Beames was born in the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, a few hours after the death of William IV and the consequent ascent of Queen Victoria to the English throne.

Beames arrived in India in 1858 to work in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), serving in the Punjab from March 1859 to late 1861.

To the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, Beames contributed essays on Chand Bardoi and other old Hindi authors and studies on the antiquities and history of Odisha (1870–1883).

The classicists remember his celebrated Comparative Grammar of the Aryan Languages of India and his essays in Indian Antiquary and Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society.

Likewise, well-known Bengali scholar Rajendralal Mitra who came to study the temples of Cuttack declared that there was no need to have a separate language for a mere 2 million Odia population.

Pandit Kanti Chandra Bhattacharya, a teacher of Balasore Zilla School, published a little pamphlet named "Udiya Ekti Swatantray Bhasha Noi" (Odia not an independent language) where Mr. Bhattacharya claimed that Odia was not a separate and original form of language and was a mere corruption of Bengali.

Beames, who stayed for a considerable time in Odisha and worked for the survival of Odia language, said on the topic: [T]here exists in the present day an active controversy between the literary heads of [Bengal and Orissa].

Basque should also be stamped out, and the same argument would apply to Romaic or Modern Greek, and would justify the Russians in trying to eradicate Polish, or the Austrians in annihilating Czech.

Moreover, it is far beyond the power of the handful of English and Bengalis to stamp out the mother-tongue of all these millions, and it may be added that any forcible measures of repression would be entirely foreign and repugnant to the spirit of our policy.

In "On a Copper Plate Grant from Balasore AD 1483", he argued that Odia script had developed from a southern variety of Kutila type.

This he clearly stated in a deposition to the Aitchison Committee which looked into the possibility of equalising the salaries of all officials, British and Indian, in the ICS at the time of the Ilbert Bill controversy in 1883.

Beames was a die-hard conservative who allowed his personal preferences to colour his professional judgements and interactions with his Indian juniors in the ICS.