Beaky's Blather

Self portrait

Paul Beak  – known since he was very young as Beaky is, and has been a remarkable  variety of things.  

As a young man he was a PE student at the world renowned Loughborough College in England. Alma mata – Seb Coe,  Dave Moorcroft  and Fran Cotton and his own Loughborough rugby wing three quarter heroes – Gerald Davis, Billy Steel, Lewis Dick, Clive Rees and Keith Fielding to name only a few, all internationals rugby wingers from Paul’s own Loughborough da. Paul also played on the wing for Loughborough for four years. ‘These were wonderful days ,’ Beaky never took playing for Loughborough as anything but a great privilege. 

Post University, he was initially a school teacher where he displayed some early signs of what was his charactoristic creativity in the face of obstacles. At the end of his first year teaching, he offered to take some pupils on a three week school European camping trip. Nearly thirty children signed up to go on what was conceived as an offer for to be slimmed down to only 6 places. Beaky’s extraordinary and creative solution for this dilemma – he purchased a 20-year old, forty-seat bus at a local charity auction and he took all 27 schoolboys on the trip of a lifetime – a three-week camping trip around Europe taking in – Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Munich and Amsterdam. 

Finding a teacher’s salary meagre, Beaky’s first recourse was to seek out extra earning capacity. His solution? – he bought a retired Co-op mobile shop, a large van in effect and converted it himself on his driveway into a mobile fish and chip shop that he then drove around and served fish and chips to all the rural villages of East Lothian, near Edinburgh. 

He used to lament to whomever would listen that it was a topsy world where as a teacher who has spent four years gaining a degree, he could earn only £2750 a year whilst now, a mobile chip shop operative he could earn £700 a week selling chips! The money was great but the work smelly and unpleasant; Beaky’s solution? He abandoned teaching and, with his wife and young son, moved to the USA to start up a pig farm operation with his father in South Carolina. 

Working with his father, also an established creative problem-solver, it quickly became obvious to him that as a way forward this partnership would not work. He returned to the UK with his bewildered wife and son and joined the RAF as a Physical Education Officer. This was the beginning of a wonderful sixteen years he has often admitted where he was paid to lead expeditions to many classic adventurous areas across most of Europe and the USA.. 

An obstacle arose before him even in the RAF. Faced early on in his first tour of duty as the Physical Education lead on his unit, he faced an almost complete ban on the use of military vehicles for non operational journeys. His solution, was characteristically creative. He resurrected – from a farm – where it had languished abandoned – his old bus. Beaky converted and pressed this tested old vehicle into service as an expedition adventurous activity centre with basic accommodation facilities – 12 beds, a toilet and kitchen, tables and a roof rack. and he continued his career as prolific adventurous training specialist operating wherever his expeditions went. This vehicle offered a basic level of comfort as an adventurous training vehicle. A travelling outdoor centre.  A number of replacement buses followed in the early footsteps of his original twenty-plus-year old stalwart little bus.

Over the years a bemused cadre of senior officers watched on nervously as Beaky’s bus – as it was universally described – mutated from the old AEC of the schoolboy era progressively to much more modern vehicles, culminating eventually in a luxury Volvo coach recently removed from the Glasgow to London overnight express service : the old bus was traded up gradually to the ones below.

and then in 1987 with the support of a friend from his Loughborough days, eventually he acquired and converted a double decker bus into a bloody big camper van that accommodated – transported, catered for and slept eighteen people. It travelled all over Europe on expeditions :- mountaineering, climbing, canoeing, skiing or Surf skiing- to Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, Pyrenees, Alps, and cycling treks across Europe and so many other beautiful places.

In 1992 Beaky, an experienced ski racer, took charge of the RAF Ski team; a role where he found himself working directly for an extremely senior RAF ASir Vice Marshall and RAF Board member. He led the Team armed with this immense leverage effectively so that racers were released from duty to participate for extended periods. He held this position for the three years that he was in charge of the RAF Ski Team. He developed the programme hugely into a tour gigantic tour, training and racing across the US and Europe. A tour that began in mid November in the USA for nine weeks and then migrated to competitions across Europe from France to Italy, Austria and Germany before eventually returning to the UK after 23 weeks of constant skiing and racing 

Three years was enough hands-on leadership and he handed this role over for the 1995 season when he was due to leave the Service.

Beaky left the RAF in 1995 and his career took a whole new direction. Somehow he convinced a consultancy firm to take him on as a management consultant. He certainly had considerable experience as a leader where he had faced and surmounted enormous challenges on a great many expeditions and eventually as head of Training Design. It was asr he has explained, as expedition and RAF Ski Team Manager, where he gathered huge sponsorships and when he personally led and managed the 66 person squad on its travel across the World that is leadership was most sustainedly challenged.  

It took a considerable leap of faith nonetheless to move from the leadership world of the RAF to the wide open plains and high-wire act with no safety net world of a management consultant tasked with identifying and introducing potential solutions to the boards and senior managers of large companies. The first of which he began work with when only three weeks out of the RAF. It was a nationally well known bank.

 At this juncture Beaky met and in time moved to live with the woman who would become his second wife. Unsurprisingly, his first marriage had eventually foundered some years earlier, before he left the RAF. His fledgling relationship with his new partner did remarkably well to even survive the work demands and changes required of him in his new role. ‘An enormous challenge that nearly broke me,’ is how Beaky describes  that time, when he looks back, on that first year of this new employment as a management consultant. Gradually, he mastered his craft and he rolled out many successful projects over the following 23 years.

In the period 1999 – 2000, he mounted a management buy out of the firm for which he had worked since 1995 and two years later he then merged his firm with a much larger consultancy with over a hundred consultants and he became a board member of the combined larger firm.

It was during this period he experienced two things, one positive and one disastrous.. He broke his neck skiing, and was an invalid for months and he picked up a new and stimulating new role. Asked by Warwick University initially, to deliver a single lecture to a cohort of MSc students from AstraZenica – Beaky tacked the task onto an evening at the end of a day’s consultancy in London. Passing Warwick on his route home along the M40, he popped into the University to deliver his lecture. This barely planned, one and a half hour talk was so well received that Warwick called on Beaky regularly thereafter for the following 15 years, to deliver a widening series of lectures on a number topics for their MSc and degree courses to mainly mature students. 

 ‘It was a pleasure to teach these obviously bright, motivated  and experienced middle to senior experienced managers in the stimulating atmosphere of a university.  I was by far the least academically qualified member of the faculty but my extensive, (35-years experience of both hands-on leadership and management) and consultancy experience.was a USP valued by his students and colleagues. He eventually worked closely with the Boards of more than a hundred companies, ”I suspect this meant that I brought a refreshingly real world, coalface experience to my slant of the offer to students on a programme that otherwise comprised mainly academic theory.

In 2013 two big changes arrived in Beaky’s life. He and his long term partner married after about 20 years together and he began to write. Initially he wrote as a relaxation activity that he turned to for an hour or so at the end of a typically 12-hour working day.  The first stories were actually written much earlier when his two children were still young. They were amusing anecdotes under the title Tarzanabitxz, written to be read aloud and entertain his two children and their friends.

Beaky returned to writing in around 2011/12 and the first tale of book length he wrote was called The Thirty Year Rule. Much later, having languished in his laptop for years this tale was eventually dusted off, edited and offered around agents seeking a publisher until picked up in 2025. This is the novel that has recently been published. In November 2025. His novel finally made it out into world, renamed ‘A Legacy of Silence.’ 

Beaky retired from consultancy in 2018 and is now author of a second novel – perhaps the second in what may become a series – called ‘Time In a Place.’ This second novel should be published later this year, either just before Christmas orbearly next year.

In addition to the original Tarzanabitz stories that have not yet been offered for publishing, Beaky has also written a series of five children’s books aimed at the 6-10 year old reader. These may be offered for publication next year.  There is currently an illustrator fashioning some pictures for these books..

Finally, to bring this bio up to date, Beaky also provides posts that are published regularly in a Blog called –  beakysblather.com

So that’s the backstory of the author, Beaky in 2025. son of the Ordinary man series in this blog.