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Back to all news
Members of the St Paul’s Community are invited to share their messages of condolence, following the sad loss of Dr Ed Beesley, Head of History at St Paul’s.
Ed’s wife is extremely grateful for the kind words she has received so far and wanted the school to share this message with the Pauline community:
Normally, I am extremely assiduous in writing thank-you cards for the gifts I receive but, after today, this would be an Herculean task so please excuse the impersonal nature of this message.
Ed was loved and respected wherever he worked and it is an enormous help to Augusta, Theo and me to see this marked so palpably by the hundreds of cards and messages we have already received. We have long since run out of vases for beautiful flowers and the massive box which just arrived with so many envelopes, gifts and expressions of love from SPGS and SPS is quite overwhelming. The Rugby community also holds Ed deep in their hearts and so we are drawing on our collective good memories to keep us strong. Ed will live with us forever, of course, but you have all already played a huge part in supporting us and I know he would love you all the more for it.
With our best wishes, Lizzie, Augusta and Theo.
If you would like to share your message on this page, please add your comment in the below box.
If you wish to include your name with your message, please add it to the message box as well as the field marked ‘name’.
Dr Beesley was transformative in my education. After a divisive period, his calm and wit restored a love of history in me. He was immensely talented, deeply clever, and never patronising. He never taught us what to think, but rather how to think — I developed my ideas about everything under his watchful eye. Above all else, I hope he knew just how good an educator he was, but I take some solace from something he said to me at one of our last meetings. I told him I planned to be a teacher. He leaned in with a conspiratorial grin and told me it was the best job in the world.
I was only taught by Dr Beesley in the odd cover lesson, but even on these brief occasions his incredible knowledge and enthusiasm for History shone through. Despite the misfortune of never having been formally taught by him, I was lucky enough to get to know him as a person, and I will always remember his kindness, wry sense of humour and amazing sense of fun. Dr Beesley had time for everyone whether they were a pupil of his or not, and my thoughts are with his family and friends at this extremely difficult time.
Dr Edward Beesley – or simply ‘Ed’, as he always insisted I call him in recent years, despite my best efforts to continue to show him the deference I believed he deserved by continuing to refer to him as ‘Sir’ – was a man of singular qualities. A rip-roaringly funny interlocutor, a fanatical Federer fan, a fierce competitor on the tennis court, and a superb scholar, who was counted as a friend and held in high academic esteem by more than one of the living giants of seventeenth-century British historiography, Ed was also that rarest of things: a schoolmaster of genius. Never, despite his vast store of knowledge and enormous erudition, did he make any student feel remotely intellectually inadequate. Never did he disparage, demean, or lose his temper. Never did he permit anything – not least the arduous journey he made to and from the Midlands every weekend – to affect the quality of his teaching. He was, quite simply, always brilliant.
The intellectual debts I owe to him are considerable: My enduring fascination with the political tumults that rent Britain apart in the seventeenth century; my rather unfashionable reverence of the work of the late Professor Conrad Russell; and my appreciation of the polyvalent meaning of that most crucial of terms, ‘revolution’, are all the direct fruits of his influence. But far more important than them is the profound gratitude I will always feel for the inspiration and encouragement he offered me when I was at my lowest, when I began to question whether the path I had chosen for myself – his path – was the right one.
The sorrow I feel at the realisation that we will not be able to honour our commitment to finally seeing one another at his beloved Blue Anchor in early January 2023 is ineffable.
‘Light lie the earth, and flourish green the bough!’
Ed Beesley was our son Louis’ history teacher all of last year, in the 4th form, and Louis thought he was the best teacher he’d ever had. He really made the subject come to life for him. Ed also headed the St Paul’s tennis programme, and both Louis and our other son Josh are heavily involved with tennis and really enjoyed and appreciated having him in charge of the school offering. Both our boys were devastated to hear about Ed’s loss and, although we knew him less well, the times we had met him he came across as a lovely and dedicated man. His loss has hit us all very hard, and he will be very much missed. We offer his family our sincerest condolences.
Albert Ferro and Alethea Cooper
As parents of a son taught by Dr Beesley and a daughter at the Girls School, we have been very taken aback by the news. Our teenage son enjoyed his lessons with Dr Beesley without fail – he found his unique way to bring history to life for the boys, managed to captivate their attention, made their time together intriguing and made learning an easy and seamless process – pretty much the gold standard of teaching. This unique skillset was wrapped in a very friendly and kind demeanour. He will leave a large hole at the Boys school and will hold a special place in the heart of our son. Our thoughts and in particular our daughter’s thoughts are with Mrs Beesley during this difficult time.