In 1857, he moved to England where he built a large factory in London from which his instruments took a share of the English market and from where he exported to many countries including the United States.

[citation needed] In 1858, following a long series of lawsuits with Adolphe Sax, Gustave-Auguste Besson left Paris to build a factory in London.

D. J. Blaikely, the inventor in 1878 of an automatically compensation tuning system for valves collaborated with Distin, and together they developed a new range and improved existing models.

At the end of the nineteenth century (1894), the Besson factory of London employed 131 workers, producing 100 brass instruments a week, and no less than 10,000 musical ensembles appeared on their contact lists.

The company became Groupe Buffet Crampon, with two subsidiaries in the United States and Japan, and in November 2007, it appointed Antoine Beaussant as new chief executive officer.

The Besson student instruments continue to be manufactured in the factory near Delhi, in India, under the supervision of specialists from the Buffet Crampon Group.

These instruments are best described as novelty items since they are shoddily built from very thin metal and they are often unplayable (due to faults in the manufacturing) and untunable (the tuning slides are simply ornamentation – they do not work).