A native of Ottawa, Alan Beddoe studied in that city at the Model School and Ashbury College. During the First World War, he enrolled in the Second Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was taken prisoner at the battle of Ypres in 1915 and spent 2-1/2 years in the camps at Giessen and Zerbst. For medical reasons, he was transferred to Geneva, Switzerland, where he met the English painter Horace Taylor, a prisoner like himself. Liberated and then demobilized, Beddoe went to study at the Art Students League in New York. In 1925, he opened the first commercial art studio in Ottawa and specialized in display and exhibition art. He obtained many government contracts and supervised the illumination of the Canadian Books of Remembrance for both world wars. He contributed to the preliminary studies for the new Canadian flag. Beddoe was also an expert in heraldry. In 1957, the Royal Canadian Navy appointed him its heraldic advisor and he was the first president of the Heraldry Society of Canada.

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Alan Brookman Beddoe.