12 Facts About Francis Beckett

Francis Beckett was born on 12 May 1945 and is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian.

Francis Beckett has written biographies of Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

Francis Beckett has written on education for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent and is the editor of Third Age Matters, the national magazine published by the University of the Third Age.

Francis Beckett was born in 1945 in Chenies, Buckinghamshire, 21 miles from the centre of London, because his father, John Beckett, just released from wartime internment because of his fascist past, was under a form of house arrest, unable to live within 20 miles of the capital or to travel more than five miles away from his home.

Francis Beckett took A-levels at a London further education college and studied history and philosophy at Keele University.

Francis Beckett worked as a journalist, a teacher, an adult education lecturer, and West Midlands organiser for the housing charity Shelter, before becoming head of the press and publications department at the National Union of Students.

Francis Beckett has written regularly on education for The Guardian and The Independent for 15 years and was education correspondent of the New Statesman for seven.

Francis Beckett has written on politics, industrial relations, business and management, and the theatre, and edited two management publications.

Francis Beckett has written a biography of his own father, John, a Labour MP from 1925 to 1931 and whip of the Independent Labour Party group of MPs; later chief propagandist for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and co-founder of the National Socialist League, who was interned during the second world war for his fascist activities.

Francis Beckett returned to the subject of his own background with Fascist in the Family which Martin Bright in The Jewish Chronicle described as "part political history, part memoir: an attempt to come to terms with the horror of growing up with a fascist as a father".

Francis Beckett's plays are published by Samuel French, having been performed on the London fringe or on radio, and his short stories appear in the Young Oxford series published by Oxford University Press.

Francis Beckett is editor of the national magazine published by the University of the Third Age.