After moving to Dublin in 1950, he established the Chester Beatty Library on Shrewsbury Road to house his collection; it opened to the public in 1954.

[citation needed] He bought a house on the East Side of New York and set up an office on Broadway as an independent mining consultant.

In 1912 he purchased Baroda House in Kensington Palace Gardens and moved with his two young children to London the following year.

The First World War delayed the company's expansion, but during the 1920s the business expanded to acquire interests in countries including the USSR, the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and the Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone.

[citation needed] An early family anecdote recalls that, as a young boy, Chester caught the collection bug, bidding at auction for mining samples.

[6] He recalled attending an auction with his father at the age of ten, and bidding 10 cents on a piece of pink calcite.

[8] Before his move to London he had already started collecting Chinese snuff bottles and Japanese netsuke, inro and tsuba.

The dating specifically of BP I (p45) to the mid-third century moved the understanding of when Christians accepted the four gospels as canonical to earlier than had previously been presumed.

In 1917, recovering from a bout of pneumonia and Spanish influenza, Beatty, Edith and his daughter Ninette, traveled by boat to Japan and China.

[5] During this trip he acquired painted albums and scrolls and he continued to purchase Chinese, Japanese and south-east Asian manuscripts, textiles and artefacts for the rest of his life.

As in his business life, Beatty relied on the advice of experienced specialists but made the final decision on any purchase himself.

While she was buying Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and French furniture, Beatty was acquiring important Islamic material, including an exceptional collection of illuminated copies of the Quran, and Mughal, Turkish and Persian manuscripts.

His eye was drawn to richly illustrated material, fine bindings and beautiful calligraphy, but he was also deeply committed to preserving texts for their historic value.

Though in later cases he would purchase an object and simply donate it, for the manuscript now known as the Minto Album, Beatty amicably agreed to split the folios.

The lot was sold to Sir Eric Maclagan, Director of the British Museum, as part of a joint-purchase agreement with Beatty for $3,950.

He received a belated knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1954 Birthday Honours List for his contribution to the wartime effort.

Political deviations from his free-market values, coupled with increased foreign exchange restrictions impacted both his personal and collecting interests in Britain.

The reason often cited is Beatty's growing frustration with post-war Britain, not least the defeat of the Conservative party in the 1945 general election.

The Chester Beatty Library on Shrewsbury Road and the collection it housed was bequeathed to a trust on behalf of the people of Ireland.

[5] Edith Beatty was a racehorse owner and breeder, and well-known for her collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist paintings, antique French furniture and objet d'art.