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Harry Geoffrey Beasley was a British anthropologist and museum curator who developed an important ethnographic collection during the early 20th century that is now mainly held in various British museums. Beasley inherited the North Kent Brewery and became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. With his wife, Beasley settled in Cranmore House in Chislehurst and there set up the Cranmore Ethnographical Museum which eventually held more than 6,000 objects of ethnographical interest. The Beasley's collected objects from across Europe, buying from auction houses and local museums to expand the collection, which contained material from the Pacific, Asia, Africa and Northwestern America. He died in 1939 and his collection was stored with the British Museum during the war, fortunately, as the Cranmore Museum was destroyed by bombing. After the war substantial portions of the collection were passed to the British Museum, the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Merseyside County Museum. Other pieces were sold by his widow and after her death in 1974 by their daughters. (Biography from Wikipedia.)

Born: 1881
Died: 1939