R. John Beedham

Ralph John Beedham (1879-1975), occupies a unique position in the history of twentieth century wood engraving. He was a formschneider, probably the last person in England to serve an apprenticeship as a professional reproductive wood engraver.

Beedham was born in 1879 in Whitecross Street, Cripplegate, London, and, at the age of 13, was apprenticed for six years to an old established firm of wood engravers, Hare & Company in Essex Street, Strand. By the end of his apprenticeship he found that the skills that he had acquired had been replaced by photo-mechanical processes of reproduction of images.

He was one of three professional reproductive wood engravers who found that he could use his skills for teaching. He taught evening classes in wood engraving at the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography in Bolt Court, where he taught, among others, Noel Rooke, Joan Hassall, Mabel Alleyne and Diana Bloomfield. The other two were Bernard Sleigh, who taught at the Birmingham School of Printing, and W.T. Smith, who taught at the Slade.

He was a lifelong vegetarian, and found it impossible to work on the blocks that Robert Gibbings was engraving for The History of Bovril.

He carried on engraving to the age of 83, and died in 1975, his ashes buried in the graveyard at Brill, Buckinghamshire, where he spent the final years of his life.

In 1917 Beedham went to Ditchling, where he worked with Eric Gill at the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. Gill instructed him in lettering and Beedham became his assistant until Gill died. He worked with Robert Gibbings and became friendly with both. The work that he carried out was the clearing of white areas from the block when Gill and Gibbings had finished the main engraving. This was a time consuming process and the two engravers would have been unable to produce the volume of wood engravings that they did without his help. He also engraved designs by Gill and others (he engraved Gill's initial letters for the Golden Cockerel Press edition of Lamia), and produced facsimile wood engravings. He reproduced the wood engravings for editions of Observationes Anatomicae Selectiores Amstelodamensium and The Book of Orders, printed by Gibbings in 1938 and 1940 at the University of Reading. When Gibbings was producing his engravings for the Limited Editions Club edition of The Voyage of HMS Beagle he cut out four engravings from his copy of the book for Beedham to reproduce.

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