Page 207 - They Also Served

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Tufton Beamish 1937.
The son of an admiral, Tufton Victor
Hamilton Beamish was born in January
1917. Educated at Stowe School,
he entered Sandhurst in 1935 and
was commissioned into the Royal
Northumberland Fusiliers two years
later. Serving initially with the 1st
Battalion in Egypt and then Palestine, he
developed a lifelong interest in the Arab
nations of the region. Joining the BEF
as a company commander in the 2nd
Battalion, he was wounded during the retreat to Dunkirk and later awarded the MC.
Posted onto the staff in Singapore, Beamish avoided capture by the Japanese by commandeering a small boat and, with seven others, rowing over 200 miles to Sumatra. However, this, too, had fallen, so they set a new course for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and eventually reached safety after a journey of over 2,000 miles. After working as an intelligence officer in India, he served with the Eighth Army in North Africa and took part in the invasion of Italy, retiring from the army at the end of the war in Europe with the rank of captain and MiD for his war service.
Beamish’s father had entered politics and had been the long-serving Conservative MP for Lewes. He announced his retirement in 1945 and his son was selected to fight the July 1945 general election. Despite the Labour landslide, Beamish won the seat and represented the constituency for the next 29 years. A member of the executive of the influential 1922 Committee of back-bench MPs for many years, he was also an opposition spokesman on defence. However, he never sought ministerial office and turned down several offers of government positions. Instead, Beamish campaigned on local Sussex matters and, as a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, supported the private member’s bill that later became the Protection of Birds Act 1954.
Beamish wrote the book Must Night Fall? on the danger of Soviet domination of Europe, and Half Marx, warning against the rise of the extreme left in the Labour Party, as well as an account of the 1264 Battle of Lewes. Knighted in 1961, Beamish’s
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