Beasley, Harry Geoffrey (1881-1939)
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Harry Geoffrey Beasley was born in East Plumstead, Kent, in a family from whom he inherited the North Kent Brewery. He was a collector from a very young age, and shared his passion with his wife, Irene Marguerite Beasley (they married in 1914). Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914), Council of the RAI (1921, 1922), Executive Committee of the RAI (1931), RAI Vice President... Read more
Harry Geoffrey Beasley was born in East Plumstead, Kent, in a family from whom he inherited the North Kent Brewery. He was a collector from a very young age, and shared his passion with his wife, Irene Marguerite Beasley (they married in 1914). Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914), Council of the RAI (1921, 1922), Executive Committee of the RAI (1931), RAI Vice President (1932) he resigned in 1937. He was involved in the Council of the Hakluyt Society and was a lifetime member of the Polynesian Society.
He lived in Abbey Wood, Kent, then Haddon Lodge, Shooters Hill, London, and from 1928 on Walden Road, Chislehurst, Kent, where he created the Cranmore Ethnographical Museum.
He left four accession ledgers (first entries from 1898). The Beasleys purchased objects from various sources, including Heinrich Umlauff (as early as 1910; from 1928 Beasley started visiting him annually), William Ockelford Oldman, Samuel G. Fenton, Alfred Walter Francis Fuller and Estelle W. Fuller, Stevens Auction Rooms, and later Sydney Bernard Burney (1928). One of his accession ledgers indicates he purchased a Webster Illustrated Catalogue.
The Beasleys mostly purchased Pacific art, but they also collected art from the northwestern coast of North America, the Arctic, Asia (particularly Japan and Tibet) and Africa (particularly the Kingdom of Benin; they likely had a thousand pieces through the years). They first purchased a bronze Uhunmwu-Elao (Commemorative Head) for £23 at the Stevens Auction Rooms sale of the Norman Burrows collection on 17 April 1923. In 1935, they exchanged with the Bristol Museum a Rarotonga headdress for a Benin commemorative head (King, Waterfield, p.79 – 91).
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Kent, UKExternal biography links
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88 objects
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