Ryan Beckwith

Last Seen
 Gender
 Nationality
 Occupation
 Past Jobs
 Species
 Family
Riley Beckwith (Sister)
Jim Beckwith (Father)
 Significant Other
 Friends
 Past Relationships
Sarah Grote
 Pets

**Ryan Beckwith** is a former record shop employee, postman, council worker and current teacher, and a major character in Scary Go Round, with a recurring role in both Bobbins and Bad Machinery. In the interval between Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery, he marries Amy Beckwith-Chilton, with whom he has one son (Walt) so far. Riley Beckwith is his sister.

## Early History

Ryan attended Griswald's Grammar School along with Tim Jones and Shelley Winters. When one of Tim's inventions (designed to help teach Ryan physics) accidentally injured Mr. Knott's eye, Ryan took the blame for it himself and dropped out of school (telling others that he was expelled, though he actually wasn't). He then went to work at a pea cannery, the first of a succession of jobs he would hold until eventually working as a teacher at the very school he dropped out of. After an intervention by OFSTED, which at first seemed to jeopardize his job security, he even ended up being the school's deputy head.

## Scary Go Round & Later

For a few years, he kept a bat as a pet, first Friend Bat and later Comrade Bat (bought by Shelley for him at a pet store that Esther de Groot worked for, after Friend Bat died).

In an alternate timeline shown in "The Case of the Forked Road", Ryan never became a teacher and was a drunk who played in a local band; it was implied that his relationship with Amy is what saved him from this in the main timeline. Amy has exerted herself to changing Ryan's lifestyle in a number of ways, including getting him to shave a beard he previously grew. Shelley has also had some influence on him, at one point burning Ryan's favorite shirt (with a Captain America shield)[1] in an effort to get him to improve his hygiene and wardrobe, and also leading the effort to find him after he vanished (and turned up with amnesia and under the control of a sinister cult, the Little Sisters of Belial; this was not the first time he had been caught up in a dodgy religion and needed rescuing by his friends, as this happened earlier with the cultist landladies he roomed with).

## Friendships and romances

Ryan has been friends with many of the people featured in the various strips over the years. In his '90s school years, he lived next door to Tim, and became friends with Shelley. Over the years he would sometimes play in bands alongside Tim, though the two had disagreements over what to name the bands. Ryan also hung out at pubs a lot, often meeting people there.

He's had romantic interest in a number of women, sometimes even reciprocated. As a teen he crushed on a girl named Brenda Garlick. As an adult, he was in a relationship with Natalie Durand from the French city of La Rochelle, but she died in a fire (Ryan later visited her in the afterlife). Ryan was also involved in a long term relationship with Fallon Young, which included the two of them living together for a time. Fallon and Ryan broke up over irreconcilable differences, with Ryan unable to tolerate Fallon killing as a freelance spy, and Fallon unwilling to date someone who did not respect her. Still later, he briefly dated Charlotte Grote's older sister, Sarah Grote, despite her still being of secondary school age. For many years, Amy was interested in Ryan (and was very happy to find him again when he went missing), but this took quite a while to turn into true romance; eventually they did get together and ultimately marry. This meant that the incident of Amy flashing her bare bottom to Ryan and prompting him to lament to God that he "saw that lady's bottom when she is not my wife" was finally resolved, hopefully to the Lord's satisfaction.