appointed one of twelve members of a Royal Commission into the decline of the birth rate in New South Wales. He later conducted, at his own expense, a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Secret Drugs, 1905-1910. The two-volume report records the criminal unscrupulousness of manufacturers and advertisers.

Marriage and family

Beale married Elizabeth (Lilly) Baily (1856 – 1901) at the Congregational Church, Woollahra, New South Wales, and they had thirteen children. After Lily's death he married her sister Katherine on 4 March 1903. The children from the first marriage were:

• Margaret Elizabeth married the Rev Alexander Petrie Campbell OBE (1881–1963) who was an Australian-born Congregational church minister and chairman of the Congregational Union of Australia and New Zealand from 1937 until 1939.They had a daughter and three sons.
• Lionel Charles
• Ruth
• Reginald Hugo
• Ronald Matheson
• Francis Edgar
• Rupert Octavius
• Harold Strangman
• Octavius Cyril
• Hilda Dorothea
• Mary
• Hector
• Florence

On his death in a motor vehicle accident in Stroud, New South Wales, Beale was survived by his second wife and ten children.

See also

• Beale Piano