| Activity | de Beer became a second lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards and was posted to France, but saw no fighting, and served in the army education scheme in the army of occupation.
Returning to Oxford in 1919 de Beer took first-class honours in zoology in 1921. He taught in the zoology department at Oxford until 1938, as demonstrator and, from 1926, Jenkinson memorial lecturer in embryology. He also became a prize fellow of Merton College (1923) and sub-warden.
In 1938 de Beer became reader in embryology, and in 1945 professor, at University College, London. During the Second World War he served on the general staff, dealing with military intelligence and propaganda, and later in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), as lieutenant-colonel in charge of psychological warfare in the field. In 1950 de Beer was appointed director of the British Museum (Natural History), and in 1958 president of the Fifteenth International Congress of Zoology. After his retirement in 1960 he became director of a publishing firm.
As director of the British Museum, he organized the exhibits on evolution in the main hall and arranged for the publication of an authoritative Atlas of Evolution (1964), which was translated into German, Dutch, and Spanish. He was an expert on the life and works of Charles Darwin and devised a card index from which he could tell what Darwin was studying at any time.
De Beer was elected to fellowship of the Royal Society in 1940 and from 1946 to 1949 was president of the Linnean Society. He was a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, held honorary doctorates at the universities of Bordeaux, Lausanne, and Cambridge, and received the Darwin medal of the Royal Society (1958) and also the gold medal of the Linnean Society (1958). He was knighted in 1954. |
| Relationships | Gavin Rylands de Beer was the only son and elder child of Herbert Chaplin de Beer, journalist, and his wife, Mabel. Herbert was the son of Arnold de Beer and Irene Chaplin
In 1925 he married Cicely Glyn, daughter of the Revd Sir Hubert James Medlycott, sixth baronet, and Julia Ann Glyn |