HAROLD BEACH
Aston Martin’s chief engineer from 1956 right through the David Brown years
When Aston Martin decided to ‘reissue’ the DB4 GT, it was faced with the challenge of replicating the work of several great men. Those who helped make the original car so special included Tadek Marek, whose DB4 engine responded so beautifully to tuning; racecar designer Ted Cutting; and Federico Formenti, the stylist from Carrozzeria Touring who penned the DB4’s exquisite lines ( and whose career is criminally poorly documented).
As important as any of these was Harold Beach. He worked with Cutting to chop 5in from the DB4 to produce the ‘cheap and cheerful’ GT requested by John Wyer, and he was Aston Martin’s chief engineer from 1956 until 1974. Drive a DB4, 5 or 6 today, or a DBS, and you get the feeling of a car engineered to the criteria of just one clear-sighted person – Beach. There’s a well-oiled weightiness to these Astons that goes with their generously delivered pace. There were no focus groups in Beach’s day; he just made the cars perform and feel the way he thought they should.
Born in Acton in 1913, he began his career in 1928, working as an apprentice draughtsman at Barker, supplier of bodies to Rolls- Royce and others. But much more exciting to the young Harold than stately coachwork was the stable of exotic racing cars owned by Barker director
Earl Howe. A few years later, a chance came to join a coachbuilding firm with one of his colleagues from Barker, James Ridlington, and here Beach designed an aluminium body for Eddie Hall’s Bentley 4½ Litre racer.
War came, and Beach put his skills to use on, among other things, floating tanks used in the D-Day landings. He was working under Nicholas Straussler, a Hungarian engineer who continued to employ him after the war until Beach left for Aston Martin Lagonda in 1950.
He joined AML around the same time as Robert Eberan-Eberhorst, the man responsible for the pre-war Auto Union Grand Prix cars. Eberan-Eberhorst was hired to be chief engineer, but most of his time was devoted to Aston Martin’s racing machinery. Beach, meanwhile, gained experience with the road cars before taking over from the departing Eberan-Eberhorst in 1956. His work thereafter was critical to the success of the company in the late 1950s and 1960s, and helped to establish the reputation that has sustained the marque through difficult periods since.
You can see the affable gent, in what turned out be his final year, in a series of YouTube videos posted by his nephew. Right to the end, Harold Beach’s love of Aston Martins was clearly undiminished.