Help with a Name

[Chris Grimshaw]

Team

Struggling on this one Lt Col G Beazeley ??  R Engineers.  Can't find him anywhere if I'm reading the surname right.

Chris

[Alan Baker]

What period do you think this is? I have found a Lt GG Beazley on FWR from the Army List 1947

[Nick Colley]

It's November 1918, Alan. He was a PoW of the Turks.

Chris, I decipher the name to be the same as what you make it.

chrs
N

[Alan Baker]

On Ancestry there are records of Major, later Lt Col GA Beazeley of the Royal Engineers. Also found him on FWR. George Adam Beazeley, born 7th July 1870 in Cornwall. He married in 1900 in India but later his family lived on Jersey, although he is not listed there on the 1911 census

Apparently, he was captured in Mesopotamia in May 1918 and held by the Turks. He was released in early December, report date 2nd December

He was a career soldier - there are records on Ancestry going back to 1892 - but I cannot access the relevant Army Lists.

[Chris Grimshaw]

Alan / Nick

Thanks both, Searched for him in the ICRC records but could't find him.  A lot of the POWs held in Turkey are very difficult to track down.  Quite often the ICRC records only show when they were repatriated.

Cheers Chris

[Chris Grimshaw]

Courtesy of Wipi

Lieutenant-Colonel George Adam Beazeley DSO (7 July 1870 – 8 May 1961) was a British Army officer, surveyor and one of the fathers of aerial photography in surveying, military reconnaissance and archaeology. He was probably the first person to identify aerial archaeology as an independent field.[1]

Beazeley was the son of a civil engineer. He was educated at Chigwell Grammar School and Cherbourg School, Malvern, before training at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich and being commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in February 1890.[2] He attended the School of Military Engineering from 1890 to 1892 and the spent two years with the submarine mining unit in Cork Harbour, Ireland. He was promoted Lieutenant in February 1893.[3] In 1894 he was posted to India, where he spent most of the rest of his career.

He continued to work in submarine mining until 1897, when he changed his specialty to surveying and joined the Survey of India, where he stayed until his retirement in 1925. He was promoted Captain in December 1900[4] and Major in January 1910.[5] He was attached as survey officer to the Somaliland Field Force in 1903–1904, when he was mentioned in despatches.[6]

In October 1916 he was posted to Mesopotamia, where he was in charge of all field survey work on the Tigris front until April 1917, initially assisted by only three British soldiers and about sixteen native porters and orderlies.[7] He also flew many reconnaissance missions and carried out considerable archaeological investigations, both from the air and on the ground. He identified the remains of ancient Samarra[1] and discovered the outlines of ancient canals on the Tigris-Euphrates plain.[8] He was promoted Lieutenant-Colonel in December 1917[9] and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his services on 1 January 1918.[10] On 2 May 1918 he was shot down and captured by the Turks, remaining a prisoner of war until 16 November, just after the end of the war.

In 1919 and from 1921 to 1922 he was attached to the Royal Air Force. He retired from the Army in July 1925,[11] but in 1929 joined the Sudan Air Survey for a year. He and his wife Annette (whom he had married in 1900) retired to Saint Aubin, Jersey, but from 1938 he worked in air raid precautions. He left the Channel Islands for England in 1940, just before the German occupation, and continued to work in ARP until 1942, when he took up office work in Totnes, also in connection with the war. He returned to Jersey after the liberation in July 1945 and spent his retirement living in the Grouville Hall Hotel after Annette died in 1950.

Chris