In Memoriam Renault Beakbane

Renault died peacefully on August 2, 2009.  He was 86, and had been in failing health, exacerbated by the death the previous January of his wife Joan, whom he had nursed through a distressing degenerative illness for some years. 

 Renault was a Quaker and his funeral at Stourbridge Crematorium on August 20, at which around ten of us from KCS were present, took the form of a Quaker meeting.  The silence was broken only by warm recollection and anecdotes from members of his family.  Finally a recording of Mozart’s Laudate Dominum was played – most noble, soaring music which seemed entirely fitting to the occasion.

 Renault was for many years a highly respected local businessman and a significant benefactor in the Kidderminster area.  In the 1880s his grandparents had set up a leather tannery business in Stourport.  After gaining a degree in chemistry at Leeds, Renault joined the family business, which at the time specialised in leather for garments.  He started making bellows from the off-cuts: the engineer in him realised there was enormous potential for bellows to protect moving parts in engines and other machinery – pistons, shock absorbers and so on.  Subsequently Renault founded Beakbane Ltd in 1954 to manufacture bellows, and the factory established at Oldington in 1960 continues to make bellows, covers and other machinery protection items – leather now entirely replaced by polymers, metals and composite materials.  It is a very specialised business and the company has a highly successful international presence.

 Renault joined KCS in the late 50s and served on the Committee for several years.  He and Joan hosted a number of gatherings at “Jacobs Ladder” for KCS – notably Christmas “At Homes” and summer parties.   As many will remember, Renault’s company for some years sponsored our concert programmes, with quirky cartoons by the illustrator Marc Vyvyan-Jones, and such captions as “…Sponsored by Beakbane….Purveyors of Music to the Cognoscenti and Bellows to the Masses”!  One memory of Renault was during rehearsal breaks when he would produce a tin of “Melloids”, offering them to the first basses and to selected altos!  When we were learning the Britten War Requiem – completely new to most of us – Renault issued an open invitation to KCS members to come to “Jacobs Ladder” to listen to his CD of the work.  I went on one of the appointed evenings, I was a little late, and the only one from KCS that night to call, but he and family members made me most welcome.

 In later years Renault kept horses and rode with the Ludlow Hunt - for the riding, he said. For a time he was Master of the Worshipful Company of Glovers which must have given him an entrée into some interesting, certainly esoteric aspects of London life!

 In the nicest possible way Renault was quite an eccentric man, and stories and anecdotes about him are legion.  He drove from South Africa to the UK in an early Land Rover, crossing the Sahara.  He built a 12ft dinghy at Kidderminster College of Further Education and sailed single-handed across the English Channel.  He arranged a Beakbane publicity stunt employing elephants from a travelling circus which was in town at the time.  He overcame exclusion from a trade exhibition at Olympia by pitching a caravan outside the hall.  He organised incredible outdoor children’s parties, one escapade involving scrambling down at night with torches into the head of Habberley Valley!

 He was a kind man, cheerful and considerate.  He certainly had a long, active and fulfilled life.

 Peter Knott