Francis Beckett
| Francis Beckett | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
12 May 1945 Chenies, Buckinghamshire |
| Occupation | Journalist, author and contemporary historian |
| Known for | Biographies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown |
| Website | francisbeckett.co.uk |
Francis Beckett (born 12 May 1945) is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian. He has written biographies of Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has also written on education for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent and is the editor of Third Age Matters, the national magazine published by the University of the Third Age. Beckett has been described as "an Old Labour romantic" by Guardian associate editor Michael White.
Francis Beckett was born in 1945 in Chenies, exactly 21 miles from the centre of London, because his father, John Beckett, just released from wartime internment because of his fascist past, was under a form of house arrest, unable to live within 20 miles of the capital or to travel more than five miles away from his home. His mother Anne Cutmore was the common law wife of John Beckett until 1963 when he finally divorced his legal wife Kyrle Bellew.
He was moved from school to school and home to home as his parents' fragile finances ebbed and flowed, eventually spending four years at Beaumont College, a Jesuit boarding school near Windsor, Berkshire, where he claims to have been "force-fed a diet of beating, bullying and religious bigotry.”
He took A-levels at a London further education college and studied history and philosophy at Keele University. There he was chosen by the English Speaking Union to be one of the two British student debaters to tour the USA in 1969.
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