R. John Beedham

By the end of his apprenticeship he found that the skills that he had acquired had been replaced by photo-mechanical processes of reproduction of images.

[2] He was a lifelong vegetarian, pacifist and a conscientious objector, and found it impossible to work on the blocks that Robert Gibbings was engraving for The History of Bovril.

He carried on engraving to the age of 83, and died in 1975, his ashes buried in the graveyard at Brill, Buckinghamshire, where he spent the final years of his life with his daughter Ruth and her husband Robert Wickenden.

The work that he carried out was the clearing of white areas from the block when Gill and Gibbings had finished the main engraving.

He reproduced the wood engravings for editions of Observationes Anatomicae Selectiores Amstelodamensium and The Book of Orders, printed by Gibbings in 1938 and 1940 at the University of Reading.

At the Saint Dominic's Press he wrote a book on the technical aspects of wood engraving [5] which ran into seven editions.

His faithful reproductions, however, lack the vigour and artistic sensitivity of blocks engraved by William Morris using the same designs.