Welsh Journals

Beck displayed his concern for the community of Gowerton by acting as treasurer of the committee responsible for the building of St. John's Church in Gower Road (as Gowerton was known at the time) which was opened in 1882. His support was marked by a memorial stone placed at the entrance to the church hall built in 1929, but later demolished. Roads on the housing estate on the former Elba works site have been named after the industrial pioneers who contributed so much to the growth and welfare of Gowerton. Among these is 'Ffordd Beck'. In Handshake the house magazine of Baldwins (South Wales), on the occasion of his retirement as a company director in September 1921, Beck wrote: For me the association has enabled me to convert my original backers into profitable investors, who have received their venture back in full, with compound interest. It has been a field of vast experience and the strengthening more than ever in my mind the certainty that real success can only be obtained by closer touch and fellow feeling between employer and employee. Beck had not only more than repaid his backers, he had made the fortune he came to seek in South Wales. His other commercial activities were many and varied. In Arthur Mee's Who's Who in Wales (1921) he is shown as being chairman of the Beaufort Works Ltd., Rhondda Fishing Co., Izaak Walton Fishing Co. and chairman of the Swansea Harbour Trust. It was his election as Chairman of the Harbour Trust in January 1918 which brought Beck really into public prominence. The Port of Swansea had suffered a severe loss of trade during the war and the Trust had difficulties in fulfilling its obligations to its bondholders. Liquidation loomed. Beck came to the rescue with an unconditional loan of £ 63,000 which guaranteed the interest payments to the bondholders and helped, for a time, to avoid proceedings against the Trust. Subsequently, after earlier attempts to obtain the Board of Trade's agreement to the port being controlled in the same way as other leading ports in the Bristol Channel had failed, negotiations were completed with the Great Western Railway for the purchase by it of the docks undertaking. Beck saw the negotiations carried through but not the actual handover to the G.WR. Beck's most outstanding benefactions were to the former Swansea General and Eye Hospital in the days when it was a voluntary institution. His great interest in the work of the hospital may well have been inspired by the fact that his brother Marcus was a Professor of Surgery at University College Hospital, London. His first gift of £ 2,000 in 1902 was for the endowment of a bed in memory of Marcus. Following this, he