Ralph Beyer

Early life

Ralph Beyer was born in Berlin in 1921. His father Oskar Beyer was a well known art historian. During his early childhood his family lived with relatives on an island near Potsdam before moving to Dresden in 1928. Due to the threat of arrest under the National Socialists the family moved to Crete in 1932 followed by Liechtenstein and Switzerland before going to stay with the German architect Erich Mendelsohn in England, United Kingdom, in 1937 and later in London and Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire with his mother's cousin and pioneering child psychotherapist, Margaret Lowenfeld. Ralph's Jewish mother, Margarete returned to Germany and during the Second World War was incarcerated in Auschwitz where she died in 1945. At the outbreak of war Ralph was sent to an internment camp in Liverpool and later on joined the Pioneer Corps in France and the British intelligence services as a translator. This work, carried out in-situ while the cathedral was still under construction is noted as "the most significant work of British public lettering of the 20th century." Beyer's next major commission was to carve a memorial stone and lettering at the park in Indiana, United States created in memory to the German theologian Paul Tillich who he had first met as a boy in Potstam.