Beaky's Blather

Graduating from RAF Officer Training didn’t move my dad any closer to the field of heroism in the way that it had offered Uncle Daniel the opportunity to make his extraordinary contribution.

 (Check out Wikipedia under Daniel Marcus Beak VC for the full extraordinary story)

Graduation as an officer who had been a child prodigy did not pass unnoticed by those whose role it was to staff the wartime specialist research centres springing up around the country. The most famous of these was at Bletchley Park, the most celebrated and possibly the only one today that anyone can recall. There were others however and my father was posted to one immediately he finished training. He told me only one thing about it. He worked under the direct supervision of a Dr Beeching, later to become a household name once he stamped his considerable powers of reasoning onto the task of rendering the nationalised railway system profitable. A project universally referred to since the early 1960s as the Beeching Cuts. 

Damaging as these cuts were for the hundreds of small communities that lost access to the railway system, Beeching may one day perhaps be nominated as the patron saint of traffic-free cycling. So many of today’s wonderful cycle routes now utilise the access and mild gradients these nature-freeways now offer

Long ago in the 1980s, I asked my father where it was that he had been sent but he wouldn’t say. This secrecy, commonly honoured by so many of those involved, was actually a requirement of the Official Secrets Act that bound all participants until the 1990s I understand. The only thing I ever discovered, as he refused to discuss it however was something that I learned on a visit that I made during the very earliest days following the opening of Bletchley Park to those interested in a guided tour.  They have a book there that at the end of the tour they invited us as visitors to review and identify whether we had an ancestor amongst its alma Mater. I have never in my entire life to date ever actually met anyone, anywhere outside my family with the same surname as me. Beak is not one you would often I come across, so you may imagine the surprise I experienced looking down the list of names of people beginning with letter ‘B’ who worked there on the code breaking endeavour to read that there are listed, two Beaks. 

Apart from that I know that it was on a research station somewhere that he worked throughout the war, but where, he never told me or perhaps anyone else. I do know that he never fired a gun and was never given an opportunity to display any form of daring or ‘pre-eminent act of valour in the face of the enemy.’

De-mobbed in 1945, he faced the by now, familiar challenge of finding a job. Married with two sons and a scarcely useful degree in Marine Biology, with ten years’ apparently unrelated experience as either a woodworker or in a secret research role that he was not permitted to discuss did little to suggest a good fit to many employment opportunities.  So, as you might expect, he secured the position somehow of manager/director of a brickworks in Thornbury Gloucestershire. Why anyone saw this as good fit, logical step I fail to understand. But that is what it states clearly as father’s occupation on my birth certificate in 1949. I was born in Thornbury, Mother’s occupation isn’t mentioned. She was however an ex-teacher, having been obliged (so unfairly) to resign her teaching post on marriage.

My father continued in the role of manager/director of the Brickworks until 1950 when he and the family moved to Edinburgh as he had made what seems to me to have been a logical career move. He secured a position suited to his degree in Marine Biology in an organisation called the Scottish Highlands & Islands Salmon and Trout Fisheries Service. He was a Civil Servant, and I was now to become a Scot. Never having known anything else, I adopted my new nationality with ease and grew naturally into a Scottish accent with the sensitivity and attitudes most appropriately represented by the Scottish National Emblem, the Thistle.

Dad, having fathered an as yet unborn fourth child, a girl, promptly left his wife and children, and the Civil Service, divorced and remarried. Simultaneously, he made the employment move that puzzles me more than any in his bizarre career. He took on the management of a boat yard and hire company, based on the Edinburgh to Glasgow, Grand Union Canal. I recall weekend visits where, aged 4 or so I remember clearly rowing alone. I recall particularly one afternoon when I took out and rowed a single-seat racing skiff – a notoriously unstable racing skull – for miles along the canal in the direction of Glasgow. Child safety supervision was not a significant consideration then I imagine.

In 1955 my father and his wife emigrated to Canada, so my close involvement with him reduced for some years to a regular exchange of airmail letters. Thery moved to Ottawa in Ontario and opened Canada’s first environment consultancy. Capitalising on their recent experience of emigrating, Dad wrote a book called “we came to Canada,” I’ve found it on the Web. It was still published in Britain in 1959; a self-help guide to would-be Canadian emigrants.

The nascent consultancy firm, run from their Ottawa home survived on fairly thin pickings for two years with my father as its sole source of expertise on offer and his wife its office manager and staff, when a monumental piece of good fortune brought a huge opportunity. Hitherto, across Canada many pulp and paper mills, most built in the northern territories of Canada, had been unrestricted in the waste that they discharged; they could dump their wastewater back into the rivers causing terrible pollution. The Government in Ottawa passed the first of what became an increasingly rigorous set of regulations governing the effluent outflow from paper mills. 

The first, and at that stage only Canadian Environment consultancy firm available to identify the specific treatment plant and procedure required by each plant anywhere in Canada was my father’s small enterprise based from their home. T.W Beak Environmental Consultants, the biggest, smallest but crucially the only specialist consultancy offering this service in Canada qualified to analyse and direct the size and type of effluent plant each site required.  Every Pulp and Papermill across the country was obliged to introduce an individually tailored treatment plant to their plant within a set period of only a few years. TW Beak Environmental Consultancy set about winning as many of these consultancy contracts as possible

T.W. Beak himself embarked on a nation-wide tour of every Pulp and Paper Company and signed them up to a consultancy contract. He would survey the rivers downstream from each pulp and paper mill and direct the type and cleaning capability of the effluent plant each must introduce and then monitor its effectiveness. With a head start on zero competition, my father began to build a very successful business that grew rapidly, and he operated it for the next ten years before selling it to the gigantic Sandwell Corporation 1966. I do not know how much the business sold for except it must have been in the millions.

Wisely I suspect, Sandwell’s did not require my father to continue as an employee however a condition of the sale was that TW Beak continue in a role as ambassador/advisor. He addressed conferences in cities spread from San Francisco  to Moscow and – as he was now recognised Internationally as the preeminent expert in the field – Sandwells bound him with a non-competition agreement in exchange for an annual pension of a quarter of a million dollars a year. In 1966 this was a considerable bung.

This however was not the extra ordinary thing that I most wanted to describe in this ordinary man’s life. Between 1955 and 1966, whilst building up the very successful consultancy firm described above, dad moved home and business from Ottowa to Kingston Ontario. He found and purchased a very attractive, virgin lakeside plot of land on what would rapidly develop – once houses were built along the lake Ontario shoreline of Collins Bay – into a strip of properties known locally as Millionaires Row.  

Long before he sold the consultancy, whilst was growing a rapidly developing  business he decided to build on his newly acquired plot on the lakeside a house and set of laboratories from which to operate his business. When I say build, I mean exactly that. He took the architect plans and, using local tradesmen, organised and supervised the self-build of a huge house on top of the TW Beak Consultancy Laboratories. The garden ran down to the lake where he introduced a large jetty that stretched out into the lake.  The Jetty was necessary as, before he finished building the house, he decided that he would also have a yacht. And the yacht he wanted was one capable of going to sea, far to sea.  As he discovered when seeking a house builder, he could find no one that met his requirements in the steel boat building field, so he resorted to his standard approach. He found a boat designer in Chesapeake Bay in South Viginia who had a design for suitably extreme weather capable yacht; a 65-foot overall length, 29 ton, deep-sea-capable steel yacht. It was to be a two masted Ketch and employing a local welder, he set about building the huge boat himself, in his garden. He dug a dry dock into the lawn down by the lake-shore and laid down the keel. It took two years, but he successfully completed both the house and yacht and opened the dry dock allowing the lake in and launched the yacht, Wahine. It floated out into the lake, and he tied it alongside the huge dock. 

What did he want a deep-sea-capable yacht for you might ask, based as he was on a lake over a thousand miles from the nearest deep-sea opportunity? I will explain next.

An Ordinary Man?? – Part four will explain