R. John Beedham (1879 - 1975)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Professional reproductive wood engraver. He was apprenticed aged 13 for six years to an old established firm of wood engravers, Hare & Company in Essex Street, Strand, London. By the end of his apprenticeship he found that the skills that he had acquired had been replaced by photo-mechanical processes of reproduction of images. However, he was able to use his skills for teaching and 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.

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’s death in 1940. He also worked with Robert Gibbings. 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 (e.g. he engraved Gill’s initial letters for the Golden Cockerel Press edition of Lamia), and produced facsimile wood engravings.

Beedham also worked for the Saint Dominic’s Press, the Gregynog Press, the Golden Cockerel Press and the Shakespeare Head Press among others. At the Saint Dominic’s Press he wrote a book on the technical aspects of wood engraving, 1st published in 1920, which ran into seven editions.