North Ludlow Beamish (31 December 1797 – 27 April 1872), was an Irish military writer and antiquary.

He was the son of merchant and landowner William Beamish, Esq., of Beaumont House, County Cork.^[1] William Beamish was an owner of Beamish and Crawford, one of the largest Irish breweries.

In November 1816, he obtained a commission in the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, in which corps he purchased a troop in 1823.^[1] In 1825 he published an English translation of a small cavalry manual written by Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Bismarck, a distinguished officer then engaged in the reorganisation of the Württemberg cavalry. Beamish's professional abilities brought him to notice, and he received a half-pay majority in the following year. Whilst attached to the vice-regal suite in Hanover he subsequently published a translation of Count von Bismarck's Lectures on Cavalry, with original notes, in which he suggested various changes soon after adopted in the British cavalry. He also completed and edited a history of the King's German Legion from its formation in the British service in 1803 to its disbandment in 1816, which was published in England in 1834–7.^[1]

After quitting Hanover, Beamish devoted much attention to Norse antiquities, and in 1841 published a summary of the researches of Professor Carl Christian Rafn, relative to the discovery of America by the Northmen in the tenth century.^[1] Beamish, like his younger brother, Richard, who was at one time in the Grenadier guards, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and an associate of several other bodies.^[1]

He died at Annmount, County Cork, on 27 April 1872.^[1]

Works

• Instructions for the Field Service of Cavalry, from the German of Count von Bismarck, London, 1825, 12mo.
• Lectures on the Duties of Cavalry, from the German of Count von Bismarck, London, 1827, 8vo.
• History of the King's German Legion 2 vols. London, 1834–7, 8vo.
• The Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century, with Notes on the Early Settlement of the Irish in the Western Hemisphere, London, 1841, 8vo; a reprint of this work, edited by the Rev. E. F. Slafter, A.M., was published by the Prince Society of Albany, N.Y., in 1877.
• On the Alterations of Level in the Baltic, British Association Reports, 1843.
• Major Ludlow Beamish's visit to the Kilkerrin Estate of the Irish Waste Land Company, Dublin, c. 1844.
• Statistical Report on the Physical and Moral Condition of the Working Classes in the Parish of St. Michael, Blackrock, Near Cork. Journal of the Statistical Society of London 7, no. 3 (1844): 251–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/2337941.
• On the Uses and Application of Cavalry in War, London, 1855, 8vo.