Professor Alfred Felix Landon Beeston 'Freddie' (1911-1995)

Alfred Felix Landon Beeston was born in Barnes, south London, on 23 February 1911. His father (Herbert Arthur Beeston) wished him to be known by his grandfather's and great-grandfather's name, Alfred, while his mother (Edith Mary, née Landon) insisted he be called Felix. His father therefore proposed the 'distinctly Biblical solution, "Let us call him Rogo, because 'I ask' [Latin rogo] you not to use Felix"'. In his undergraduate days he came to be called Freddie, a name by which he was universally known to friends, colleagues and students for the rest of his life, though he remained Rogo to his close family.

He was the first member of his family within living memory to go either to public school or to university. At the age of 14 he was elected a King's Scholar at Westminster School and at 18 won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. From at least the age of ten he had had a passionate interest in foreign languages and while he was receiving 'a thorough training in Latin and Greek' at Westminster, he spent much of his spare time exploring other languages; teaching himself German 'in order to have access to scholarly work in that language'. While he avidly scanned any language manuals he could find 'the more exotic the better', his principal 'interest was in theoretical linguistics, in the structure of a language and its strategies for expressing ideas'. He had 'always had an inclination for specialising in something unusual and exotic' and toyed with the idea of studying Sanskrit or Chinese. However, when he picked up an Arabic grammar in a second-hand bookshop, he began to teach himself as much Arabic as he could, helped by an Arabic Dictionary and a copy of the Koran which he had asked for as school prizes. Thus, it was almost by chance that he concentrated his considerable energies on Arabic, though in later life he also acquired a knowledge of Chinese and a sophisticated understanding of its structures with which he sometimes startled Sinologists.

During his schooldays, he spent many hours 'haunting museums in London, especially the British Museum'. Here, having got to know the contents of the Egyptian galleries 'almost by heart', he discovered a 'series of narrow galleries totally devoid of visitors, being filled with an unattractive ... lot of inscribed stones and bronze tablets, which fired my interest'. Among these were some in Sabaic which he immediately set about copying and transliterating with the aid of a second-hand copy of Theodore Bent's Sacred City of the Ethiopians which had an Appendix on the Axumite inscriptions.