Harry Overy was born 5 January 1875 at Brenchley, Kent, the first of the thirteen children (nine sons and four daughters) of Henry James Overy, a farmer, and Sarah Mannington, his wife. He assumed the name of Beckett-Overy by deed poll, after his marriage with May Beckit in 1906; Mrs Beckett-Overy died before him, leaving an only daughter, Mrs Horsburgh. He was educated at Kent College, Canterbury and Swanley Agricultural College. He then attended the University of St Andrews and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and graduated from Edinburgh University at the age of twenty-seven in 1902. From the London Hospital he took the English Conjoint qualification in 1903, and served as casualty officer and pathologist at the Metropolitan Hospital. He was surgical registrar, and then assistant surgeon, at the Kensington General Hospital. Beckett-Overy practised as a gynaecological surgeon in a fashionable district of Kensington, first at 19 Lowndes Street, and latterly at 15 Herbert Crescent, both addresses being near Sloane Street, SW1. He was honorary secretary of the British Gynaecological Society and of its successor the obstetrics and gynaecology section of the Royal Society of Medicine, and later a vice-president of this section. He served as honorary secretary of the Kensington division of the British Medical Association. Beckett-Overy publicly supported Beatrice Webb's attack on the Poor Law in 1910. During the war of 1914-18 he was medical officer in charge of the Londonderry House hospital for officers in Park Lane. Later he was consulting surgeon to the Cobham and district cottage hospital. Details of Beckett-Overy's marriage have been given above. He died in a nursing home in London on 27 February 1950, aged 75, and was cremated at Golders Green. Publications:- The medical proposals of the Minority Report [of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law], an appeal to the medical profession, with Somerville Hastings, FRCS and Arnold Freeman. *Lancet*, 1910, 2, 229. Treatment of varicose veins by sclerosing injections, with L Gaugier of Paris. *Franco-British med Rev*. 1927, 4, 57.