Eric Armour Beecroft
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: 7 Sep 1903 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Christening:
Death: 20 Nov 2001 - London, Ontario, Canada
Burial:
Cause of Death:
AFN :
Events
• Biography
Eric Armour Beecroft, son of Frank Lloyd Beecroft, was born at Toronto on September 7, 1903. He moved to Whitby in 1918. A graduate of the Whitby High School, he went on to study at Victoria College (Toronto), where he received a fellowship at the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Government and Economics (Washington, D.C.) in 1926 after graduating. In 1927, he was appointed assistant professor of political science at Hamilin University (St. Paul, Minnesota). He was awarded a fellowship in public law at Columbia University, New York, and later, a fellowship at Yale University in 1929.He became an American (U.S.) citizen in 1939 and a U.S. government official in the department of economic warfare 1942 where he was responsible for directing U.S. economic warfare in India. In 1944 he went to Afghanistan to manage shipment of supplies. He was ppointed special assistant to Harold L. Ickles, Secretary of the Interior in 1945. From 1930 to 1940 he was a professor in the department of political science at the University fo California. He went on a fact finding mission to the Philippines in 1948 to study financial and banking conditions and then attended the International Bank in Ethiopia during 1950 for reconstruction and development. In 1951 he was in Ceylon for the bank. He was appointed director of the Community Planning Association of Canada in 1954, and from 1960 to 1965 he was director of urban planning and Ottawa's representative to the Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities. Eric Beecroft taught politicl science at the University fo Western Ontario (London, Ontario) from 1965 to 1976 and died at Toronto on November 20, 2001.• Census, Federal, 1930 in New Haven Co, CT
Eric A Beecroft, born abt 1904; wife Ruth, 1904.• Obituary, Globe and Mail, 2001
Obit: Eric Armour Beecroft (1903-2001)
October 21, 2011
By Bill Gladstone
Eric Armour Beecroft, a Toronto-born political economist who worked for the U.S. Roosevelt administration during the Second World War and helped establish the World Bank, has died (2001) in Toronto of pneumonia. He was 98.
Through a diverse and illustrious career that stretched from the 1920s through the 1970s, Prof. Beecroft held professorships at universities in Ontario and California, became an esteemed urban planner, and knew many famous people, such as Lester Pearson and Charlie Chaplin.
A specialist in urban planning, he was an international authority on the structure of local government as it affected urban planning issues. In the 1950s and 1960s, he headed two national organizations in Ottawa, the Community Planning Association of Canada and the Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities.
He became a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario in 1965 and retired as professor emeritus in 1976. Even so, his public influence continues: his study of provincial-local relations affecting water resources was cited in the report of Ontario's Walkerton inquiry.
"The one theme that runs through my father's life, he was always trying to make the world a better place," said his son, Doug Beecroft, a lawyer for Queen's Park.
Born in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood in 1903, Prof. Beecroft attended Queen Victoria Public School and Parkdale Collegiate. His father, Frank Beecroft, had helped establish Eaton's lucrative mail-order catalogue in the 1890s. The family later moved to Whitby, Ont.
He attended the University of Toronto, where he was elected president of Victoria College and the student council. While there he became friends with Lester Pearson, the future prime minister, who was then a university lecturer; he and Pearson exchanged letters until the latter's death. He was also friends with Paul Martin Sr., father of the Canadian finance minister.
A brilliant student, he won a scholarship to study for one year at the prestigious Brookings Institute in Washington DC; the next year he received competing scholarship offers from Harvard and Yale. "He always joked that he picked Yale because they offered him $50 more," said his son. One of his professors at Yale was Felix Frankfurter, later a jurist on the US Supreme Court.
Hired by the University of California in Los Angeles and then Berkeley, he became active in the labour and social movements of the 1930s. Wary of the dark clouds gathering over Europe, he joined a Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and met Chaplin.
"From the stories my father told, Chaplin believed passionately that something had to be done to stop Hitler, but he wasn't an intellectual," Doug Beecroft recounted. When the professor invited the film star to dine at his house with various friends and their families, the latter played tiddlywinks with the children on the living-room floor as the others discussed politics.
While at Berkeley Prof. Beecroft also encountered Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist, and "thought it ironic that he would always be regarded as the father of the atomic bomb because he was such a peace-loving person."
Having thoroughly studied India's government, he went to India for the US government during the Second World War. He was responsible for ensuring that crucial Allied supply lines remained open in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Afghanistan.
At war's end, as special assistant to the US Secretary of the Interior, he went to Hawaii to study its government in preparation for possible statehood. Then he did the same for Micronesia, the scattered and war-scarred Pacific islands, to help determine their political future.
In 1947 he became a loan officer for the new International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a precursor to the World Bank, because "he wanted very much to help Third World countries get on their feet economically." While engaged on bank missions in Asia and Africa, he met Indian Prime Minister Nehru and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Salassie. In 1952 he married Ann Granger, an American employee of the World Bank. They returned to Canada in 1954.
Friends and associates remember Prof. Beecroft as a serious-minded Edwardian gentleman who was an outspoken foe of traffic congestion and urban sprawl, and as an old-fashioned believer in the power of well-founded governments to solve urban ills.
"He had great faith, back in the 1960s and 1970s, in the ability of governments to fix problems and make our communities better places to live in," said Andrew Sancton, chair of Western's political science department. "This is not a particularly widely held view today. Today many people have a distrust of government, but Eric Beecroft's view was just the opposite."
His niece, Jane Beecroft, a Toronto heritage activist, recalled that he "spoke in diplomatic tones and belonged to the era of Dean Acheson and other fine world diplomats. They were a great breed of men and we don't any of them left any more."
Eric Armour Beecroft is survived by his son, Doug, and brother Julian. His wife, Ann, died about three years ago. ?
Originally appeared in the Globe and Mail, © 2001.
Parents
Father: Frank Lloyd Beecroft
Mother: Eva Gertrude Armour
Spouses and Children
1. *Ann/Ruth
Marriage:
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Children:
1. Doug Beecroft
Notes
Birth Notes:
Name:Eric Armour Beecroft
Gender:Male
Baptism/Christening Date:
Baptism/Christening Place:
Birth Date:07 Sep 1903
Birthplace:Toronto, York, Ontario
Death Date:
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Race:
Father's Name:Frank L Beecroft
Father's Birthplace:
Father's Age:
Mother's Name:Eva G Armour
Mother's Birthplace:
Mother's Age:
Indexing Project (Batch) Number:C04253-0
System Origin:Canada-EASy
Source Film Number:2148636
Reference Number:p 290