Jim Marshall is probably best known as founder of Marshall Amplification, a British company which designs and manufactures electric guitar amplifiers. However, Jim Marshall started as a drummer and drum teacher, with Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix), Micky Waller (Little Richard), and Micky Underwood (Ritchie Blackmore) among his students.



Biography

Jim Marshall was born in Kensington on the 29th of July, 1923 to Mrs. Beatrice Marshall and her husband Jim. Unfortunately, he suffered from tuberculosis of the bones which meant that he was in plaster cast from his ankles up to his armpits during most of his school years.



He managed just eight weeks at school before leaving at the age of thirteen and a half to start a variety of jobs. His father owned a fish and chip shop in Western Road, Southall, but it wasn't for Jim, so he started drifting around and found work as and where he could. He worked in a scrap metal yard, a builder's merchant, as a baker in a biscuit factory, a "boiler" in a jam factory, a salesman in a shoe shop and as a meat slicer for a canned food group where he sliced off the top of his thumb.



Yet all this time Jim Marshall seemed to have a thirst for knowledge and had started reading books on engineering. Due to his illness he failed his medical for the Forces, so he went to work at Cramic Engineering throughout the Second World War and then he put his new found engineering expertise to good use by working at Heston Aircraft in Middlesex as a toolmaker from 1946 to 1949. However, at the age of 14 he had learned how to tap dance and music was already very much at the forefront of his mind. Recalls Jim:

"I went to tap dancing lessons and a Band Leader who's grand daughter was in the same class as me heard me sing, he said he was playing locally at the Monapole, this was the largest dance hall in Southall. He asked me to come along and he would try me out. He thought that I sounded fine with just a pianist but may not be all right with a 16 piece orchestra. It turned out fine and from then on I was singing 5 or 6 times a week. I was making 10 shillings a night and because it was wartime, we didn't have any petrol for cars, so I would ride my bicycle with a trailer behind it to carry my drum kit and the PA cabinets which I had made! I then left the orchestra to be with a 7 piece band and in 1942 the drummer leader was called into the forces and I took over on drums."

Realising that he wanted to be more proficient at drumming, Jim Marshall started taking drum lessons from Max Abrams in 1946 in Knightsbridge every Sunday, trying to emulate the style of his idol, Gene Krupa. At the end of two years, Jim became quite efficient on drums, so in 1949 he started teaching other drummers in Lonsdale Road, Southall:

"I taught Mitch Mitchell who joined Jimi Hendrix, Micky Burt of Chas and Dave, Micky Waller with Little Richard and Micky Underwood who played with Ritchie Blackmore. I used to teach about 65 pupils a week and what with playing as well, I was earning in the early 1950's somewhere in the region of £5,000 a year, which was how I first saved money to go into business."

Having taught so many drummers, Jim used to buy Premier drums from the Selmer shop in Charing Cross Road and sell them to his students. The manager said that it was rather silly spending all this money there so why didn't Jim open up my own drum shop? That's how he started in retail: "Then the drummers brought their groups in, including Pete Townshend, and said why don't you stock guitars and amplifiers, which I knew nothing about. This would have been July, 1960."In 1960 Jim started building bass and PA cabinets in mhis garage because nothing was really made as a column speaker, and he had the idea of using two 12" speakers. Also, there was nothing produced whatsoever in those days for bass guitar.



Many orders were taken from that first prototype and Jim recognised that he was into something. By 1963 he had expanded the shop to include a small manufacturing area where Ken and his assistant Dudley built the first amplifiers at the rate of about one a week.



And the rest is, as they say, well-known history.