Joseph Lyons (caterer)

Sir Joseph Nathaniel Lyons DL (29 December 1847 – 22 June 1917) was the chairman of J. Lyons and Co., a restaurant chain, food manufacturing and hotel conglomerate created in 1884 that dominated British mass-catering in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lyons was born in Kennington, London, on 29 December 1847, the son of Nathaniel Lyons, "an itinerant vendor of watches and cheap jewellery", and Hannah Cohen, his wife. He was educated at the Borough Jewish Schools in London's East End.

Lyons began his career as an optician's apprentice. He had an ingenious mechanical bent and invented small gadgets that he was able to sell quickly at the many exhibitions held throughout England in the late nineteenth century, using his skills in showmanship and sales. One was a combined "microscope-binocular-compass" that he sold for one shilling from a stall at the Royal Jubilee Exhibition Liverpool in 1887.

When Isidore Gluckstein (1851–1920), Montague Gluckstein (1854–1922) and Barnett Salmon (1829–1897), who headed the Salmon & Gluckstein tobacco merchants, wanted to expand into catering, they invited Lyons to join them but used his name for the company, as they thought that associating their family names with catering would be beneath them; Lyons was distantly related to Isidore Gluckstein's fiancée.

A trial tea pavilion was run at the Newcastle Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 which was so successful that in that year a private company was incorporated to develop the business. The company took space at the 1888 International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry in Glasgow and the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris, after which it took over catering at Olympia (1891), the Crystal Palace, and the White City, all in London. A public company, J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., was formed in 1894 and the first Lyons' teashop was opened that year in Piccadilly, London, which eventually grew into a chain known as Lyons' Corner Houses. Lyons was made chairman of the company for life.

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