John Bull Record (Germany) / c. 1910
Corporate background:
A label made by the German Beka company,
despite the claim to British manufacture.
Bill Dean-Myatt writes: “John Bull is another unbelievably
complex label to unravel. They also drew from Favorite and
Dacapo [as well as Beka].
“It was produced for an unknown
company that is thought to have sold gramophones and records
from door-to-door and paid for on a weekly basis.”
The depiction of a bulldog is pretty crude
(it was likely ‘lifted’ from a Victorian-era book
of natural history illustrated with wood-engravings).
Perhaps the German owners of the label did
not realize that 'John Bull' referred not to the British
bulldog but to the archetypal Englishman.