Beach's family migrated to New South Wales while he was a small child and he lived at Dapto for most of his life, learning to row on Lake Illawarra.
He began his sporting career in a wooden tub on the Macquarie Rivulet and ended it as champion sculler of the world.
Beach trained as a blacksmith like his father and seems to have been a fisherman for a time.
According to local legend, Beach won his first race as a teenager against a local publican, either for a bottle of brandy or 5s.