Background
The son of Arthur C. Beck Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, of Heydon, Norfolk, Beck was educated at Gresham"s School (where he was a cadet Central Saint Martins in the Officers" Training Corps) and Magdalene College, Cambridge.
The son of Arthur C. Beck Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, of Heydon, Norfolk, Beck was educated at Gresham"s School (where he was a cadet Central Saint Martins in the Officers" Training Corps) and Magdalene College, Cambridge.
There, he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1931 and proceeded to Master of Arts in 1944.
In the 1930s Beck was a peace campaigner, but in 1938, a year before the Second World War, he joined the British Army. After the war he became head master of Cheam School, serving there from 1947 to 1963. In 1932, while working at Sandringham, he became a member and local representative of the New Commonwealth Society, a group campaigning to secure world peace by giving the League of Nations a military capability.
In December 1938 Beck was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Royal Norfolk Regiment.
During the Second World War, he continued to serve in the same regiment, becoming adjutant of its 1st Battalion. In 1942 he passed the Staff College, and from 1942 to 1946 was brigade major of the 35th and 1st Army Tank Brigades.
In 1947 he was appointed as head master of Cheam. Beck called a press conference at the school and made an unsuccessful appeal to the news media to be left in peace, but in the eighty-eight days of Charles"s first term, no fewer than sixty-eight of them saw stories about the prince and the school carried in a national newspaper.
Beck twice caned Charles for "ragging".
In 1959 he had resigned his commission in the Regular Army Reserve of Officers. In retirement he lived at Hopton House, near Diss, Norfolk, dying in 2002 at the age of 92. In 1946 Beck married Anne Frances, a daughter of Douglas Crossman, of Royston, Hertfordshire.
In retirement, Beck became the Secretary of the West Suffolk Horse Show Society.