Born: 2 September 1929, United Kingdom
Died: 20 January 2018
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Beulah Rosemary Knox
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Bewley, Beulah Rosemary (née Knox) (1929–2018), epidemiologist, was born at her parents’ home on Melrose Terrace, Bonds Hill, Derry, on 2 September 1929, the middle of three daughters (between Eleanor and Maureen) born to Ina Eagleson (née Charles) and John Benjamin Knox. Ina’s family gifted the house to her and Charles as a wedding present, along with a motor car. Beulah was named after Boss Croker’s second wife, whom an uncle had known. John worked for Ulster Bank, and his career took the family around Ireland. They were Anglican and enjoyed a salubrious upper-middle-class life, with a maid, nanny and part-time chauffer. In Derry the sisters attended nursery school before being tutored at home. In 1938 the family moved to Letterkenny, Co. Donegal; after being tutored there for a year, Beulah boarded for two years at Cambridge House in Ballymena, Co. Antrim. John encouraged his daughter’s education, supported by Ina’s private income. Upon moving to Kilkenny city in 1941, Beulah attended Loreto Convent in the town. She played hockey and tennis, and was taught piano by Walter Beckett and learned violin at Loreto. From 1943 she was a boarder at Alexandra School, Dublin, one of the very few secondary educational institutions then teaching science to girls. In 1945 she continued to Alexandra College.
Their families becoming friendly, Bewley often accompanied the local GP on house calls as a child, and she went on to study medicine at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) (1947–53), where she played hockey and music in various ensembles and orchestras. She undertook clinical training at the Adelaide (where she met her future husband, Thomas Bewley) and Rotunda hospitals in Dublin, while living at Trinity Hall (the female university residence in Dartry) and later in flat shares. She graduated Bachelor of Medicine (MB), Bachelor of Surgery (B.Ch.) and Bachelor of Arts in Obstetrics (BAO) in July 1953. Working initially as a ‘houseman’ at the Adelaide Hospital, Bewley moved to England in early 1954; an uncle working as a surgeon in Ipswich helped her find employment in hospitals there, where she trained in surgery. Thomas followed her to England and for a time the couple were based in London, where Thomas focused on his psychiatric career. In 1954 Bewley was a locum general practitioner in Kent and a senior house officer at Rush Green Hospital, specialising in polio. On 20 April 1955 Beulah and Thomas married at St Peter’s church, Aungier Street, Dublin – adjacent to the Adelaide. Returning to London, Bewley was a paediatric physician at Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Shadwell (where senior male colleagues were dismissive of her as a ‘married woman doctor’), and in 1956 at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell (Bewley, 90).
Bewley and her husband spent a year (1957–8) in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, where she worked in paediatrics at the Jewish Children’s Hospital; her experience of for-profit medicine reinforced her support for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), as did the poor obstetric care she received in Dublin while giving birth to her first child, Susan, in July 1958. The Bewleys had four more children: Sarah, Louisa, Henry and Emma. Sarah had intellectual and physical disabilities and lived in specialist residential care, where her parents visited her weekly.
Although keen to pursue paediatrics, her professional and family commitments – even while employing cooks, cleaners and au pairs – impeded Bewley’s pursuit of postgraduate specialist training. From 1959 she instead devoted herself to informal community medicine, which also facilitated Thomas’s rising psychiatric career. In the mornings Bewley worked part-time in child welfare clinics and in the evenings she provided family planning advice, initially with the Family Planning Association and later for local authorities. At various times she supervised antenatal clinics, school clinics and community paediatric developmental clinics and delivered occupational medical care to staff at Marks and Spencer. A turning point came in 1969 when she saw a notice in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for a new Master of Science (M.Sc.) in social medicine and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Bewley was the only woman and oldest student on the course, which was designed for community public health physicians and led by Jerry Morris – a celebrated epidemiologist who became her mentor. Bewley was amongst the first in a generation of Morris’s protégés who became leading figures in public health research and practice. Supervised (and later mentored) by Walter Holland, director of social medicine at the health services research unit, St Thomas’s Hospital, London, Bewley conducted research that examined the smoking habits of primary school children in Lambeth. She graduated with an M.Sc. (awarded by University of London) in 1971 and became a member of the faculty of community medicine at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in 1973.
Continuing to work with Holland, Bewley was a lecturer (later senior lecturer) in the department of clinical epidemiology and social medicine at St Thomas’s, where she undertook a Medical Research Council-funded longitudinal study examining juvenile smoking and respiratory symptoms in 5,000 primary school children across fifty-three schools in Derbyshire. Martin Bland, later a leading statistical epidemiologist, was amongst the team of four researchers Bewley led in exacting fieldwork over five years. The study established diminished respiratory health outcomes for children who smoked, positive outcomes for those who did not, and assessed the impact of socio-economic and familial factors on the uptake and continuation of juvenile smoking. For this body of work – the first to establish robust data marking the pernicious health outcomes of juvenile smoking – Bewley received a doctorate in medicine (MD) from TCD in 1974, which qualified her for appointment as a consultant. In 1979 she was appointed senior lecturer and consultant at King’s College medical school, London, where she endeavoured to expand public health medical teaching and research. In 1983 she moved to the department of community health at LSHTM and University College London Hospital, where she deployed her expertise in the design and operation of medical research studies to improve teaching and to support research by colleagues and postgraduates.
Bewley became a mentor to a new generation of medical researchers. This was recognised in her 1987 appointment as postgraduate academic tutor in public health medicine in the department of clinical epidemiology and social medicine at St George’s Hospital medical school. There she was a senior lecturer (1989–92) and reader (from 1992), and a consultant in public health sciences. One of the very few senior women in this field, her principal research further probed juvenile and adolescent smoking behaviour, related academic performance and contributory socio-economic factors. She was active in Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), an influential anti-smoking campaign group.
Aside from her formidable research prowess, Bewley was a prominent campaigner for gender equality in academic medicine, which she observed was ‘the last branch of medicine to accept women into their ranks as they had the necessary intellect to produce better rationalisations for not having women’ (Bewley, 162). She was a long-time council member of the Medical Women’s Federation, serving as its president (1986–7) and as president of its executive council (1979–88). Bewley relentlessly lobbied colleagues in other medical organisations and professional colleges to remedy the abject representation of women within their memberships and governance structures. In a speech delivered in Belfast in April 1986, Bewley noted that despite accounting for over half of medical graduates, women remained under-represented in senior leadership positions across the medical professions. Observing the disinclination of women to join professional bodies or put themselves forward for promotion, she favoured gender quotas to counter the familial and societal barriers they invariably faced. Bewley served four five-year elected terms on the council of the General Medical Council (which governed the medical profession in the United Kingdom) and was the first woman to serve as its treasurer (1992–7). Bewley also served on the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (1986–9), on the Women’s National Commission (1992–9), and various other national working groups in England. Her fellowships of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine (1990), the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (1992) and the RCP (1992) marked her achievements across these domains. Over forty years, Bewley published her research in leading journals, including the BMJ, The Lancet, the Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, the British Journal of Preventative Social Medicine and Community Medicine. With Judith Cook and Penny Kane, she co-authored Choice not chance: a handbook of fertility behaviour (1977). She retired in 1994 and published a memoir in 2016.
Bewley was made a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000 for her services to the advancement of women in medicine. In July 2002 TCD awarded Bewley an honorary doctorate of laws (LLD) in recognition of her fundraising efforts for TCD medical school; she later served on the school’s tercentenary fundraising board (2007–12).
Assertive, frank and often blunt in sharing her views, Bewley’s tenacity and intellectual rigour were revealed in the ‘surprisingly pithy turn of phrase [that she deployed] … against patronizing comments’ (Kilbane). She excelled at motivating and inspiring her students and junior colleagues. Bewley regarded her early family planning work, and her later postgraduate teaching and supervision, as the most rewarding and enjoyable periods of her working life.
Bewley maintained a lifelong love of music and returned to piano lessons in retirement. She and her husband shared a passion for opera and were annual visitors to Ireland, where they frequently attended the Wexford Festival Opera and were active in the Irish Georgian Society.
After enduring cardiovascular disease and dementia for some time, Bewley died on 20 January 2018 in London. Her funeral took place on 13 February at St Margaret’s church, Westminster Abbey, London. Her ashes were interred in the Quaker cemetery in Dublin.