George Hewitt Beatty, son of James Beatty and his wife Mary Elizabeth Hewitt, came to South Africa with his parents in 1898. He started his career in mining in 1903 as assistant surveyor to New Goch Gold Mines, Ltd, and was later promoted to chief surveyor, shift boss and mine captain. From 1909-1911 he was underground manager at Cinderella Consolidated Gold Mines, Ltd, and then spent a year as a field geologist for Free State Rand, Ltd. In February 1912 he joined the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company's group of mines and remained associated with them for the rest of his career, initially as assistant or acting mine manager but from November 1915 as consulting engineer and from 1917 to 1923 as general manager of Randfontein Estates Gold Mining Company, Ltd. In the latter position, in 1922, he gave evidence before the Mining Industry Board. In July 1923 he became consulting engineer to the group and from 1933 in addition joint general manager and later also a director. He retired in 1946, but remained a member of the board of directors of JCI and other mining companies to his death.
Beatty served continuously on the executive committee of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines from 1923 to 1946 and as president during 1936-1937 and again during 1939-1940. In 1939 he opened a pavilion presented by the Chamber of Mines to the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society in honour of the splendid work of the chairman of the society, Mr John Roy. He became a member of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy in 1937 and was a member of its council for South Africa from 1938 to 1945. At his death his occupation was given as director of companies. He was married to May Beart, but they had no children.
The only known contribution made by Beatty to the scientific literature is a paper on "Faulting phenomena in Rand Mines", published in the Journal of the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa (1910-11, Vol. 11, pp. 366-370). In 1926 he presented an unusually large crystal of the mineral sperrylite (a diarsenide of platinum) to the mineralogical collection of the British Museum (Natural History). The crystal came from a mine on the farm Tweefontein, some 16 km north-northwest of Potgietersrust (now Mokopane). The crystal was described in the Mineralogical Magazine by L.J. Spencer of the British Museum in 1926.
