Franz josef popp biography of william hill

Richard John Seaman-Beattie was born in Chichester on the 3rd February 1913.  His father William Beattie-Seaman was a wealthy Scotsman who had married Dick’s mother two years before.  Lillian Graham Pearce was the product of a late Victorian upbringing of privilege.  Doug Nye and Geoffrey Goddard in their book “Dick and George: The Seaman-Monkhouse Letters” (which, if anyone has a spare £200 laying around and fancies getting me a gift, I’d love a copy of) wonderfully describes Lillian as a “ferociously pompous grande dame of absolutely the stiffest corset.”  You wonder, with a description like that, how poor old William ever got the corset undone…  After losing their house, Kentwall Hall in Suffolk, to a Zeppelin raid in 1915, Lillian moved them to town and Ennismore Gardens, Prince’s Gate.  Sent to school at Broadstair’s and Rugby, he didn’t put much work in until the exams for Oxford came up and, having crammed like the best of them, won a place at Trinity College.  Having got into Oxford, he promptly left as soon as possible to race his Riley.  At his first event, the Shelsley Walsh Hillclimb he came second to a man in another Riley, Whitney Willard S

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