Beresford, who was of Irish descent,[3] was born in the port town of Birkenhead in what is now the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in the county of Merseyside.
[1][2] Beresford had his first engagement at the Landestheater Linz, where he sang the role of Wolfram von Eschenbach in Tannhäuser as a baritone in 1953.
[1][2] In Linz, he sang among others in Ruggiero Leoncavallo's opera Edipo Re, his last and only posthumously premiered stage work, of which a complete recording was also produced in 1960 by Österreichischer Rundfunk with the ensemble of the Linzer Landestheater.
[1][2] In the 1965/66 season, Beresford sang the title role in Nabucco at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in each of its new productions, where he "found baritone sequences of harrowing, masculine intensity, especially for the despair of the humiliated and benighted king", and Tonio in Bajazzo.
In the 1963/64 season, he made a guest appearance at the Cologne Opera as Count Tomski in The Queen of Spades[7] In June 1964, he sang his only Vienna premiere at the Vienna State Opera as Mandryka in an Arabella new production conducted by Joseph Keilberth to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss.
In the 1982/83 season, he made guest appearances as Kalaf in Turandot at the Stadttheater Bremerhaven and as the "veritable" title character "with stentorian tones" in Otello at the Theater Heidelberg.
There are a few recordings of Beresford's voice as a baritone and tenor, among others so-called "cross-sections" of the operas Rigoletto and Margarethe (as Valentin).
[14] There also exists a live recording of a Tannhäuser performance at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1972 with Beresford in the title role under the musical direction of Erich Leinsdorf.