[1] He was educated in Sheffield at King Edward VII School, where he was Head Prefect in 1951 (photo), before going up to New College, Oxford, with an Open Scholarship in Classics.
In his later post-BBC years, after divorcing his first wife, he married the novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán,[1] with whom he had a child, Alexander Morton George MacBeth.
After a divorce, he moved with his new wife, Penny, to Ireland to live at Moyne Park, Abbeyknockmoy, near Tuam in County Galway.
A few months later, George MacBeth was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease, of which he died in early 1992.
In the last poetry he wrote, MacBeth provides an anatomy of a cruel disease and the destruction it caused two people deeply in love.