Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was born on January 14, 1904, in the Hampstead section of London, England. As a child, he adored the picture postcards of society ladies that came with the Sunday newspaper, and he had his two younger sisters pose for photos after receiving his first camera at age 11.
Beaton enrolled at the University of Cambridge's St. John's College in 1922, but he harbored little interest in academics, devoting much of his energy to photography and theater design. After leaving the school in 1925 without a degree, he briefly worked for his father, a timber merchant.