After beginning his career as a historian and lecturer, following World War II, Beeley joined the British diplomatic service and served in posts and ambassadorships related to the Middle East.
Beeley was born in Manchester, England to an upper middle-class London merchant in 1909,[2] and studied at Highgate School and The Queen's College, Oxford, gaining a First in Modern History.
[1] Together with Bevin, he negotiated "the Portsmouth Treaty" with Iraq (signed on 15 January 1948), which was accompanied by a British undertaking to withdraw from Palestine in such a fashion as to provide for swift Arab occupation of all its territory.
"[1] Archived 17 July 2012 at the Wayback MachineBeeley spent 1949 to 1950 as the Deputy Head of Mission in Copenhagen, moving on to Baghdad from 1950 to 1953 and Washington, D.C. from 1953 to 1955,[1] where he worked closely with the US State Department.
[1] After he recovered, Beeley returned in June 1956 to be the Assistant Under-Secretary for Middle East affairs,[4] where he remained until 1958,[1] living in London's St John's Wood.
[1] Here Beeley was engaged in efforts to solve the Buraimi dispute as well as the UN's peacekeeping mission in the Congo (Léopoldville), and developed a close relationship with UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.
[5] Leaving this post in 1964,[3] Beeley spent the years 1964 to 1967 as UK Representative to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva and was then reappointed as the Special Envoy of Foreign Secretary George Brown and was subsequently ambassador to Egypt from 1967 to 1969, retiring from the Diplomatic Service at this time.
[3] In 1971 he and Christopher Mayhew were instrumental in the establishment of a periodical on current events in the Arab world, Middle East International, of which he became vice-chairman.
They divorced in 1953 and he then married Patricia Brett-Smith in 1958, with whom he had another daughter, Vanessa Beeley, who is a blogger known for her reporting on the conflict in Syria and her support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.