Brown Beattie
Staff Sergeant 62933 · D Company, 28th (Māori) Battalion · 1941–45
Early life
David Brown Wesley Beattie, known as Brown, was born in 1918, a son of Te Waaka Piripi Beattie and Heeni (Kui) Eruera of North Clyde, Wairoa. His whānau is Ngāti Kahungunu. Before the war he worked for the Tarawera Timber Company in Napier. His brothers Whare and Moana also served in the battalion.
War
Brown sailed with D Company in mid-1941, on the same draft as his younger brother Moana, and joined the battalion in Egypt after Greece and Crete. Within a year he had lost both brothers. Moana died of wounds near Gazala in December 1941, and Whare died of wounds at El Mreir in August 1942. Brown served on, and by mid-1943 he was a sergeant.
After the war
Brown rose to staff sergeant. He came home to Wairoa and married Ereti Jeanette (Janet). He died in 1992 and is buried in the RSA section of the Wairoa Lawn Cemetery, where Janet was laid beside him in 2021. Of the three Beattie brothers who went overseas, he was the only one to come home.
Sources
Online Cenotaph C117016; Ngata’s 1943 nominal roll (Mataia, ‘Odd men from the Pacific’, 2007); 28th Māori Battalion website; Pickering Funeral Services death notice, 2021.
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