Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-24057766-20131016131959/@comment-188432-20131016143309

Well, you might notice that we don't actually repeat that information here, because it's completely un-cited at Wikipedia. Still, since you've shown some curiosity about it, I've edited Geoffrey Beevers to request a citation on the fact, and left behind a message at wikipedia:talk:Geoffrey Beevers.

But, sure, if it's true — and it's almost certainly true he was born sometime during World War II — a likely reason for the imprecision is bombing of hospitals. If he were born in London during The Blitz, the likelihood of surviving documents is low.

But we don't know any of that. He could have been born in rural Lancashire for all we know, where the chances of surviving documents are considerably higher.

I'm pretty sure, too, that 1941 was before the time when British law penalised people for not registering child births, which appears to have been an innovation of 1953. Since failure to register wasn't actually punished before that, presumably lots of people didn't register, particularly in cases where it was burdensome to do so.

It's also current British law (since 1953) that it's difficult in most cases to register a birth 3 months after the fact, and practically illegal to do so a year after the birth. Dunno what wartime considerations there were for this rule. No matter where he was born, birth registration would not necessarily have been a high priority for his parents at the time, and it was soon too late to perform the registration anyway.

But, of course, that doesn't mean he wouldn't have known his own birthday. He also could simply be deliberately withholding his birthday from his agent and, consequently, any personal publicity. Add in a lack of public record on the matter, and you've got an essentially insoluble conundrum.

At the end of the day, we just don't know when he was born, so we don't report that Wikipedia year-of-birth until we get some sort of clearly citable information.