Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook
William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook PC, ONB (25 May 1879 – 9 June 1964), generally known as Lord Beaverbrook ("Max" to his close circle), was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century. His base of power was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the Daily Express, which appealed to the conservative working class with intensely patriotic news and editorials. During the Second World War, he played a major role in mobilising industrial resources as Winston Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production.[1]
"Lord Beaverbrook" redirects here. For the peerage, see Baron Beaverbrook.
The Lord Beaverbrook
Office created
Oliver Lyttelton (as Minister of Production)
Office created
Office created
9 June 1964 (aged 85)
Leatherhead, Surrey, England
- Janet Gladys Aitken
- Sir Max Aitken, 2nd Baronet
- Captain Peter Aitken
Cherkley Court, Leatherhead, Surrey, England
Legislator, author, entrepreneur
The young Max Aitken had a gift for making money and was a millionaire by the age of 30. His business ambitions quickly exceeded opportunities in Canada and he moved to Britain. There he befriended Andrew Bonar Law and with his support won a seat in the House of Commons at the December 1910 United Kingdom general election. A knighthood followed shortly after. During the First World War he ran the Canadian Records office in London, and played a role in the removal of H. H. Asquith as prime minister in 1916. The resulting coalition government (with David Lloyd George as prime minister and Bonar Law as Chancellor of the Exchequer) rewarded Aitken with a peerage and, briefly, a Cabinet post as Minister of Information.
After the war, the now Lord Beaverbrook concentrated on his business interests. He built the Daily Express into the most successful mass-circulation newspaper in the world, with sales of 2.25 million copies a day across Britain. He used it to pursue personal campaigns, most notably for tariff reform and for the British Empire to become a free trade bloc. Beaverbrook supported the governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain throughout the 1930s and was persuaded by another long-standing political friend, Winston Churchill, to serve as his Minister of Aircraft Production from May 1940. Churchill later praised his "vital and vibrant energy".[2] He resigned due to ill-health in 1941 but later in the war was appointed Lord Privy Seal.
Beaverbrook spent his later life running his newspapers, which by then included the Evening Standard and the Sunday Express.[3] He served as Chancellor of the University of New Brunswick and developed a reputation as a historian with his books on political and military history.[4]
Early life[edit]
Aitken was born in Maple, Ontario, Canada, in 1879, one of the ten children of William Cuthbert Aitken, a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister,[a] and Jane (Noble), the daughter of a prosperous local farmer and storekeeper Joseph Vaughan Noble. When he was a year old, the family moved to Newcastle, New Brunswick, which Aitken later considered to be his hometown. It was here, at the age of 13, that he set up a school newspaper, The Leader. Whilst at school, he delivered newspapers, sold newspaper subscriptions and was the local correspondent for the St John Daily Star.[5]
Aitken took the entrance examinations for Dalhousie University, but because he had declined to sit the Greek and Latin papers he was refused entry. He registered at the King's College Law School, but left after a short while. This was to be his only formal higher education. Aitken worked in a shop, then borrowed some money to move to Chatham, New Brunswick, where he worked as a local correspondent for the Montreal Star, sold life insurance and collected debts. Aitken attempted to train as a lawyer and worked for a short time in the law office of R. B. Bennett, a future prime minister of Canada. Aitken managed Bennett's successful campaign for a place on Chatham town council. When Bennett left the law firm, Aitken moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, where he again sold life insurance before moving to Calgary where he helped to run Bennett's campaign for a seat in the legislative assembly of the North-West Territories in the 1898 general election. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a meat business, Aitken returned to Saint John and to selling insurance.[6]
Early business career[edit]
In 1900, Aitken made his way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where John F. Stairs, a member of the city's dominant business family, gave him employment and trained him in the business of finance. In 1904, when Stairs launched the Royal Securities Corporation, Aitken became a minority shareholder and the firm's general manager. Under the tutelage of Stairs, who would be his mentor and friend, Aitken engineered a number of successful business deals and was planning a series of bank mergers.
Stairs' unexpected early death in September 1904 led to Aitken acquiring control of the company and moving to Montreal, then the business capital of Canada. There he bought and sold companies, invested in stocks and shares and also developed business interests in both Cuba and Puerto Rico.[7] He started a weekly magazine, the Canadian Century in 1910, invested in the Montreal Herald and almost acquired the Montreal Gazette.[6] In 1907 he founded the Montreal Engineering Company.[8] In 1909, also under the umbrella of his Royal Securities Company, Aitken founded the Calgary Power Company Limited, now the TransAlta Corporation, and oversaw the building of the Horseshoe Falls hydro station.[9]
In 1910–1911 Aitken acquired a number of small regional cement plants in Canada, including Sir Sandford Fleming's Western Canada Cement Co. plant at Exshaw, Alberta, and amalgamated them into Canada Cement, eventually controlling four-fifths of the cement production in Canada. Canada was booming economically at the time, and Aitken had close to a monopoly on the material. There were irregularities in the stock transfers leading to the conglomeration of the cement plants, resulting in much criticism of Aitken, as well as accusations of price-gouging and poor management of the cement plants under his company's control.[10] Aitken sold his shares, making a large amount of money.
Aitken had made his first visit to Britain in September 1908, and when he returned there in the spring of 1910, in an attempt to raise money to form a steel company, he decided to make the move permanent,[6] but not before he led the underwriting, with a preponderance of British money, of an amalgamation of smaller units into the Steel Company of Canada.[11] Very shortly later Aitken moved his family to the UK.[12]
"Empire Isolationism" and appeasement[edit]
In March 1933, he visited Germany where he wrote that it was his impression that "the stories of Jewish persecution are exaggerated".[35] His most enduring impressions of his German trip was he felt that SA could not march properly, and he seemed to regard the Nazis as something of a joke who were not capable of achieving much of anything.[35] Beaverbrook frequently changed his views about Adolf Hitler, which caused the obituary writers that worked for him much anguish as they were forced to change their drafts of a Hitler obituary from positive to negative to positive again.[46] After the Night of the Long Knives, Beaverbrook "turned solidly, fanatically anti-Hitler" as he compared Hitler to Al Capone and the Nazis to gangsters.[46] Beaverbrook was to change his opinions about Hitler a number of times afterward.[46]
In a guest opinion column published in April 1935 in the Hearst newspapers, Beaverbrook set out to explain "the section of opinion to which I belong - the Isolationists".[47] Beaverbrook advocated that: "Britain should make no alliances except with the United States, that we should incur no obligations, no responsibilities, no liabilities outside of the Empire except in relation to the Anglo-Saxon race".[47] He supported the "limited liability" rearmament under which the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy were built up at the expense of the British Army as the rearmament programme in best accord with his own foreign policy ideas.[48] In 1935, Beaverbrook campaigned against the Peace Ballot, an unofficial referendum organised in 1935 by the League of Nations Union, as the "Ballot of Blood".[49] He was concerned that if Britain should be obliged to enforce the collective security policies of the League of Nations against aggression, it could involve Britain in wars where no British interests were at stake.[49] In a leader in the Daily Express, he wrote the collective security policy of the League "will drag you and your children into a war" caused by "the ambitious and unscrupulous powers" that were the other members of the League (Beaverbrook failed to mention that to activate collective security required the approval of the League Council, of which Britain was a veto-holding member).[50] Beaverbrook stated that his readers should not take part in the Peace Ballot and wrote: "Tear up the ballot paper. Throw the pieces in the waste paper basket. Turn away from Europe. Stand by the Empire and Splendid Isolation".[50]
During the crisis caused by the Italian aggression against Ethiopia, Beaverbrook was opposed to the policy of imposing sanctions on Italy under the banner of the League of Nations as he argued that the Italo-Ethiopian war did not concern Britain.[51] In a leader, he warned that the sanctions on Italy might cause a "world race war" as he stated that Ethiopia was not worth fighting for as it was an African nation.[51] Likewise, when Germany remilitarized the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, violating both the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno, Beaverbrook used his newspapers to argue against Britain taking action to enforce the treaties it had signed.[52] Beaverbrook maintained good relations with Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, writing to him in 1936 about his "...friendly attitude towards your Great Leader" and he was "determined that nothing shall be said or done by any newspaper controlled by me which is likely to disturb your tenure in office".[53] Beaverbrook concluded "while I am free, and my newspapers in the attitude I take to the Russian leader, I must say I admire and praise his conduct of government".[54] In 1936, at the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the new German ambassador to the Court of St. James, Beaverbrook attended the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but quickly became bored with the Third Reich and soon returned to Britain."[14]
In the 1930s, while personally attempting to dissuade King Edward VIII from continuing his affair with American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, Beaverbrook's newspapers published every titbit of the affair, especially allegations about pro-Nazi sympathies. Reflecting his "empire isolationism", Beaverbrook used the Daily Express to promote British neutrality as he wrote a leader which compared supporting the Spanish Republic as alike to supporting the Whites in the Russian civil war as he declared that British intervention in the Russian civil war "cost us some thousands of British soldiers' lives, £100,000,000 in cash, and the bitter enmity of the Russian government for the next ten years...and the intervention failed anyway. Britain had backed a loser. It is the mark of a mug to go on backing the same loser".[55] In 1936, the Daily Express published an opinion piece by Lloyd George who had just returned from meeting Hitler at the Nuremberg Party Rally in which he called der Führer "the George Washington of Germany".[35] Beaverbrook published the piece, but told Lloyd George that he was embarrassed by it as he disliked "the regimentation of opinion" in Germany.[35] In regards to the Sino-Japanese war, Beaverbrook was entirely concerned about a possible Japanese threat to the British empire and used the Daily Express to sound his fears that the Japanese might try to seize the British colonies in Asia.[56] In a 1938 leader, Beaverbrook warned: "Too many people would be interested in checking Japan if that country really MEANT trouble against white people...The British public seem to have sensed what the British ministers have not - that Japan is dynamiting her way not only through the Chinese empire, but dangerously near other empires. Get out your map!"[56] Along the leader was a map that showed the proximity of Japanese troops to Hong Kong.[56] Beaverbrook supported the Munich Agreement and hoped the newly named Duke of Windsor would seek a peace deal with Germany.
Testifying before a Parliamentary inquiry in 1947, former Express employee and future MP Michael Foot alleged that Beaverbrook kept a blacklist of notable public figures who were to be denied any publicity in his papers because of personal disputes. Foot said they included Sir Thomas Beecham, Paul Robeson, Haile Selassie and Noël Coward. Beaverbrook himself gave evidence before the inquiry and vehemently denied the allegations; Express Newspapers general manager E. J. Robertson denied that Robeson had been blacklisted, but did admit that Coward had been "boycotted" because he had enraged Beaverbrook with his film In Which We Serve, for in the opening sequence Coward included an ironic shot showing a copy of the Daily Express floating in the dockside rubbish bearing the headline "No War This Year".[57][58][59]
In the late 1930s, Beaverbrook used his newspapers to promote the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government. The slogan 'There will be no war' was used by the Daily Express.[60] At the time of the Sudetenland crisis, Beaverbrook wrote in a leader: "... do not get caught up in quarrels over foreign boundaries that do not concern you."[14] Beaverbrook was strongly opposed to the famous "guarantee" offered by Chamberlain for Poland in the House of Commons on 31 March 1939 under his usual grounds that Britain had no interests in Poland, and no reason to go to war for Poland.[54] Beaverbrook told Maisky: "I want the empire to remain intact, but I don't understand why for the sake of this we must wage a three-year war to crush "Hitlerism"...Poland, Czechoslovakia? What are they to do with us? Cursed be the day when Chamberlain gave our guarantees to Poland!"[14] On 4 August 1939, a leader in The Daily Express questioned the need for British commitments to Poland as it was declared: "while there are some reasons in favour of an alliance with France...our alliances in Eastern Europe are another matter"."[61] On 7 August 1939, the Daily Express ran a banner headline saying "No War This Year" as it predicated the Danzig crisis would be settled peacefully.[61] In a memo dated 3 March 1943, Beaverbrook was unapologetic about the "no war" headlines as he wrote: "The prophecy proved wrong. The policy, had it been pursued more vigorously might have proved it right".[62] The British historian Daniel Hucker wrote that Beaverbrook was out of touch with the readers of his newspapers in the summer of 1939.[61]
Historian[edit]
After the First World War, Beaverbrook had written Politicians and the Press in 1925, and Politicians and the War in two volumes, the first in 1928 and the second in 1932,[98] republished in one volume in 1960.[99] Upon their original publication, the books were largely ignored by professional historians and the only favourable reviews were in Beaverbrook's own newspapers.[100] However, when the combined edition of Politicians and the War came out, the reviews were more positive.[101] A. J. P. Taylor said it was "Tacitus and Aubrey rolled into one".[101][102]
Later Taylor said: "The enduring merits of the book are really beyond cavil. It provides essential testimony for events during a great political crisis...It contains character sketches worthy of Aubrey. On a wider canvas, it displays the behaviour of political leaders in wartime. The narrative is carried along by rare zest and wit, yet with the detached impartiality of the true scholar".[103] Sir John Elliot in 1981 said the work "will remain, despite all carping, the authoritative narrative; nor does the story want in the telling thereof".[104]
Men and Power 1917–1918 was published in 1956. It is not a coherent narrative, but is divided by separate episodes centred on one man, such as Carson, Robertson, Rothermere and others. The reviews were favourable, with Taylor's review in The Observer greatly pleasing Beaverbrook.[105] The book sold over 23,000 copies.[106]
When The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George was published in 1963, favourable reviewers included Clement Attlee, Roy Jenkins, Robert Blake, Lord Longford, Sir C. P. Snow, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Richard Crossman and Denis Brogan.[107] Kenneth Young said the book was "the finest of all his writing".[107]
Beaverbrook was both admired and despised in Britain, sometimes at the same time: in his 1956 autobiography, David Low quotes H.G. Wells as saying of Beaverbrook: "If ever Max ever gets to Heaven, he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course."[108]
Beaverbrook was of an imperialist mindset, with the quote, "There are countries so underdeveloped today that the gift of independence is like the gift of a razor to a child" attributed to him in a panel discussion on Canadian TV.[109]