Thomas Barbot Beale
(1805-1889)
4 March 1861

Volume 2, page 258, sitting number 2321.

Born at Edmonton in the Borough of Enfield on 19 October 1805, Thomas Barbot Beale was the son of Daniel Beale of Millfield House, Edmonton, and his wife Elizabeth née Barbot. He was baptised at All Saints, Edmonton, on 27 May 1806. 

According to Wikipedia, Daniel Beale was ‘a Scottish merchant and fur trader active in the Far East mercantile centres of Bombay, Canton and Macau as well as at one time the Prussian consul in China.’ According to the same source, Daniel had a younger brother named Thomas who was ‘a Scottish naturalist, opium speculator and general merchant operating in the Far East.’

The younger Thomas was educated, at least partially, at Winchester. An East India Company directory of 1823 lists him as ‘attached to the college’ (presumably Haileybury). 

A later General Register of the EIC gives details of his subsequent career in India. He arrived there on 3 October 1824. He was at first an ‘Assistant to the Magistrate and Collector of Furruckabad’ in Uttar Pradesh and he then held the same position at Sarun in Kashmir. By 1828 he was the ‘Officiating Collector and Deputy Opium Agent at Sarun’ and in 1831 he became the ‘Joint-Magistrate and Deputy Collector of Goruckpore.’ In September 1834 he ‘Proceeded to Europe on Furlough’ and finally on 22 December 1839 he was classified as ‘Out of Service (having exceeded his five years absence from India).’

In 1838 married Jane Hill, daughter of E.C. Hill, Esq., of London. 

Newspaper announcements of his daughter's marriage in 1861 described him as ‘of Westbourne Terrace, and Brettenham Park, Suffolk.’

He appears on the 1861 census, a ‘Landed Proprietor’ living with his wife Jane and daughter Henrietta at Brettenham Hall in Suffolk. 

His only son Daniel Chauncy Beale died, aged 34, on 14 August 1877. 

Thomas Barbot Beale died, aged 83, on 3 August 1889 at Brettenham Park in Suffolk. He was 83 years old. 

He left an estate valued at £176,153. 

His younger sister Susanna Preston Beale was the grandmother of the Irish nationalist Maud Gonnes.