Brief profile of John Henry Iles by David Jeater

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Player:

JH Iles

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DateLine: 3rd November 2008

 

John Henry Iles – he was usually known by both his forenames – was born in Clarence Road, Bristol and educated at Ashville College, a Methodist school at Harrogate. As a teenager, he played briefly for Gloucestershire as an amateur, twice alongside W.G.Grace, as a tail-end batsman and bowler, possibly right-arm of a quicker type, but no clear record remains of his method. His only first-class wickets came in his first match which the county’s opponents won by an innings in two days.

 

His achievements, though, were in other fields of popular culture: brass-band music, amusement parks and greyhound racing. He also invested in films in the 1930s, an activity which brought him to bankruptcy in 1938. A keen musician as a young man, he became involved in the brass-band movement in 1898, through buying a business which published brass-band music and a weekly magazine for band musicians. He established the British brass-band championships in 1900, which until 1936 were held at Crystal Palace, persuading leading composers and conductors to recognize brass-band music as a legitimate art form. In 1944 he received an OBE for his services to the band movement and later became an officer of the Académie Française. Since 1948, the Worshipful Company of Musicians has awarded the Iles Medal annually to individual musicians who make significant contributions to the brass band movement.

 

While in the United States on a band visit in 1906, he noticed the popularity of amusement parks and their roller-coaster rides, many of them run by a ‘legendary’ figure, LaMarcus Thompson. He secured the European rights for these and introduced them to Blackpool, Belle Vue in Manchester (where he also brought in greyhound racing and the ‘caterpillar ride’), White City, Wembley and most famously Dreamland at Margate, where the wooden ride has been designated a listed building. He was involved with similar parks in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen and Paris. He died at Margate in 1951 in a house not far from his best-known park. One of his sons was a key figure in the development of the flight simulator.