Beeching, Henry Charles

(1859-1919)

   He was born in London to a family of ship-owners and bankers from Bexhill, Sussex. Graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1883, he was ordained into the Anglican Church. He held various church positions: curate of St. Matthew's, Mossley Hill, Liverpool; curate of Yattendon, Berkshire; chaplain of Lincoln's Inn; and professor of pastoral theology at King's College, London. His last appointment, in 1911, was dean of Norwich cathedral. He died of heart failure and his ashes were buried in the Cathedral. As an undergraduate he contributed to Waifs and Strays, an undergraduate periodical, and went on to write books on doctrine and essays. In 1895 Love in a Garden and Other Poems was published, followed in 1898 by Pages from a Private Diary-having previously been published in the Cornhill Magazine. With John William MacKail and Bowyer Nichols (see entries) he published Mensae Secundae, 1879, Love in Idleness, 1883, and Love's Looking-glass, 1891. Some of his other poems: "A Song of the Three Kings," "First Snow," "From the Window in December," "Going Down Hill on a Bicycle," "Knowledge after Death," "Prayers," "The Blackbird," "The Dry Lake."

   Sources: A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. James H. Trott, ed. Cumberland House Publishing, 1999. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Neil Philip, ed. Oxford University Press, 1996. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Quiller-Couch, ed. Oxford University Press, 1971.