Nelsons

Following Dr Bach's death in 1936, the Bach Centre team continued to make and distribute remedies. Gradually a thriving business built up, and Bach Centre remedies were sent all around the world.

By the end of the 1980s interest in the system had grown so much that the small team at Mount Vernon could no longer bottle enough stock remedies to keep up with demand. There were also fears that imminent legislation in Europe and elsewhere would mean that some countries might no longer be able to obtain remedies.

To deal with these problems, in 1991 the Bach Centre asked Nelsons to run its bottling and distribution business under licence. Nelsons built a special bottling unit a few miles away from the Bach Centre, in Abingdon, and used their expertise in the marketplace to address the problem of product registration and licencing. This freed the Centre to work more on long-neglected education projects.

Two years later, in 1993, the Centre sold the business to Nelsons, along with the trade marks for the products Bach Flower Remedies and Rescue Remedy. Since that time the Centre has not been involved in the commercial side of manufacture, distribution and export.

Although the sale of the trade marks marked a new stage in the relationship between the Bach Centre and Nelsons, there had in fact been links for decades. Dr Bach supplied mother tinctures to the Nelsons Pharmacy in the 1930s so they could retail them to customers at their Duke Street pharmacy in London. And Nelsons has always made the cream used as a carrier for the cream version of Dr Bach's crisis formula.

Nelsons and the Bach Centre are separate organisations, and have different objectives. The Centre, for example, has criticised the introduction by remedy manufacturers - including Nelsons - of combination products that violate the fundamental rule of the system: treat the person, not the disease.

However, the friendship between the two organisations endures. The Bach Centre continues to supervise Nelsons in their production of mother tinctures, while the Centre's freedom to maintain and protect Dr Bach's work is greater now that the pressures of distribution and bottling have been removed. In particular, the support and enthusiasm shown by Nelsons for education have meant that Bach Centre-approved courses run all around the world. This in turn allows the Centre to register and support more properly trained practitioners, all of whom help us to spread Dr Bach's simple message of self-healing.