As a child, Beswick attended Cheadle Hulme School in Cheshire and had ambitions of being a pilot. He was a member of the International Air Cadet Exchange and even visited the White House in 1959 as a guest of the US Air Force when President Eisenhower was in office.

Yet, prevented from pursuing his dream career by defective eyesight, Beswick changed course in his career and attended Loughborough University between 1960 and 1963, graduating with a BSc in Civil Engineering. 

Beswick spent some time in London after graduation, designing docks and harbours in far flung places of the world followed by gaining a couple of years of field experience building bridges to become a Chartered Engineer. During this period, he took to investigating many geologies for different major projects from roads in difficult terrain, motorways, dams, tunnels, petrochemical plants, potentially unstable slopes and nuclear facilities across the world, relating geology to the engineering challenges that these projects presented.

Beswick completed his Master’s almost a decade after leaving Loughborough, completing an MSc in Engineering Geology at Imperial College London in 1972. During this period, he studied geology, rock mechanics, seismology and hydrogeology which helped enhance his understanding of the relationship between engineering and geology.

Beswick's studies led him into various operations in civil engineering and geology, as well as in geothermal research. Through the 1970s, he managed offices in London, Dublin, Australia, Hong Kong and the Philippines and major projects in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Middle East.

In the first five years of the 1980s, Beswick became involved in deep geothermal research in Cornwall as part of a UK and EU programme to investigate man made geothermal systems.

Beswick joined Kenting, a Canadian drilling contractor, in 1986. It was here that his work in the oil and gas industry truly began.

Thanks to his stellar knowledge, Beswick was accepted into the superdeep ‘club’ where engineers and scientists try to understand the processes of the planet at great depth. This included an invitation to visit the former USSR in 1991 at the time of the Moscow coup, as well as a voyage to the Kola well in the Arctic Circle. Beswick was also later involved in the German superdeep project in Bavaria.

Beswick's unusual all-encompassing background in civil engineering, geology and deep drilling resulted in him being handed the role of Project Manager for a UK programme to evaluate sites for an underground radioactive waste repository at both Sellafield and Dounreay in Scotland. These investigations over a ten-year period in the 1990s were among the most comprehensive investigation programmes to two kilometres of depth ever undertaken in human history.

During his time with P R Marriott, Beswick has played an influential role in growing the company from a family business into a medium-sized group. His leadership has often come in the form of 'coaching' and adapting the style in which the company operates and elevating the health and safety culture of the business to match industry standards. 

As a member of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers [OGP] Gas Communications Task Force in Brussels, Beswick has been representing IADC with the group since April 2011.

The task force, predominantly comprised of operators, compiles reports and material for government ministers and the public at large as a way of tackling misinformation about the shale gas industry.