In a 7 November 1962 letter to Hunt Botanical Library Director George H. M. Lawrence, William T. Stearn of the British Museum of Natural History wrote, "Rudolph Beer was a botanist with private means who worked for a time at Kew. At the time of his death during the war, on 23 September 1940, his large botanical library consisted mostly of pamphlets, periodicals, and textbooks. It was more or less thrown into an outhouse where it remained, deteriorating through damp, rats, and hooligans, until the death of Beer’s widow in 1961. The housekeeper then had the enterprise to get in touch with the Linnean Society and the Commonwealth Mycological Institute. Dr. Geoffrey Clough Ainsworth (1905–1998) salvaged what he could from the remains. Among these were letters from Agnes Arber, the originals of some of Beer’s papers, and reprints of these."