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Spectator or the Economist, no-one could understand it.” He went on to study
philosophy and psychology at University College London—which had then
been evacuated to Aberystwyth, back in Wales—for one year, 1943-44.
3
At
University College he swam for the college team and was English Universities
backstroke champion as well as getting a first in his first-year examinations.
In 1944 he joined the British Army as a gunner in the Royal Artillery. In 1945
he went to India as a company commander in the Ninth Gurkha Rifles and
later became staff captain intelligence in the Punjab. In 1947 he returned
to Britain, remaining with the Army as army psychologist with the rank of
captain.
Back in England, Beer married Cynthia, and they had six children together,
though the first was stillborn. Following a divorce, Beer married Sallie Stead-
man, a widow and mother of a daughter, Kate, and they had two more chil-
dren, for a total of eight, but this marriage, too, ended in divorce, in 1996.
From 1974 onward Beer lived alone in Wales for much of the year (see below).
In 1981 he met and fell in love with another cybernetician, Allenna Leonard
(then a mature graduate student and later president of the American Society
for Cybernetics), and she was Beer's partner for the remainder of his life.
Leaving the army, Beer hoped to do a PhD in psychology at University Col-
lege, but when told that he would have to recommence his studies as a first-
year undergraduate he turned his back on the academic life, and in 1949 he
began work for Samuel Fox in Sheffield, a subsidiary company of United Steel,
where he created and ran its Operational Research Group (probably the first
such group to exist in Britain outside the armed forces). From 1956 until 1961
he was head of the Operational Research and Cybernetics Group of United
Steel, with more than seventy scientific staff based in the appropriately named
(by Beer) Cybor House in Sheffield. In 1961 he founded Britain's first opera-
tional research consulting firm, SIGMA (Science in General Management).
In 1966 he moved on to become development director of the International
Publishing Corporation (IPC), then the largest publishing company in the
world, where his work largely concerned future initiatives around computing
and information systems. In 1970, Beer left IPC “following a boardroom dis-
agreement about development policy.” From 1970 until his death in Toronto
on 23 August 2002 he operated as an independent consultant in a variety of
arenas, some of which are discussed below.
Besides his career in management and consultancy, Beer was a prolific
writer of scholarly and popular works, including more than two hundred
publications and ten topics on cybernetics, which he referred to as “ten pints
