Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

Canadian businessman and politician

• Born: May 25, 1879
• Birthplace: Maple, Ontario, Canada
• Died: June 9, 1964
• Place of death: Cherkley, Surrey, England

Beaverbrook created the most successful newspaper empire of his day and, in World War II, as minister of aircraft production, was greatly responsible for the victory in the Battle of Britain. After the war, Beaverbrook was one of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s chief advisers.

Early Life

William Maxwell Aitken, best known as Lord Beaverbrook, was born in Maple, Ontario, Canada, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. The family soon moved to Newcastle, New Brunswick, where young Max grew up. His father, William Cuthbert Aitken, had emigrated from Scotland to pursue a ministerial career, and his mother, Jane Noble, Canadian by birth but also of Scottish ancestry, was the daughter of a storekeeper. Although later in life Beaverbrook referred to his relatively poor background, in fact it was comfortably middle-class. He was the third of ten children. His was a happy childhood and Beaverbrook early developed a reputation for mischief, something he kept throughout his life. He attended a local school but failed the Latin portion of his college entrance examinations and instead chose the law for a career.

It was business and finance, however, which brought Beaverbrook his fortune. The early twentieth century was a period of economic expansion in Canada, and Beaverbrook became successful in taking over companies, combining them with others, and using the profits to invest again and again. He soon had economic interests not only in Canada but also in the West Indies and was a millionaire before his thirtieth birthday. Beaverbrook rarely became involved in the day-to-day operation of his companies. For him, the thrill and the reward of business were in the act of creation itself, with its challenge and excitement. He had little patience, became bored easily, and preferred the new to the old. Nevertheless, from a distance he watched his investments and rarely lost money.

In 1906, Beaverbrook married Gladys Henderson, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Canadian military officer. Beaverbrook loved his wife, but not exclusively; he often left her alone, surrounded by luxury, as he pursued his business and other interests. They had three children, two boys and a girl. By 1910, Beaverbrook had also acquired financial interests in Great Britain, and in that year the family moved to London. He returned to Canada, but never for any length of time.

Life’s Work

For most individuals, Beaverbrook’s financial and business successes would have been sufficient accomplishments, but not for him. In London, he became acquainted with a leading Conservative politician, Bonar Law, also a Canadian whose father had been a Presbyterian minister. Their relationship was initially financial but soon became political and personal; Law became Beaverbrook’s hero. In December, 1910, with Law’s support, Beaverbrook was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative; the following year, Beaverbrook was granted a knighthood. Undoubtedly, his political successes were the result of his acquaintanceships and his money. In some circles, he had the reputation of being merely a Canadian adventurer and thus not quite proper, but he was generous to his friends and had a captivating personality that impressed not only Law but also such Liberal politicians as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Beaverbrook was of average height, five feet nine inches, but because of his quickness, he often appeared smaller; when his eyes flashed and his smile spread all across his face, he seemed still a mischievous boy yet to grow up. He was always an apt subject for political cartoons.

Unlike Churchill, Beaverbrook found the day-to-day political world boring, and he cared little about the political issues that divided the various parties. Beaverbrook was more radical and less class-conscious than most British politicians of the day, but he opposed socialism and was very much the individualist who believed in capitalism. When World War I began, Beaverbrook joined the Canadian army. He still retained his interest in making new mergers out of old firms, however, and thus became intimately involved in the political revolution of December, 1916, which saw Lloyd George replace H. H. Asquith as prime minister of the coalition government in England. In 1917, Beaverbrook accepted a seat in the British House of Lords (obtaining the name Lord Beaverbrook, for a small river that flowed near his childhood home in New Brunswick). Later in the war, he became minister of information in Lloyd George’s government.

Although he had helped Lloyd George become prime minister, Beaverbrook had doubts about the continuation of the coalition into peacetime. In 1921 and 1922, many political discussions were held at Cherkley, Beaverbrook’s country home near London. Finally, in late 1922, Lloyd George fell, and Law became prime minister. Unfortunately for Beaverbrook, Law died of cancer within a year, and the new Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, distrusted Beaverbrook, who returned his sentiments.

During most of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Beaverbrook observed politics from the outside. Lloyd George’s political influence was over, and although Churchill served in the Baldwin government during the 1920’s, his relations with Beaverbrook lessened. Beaverbrook’s great energies, however, found new outlets. During the war, he had purchased, primarily for political reasons, the London Daily Express, a successful newspaper in financial difficulty. In 1919, Beaverbrook began the Sunday Express, and a few years later he acquired the London Evening Standard. He had become one of the leading newspaper barons on Fleet Street. In the late nineteenth century, Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, had founded, in his Daily Mail, a new style of journalism, addressed to the middle and lower classes rather than the traditional establishment, and whose function was to entertain rather than simply inform; the Daily Mail was exciting and it was cheap and had many readers. Beaverbrook followed the path earlier trod by Northcliffe but with a difference. The Daily Express was not directed to any particular portion of the British population but was rather Britain’s first classless newspaper. Possibly it could have been created only by an outsider, a Canadian such as Beaverbrook who himself was not a product of the British social system.

Beaverbrook rarely entered the offices of his newspapers, but he was intimately involved in their operation. He would telephone several times a day, and, if abroad, he sent and received correspondence on a daily basis. Although he was nominally a member of the Conservative Party, Beaverbrook was not necessarily committed to many of the policies of that party, and after Law’s death he was out of sympathy with the leadership as long as Baldwin was in power. His papers thus were not automatically supportive of any particular party position, and he had as writers and cartoonists individuals who reflected various views. On certain issues, however, Beaverbrook would allow little dissent. Possibly because he was Canadian by birth, he was committed to the preservation of the British Empire, although in reality he knew little about it, other than Canada. To maintain the Empire, Beaverbrook waged a campaign for what he called Empire Free Trade, or the concept that there should be some type of free trade within the Empire and tariffs erected against nonimperial countries. In the early 1930’s, Beaverbrook pushed imperial goals and used his newspapers in doing so, but most politicians, particularly Baldwin, were opposed to his campaign, and his dream died. Still, his papers prospered, and eventually the Daily Express became the largest newspaper in the world, with a daily circulation of more than four million copies.

Given his belief in the British Empire, it is not surprising that Beaverbrook took an isolationist position toward Europe. After the no-man’s-land of World War I, no one wished for another war, even with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Many in Britain tended toward pacifism in the 1930’s or at most preferred to rely on the League of Nations. Beaverbrook had no faith in the league, wishing to rely on the British Empire; he was also no pacifist. He agreed with Churchill on the need for Britain to rearm but disagreed with Churchill’s attempt to rally France and other continental nations against Germany. In the late 1930’s, he supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and approved of the Munich settlement that led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His newspapers stated, year after year, that there would be no war that year. In 1939, they were wrong, and World War II began.

In May, 1940, as Germany turned west against France, Chamberlain was replaced as prime minister by Churchill, and Beaverbrook once again returned to influence. Churchill was in his mid-sixties, and most of his peers from the Great War were either dead or retired. Beaverbrook was the exception. He gave Churchill a link to the past, but more important, Beaverbrook’s energy and enthusiasm gave support to Churchill during the dark days of World War II. Beaverbrook’s significance, however, transcended the personal. Churchill appointed him minister of aircraft production, a controversial move that was popular among neither the military nor the civil servants. It was an inspired appointment, however, and Beaverbrook was a brilliant minister, mobilizing resources, disbursing factories, and creating the fighter defense that was able to resist Hitler’s assaults during the Battle of Britain . His methods were unorthodox, and many thought that he was shortsighted in his concentration on fighter aircraft rather than bombers, but Beaverbrook was interested only in the day-to-day need of his nation to survive.

In 1941, Beaverbrook left the ministry of aircraft production and became minister of state, then minister of supply, and finally minister of production. In none of those positions, however, was he successful. He did not work well in committees and did not get along with other members of the cabinet. At most, Beaverbrook was willing to work under someone whom he greatly admired, such as Law or Churchill. In late 1941, Beaverbrook journeyed to Moscow and became a major supporter of military supplies for the Soviet Union and one of the major advocates for the opening of a second front in Europe against Germany. Churchill was less committed to an early cross-channel invasion, but after the decision had been made to invade Normandy in 1944, the two reconciled and Beaverbrook returned to the government. After victory in Europe, the wartime coalition disbanded and elections were held. Beaverbrook was one of Churchill’s chief advisers, and when Churchill and the Conservatives were surprisingly defeated by the Labour Party, Beaverbrook was blamed, unfairly, for the debacle. It was the end of his political career; after 1945, he only watched from the sidelines.

Significance

During the last twenty years of his life, Beaverbrook continued his active involvement in his newspapers, although he often denied that he was really in control. Before World War II, he had bought a villa in southern France, which he visited each year during his retirement. He became chancellor of the University of New Brunswick, gave much financial support to the university, and spent part of each fall in Canada. He never gave up his English country home, but now it was only a part-time residence. He became a collector of manuscripts, acquiring those of Lloyd George and Law, among others. He eventually returned to the writing of history; in the 1920’s, he had written the story of the political crisis of 1916 (Politicians and the War, 1928-1932), and in his last decade he wrote two other major works on the period up to the fall of Lloyd George in 1922 (Men and Power, 1956; The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George, 1963). He also had been involved in the abdication crisis of 1936 and wrote a brief study of that episode (The Abdication of Edward VIII, 1966).

Beaverbrook opposed the onset of the Cold War, optimistically hoping that the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union could be continued. His last political crusade was against the proposal to have Britain join the Common Market in the early 1960’s. He still believed that, for Britain, isolation from Europe and partnership with the Commonwealth nations was the proper course. His wife, Gladys, had died in 1927, but it was not until 1963 that Beaverbrook married again; the bride was Lady Christofor Dunn, widow of a wealthy Canadian friend. Beaverbrook often suffered from asthma, particularly in times of stress, but his general health remained good until well into his eighties. He died at Cherkley in June, 1964, and his ashes were returned to Newcastle, New Brunswick, the land of his birth.

Beaverbrook’s Canadian background gave him a dimension that most of his British colleagues lacked. He was something of an outsider in England, but an influential outsider. He became Britain’s most successful newspaper publisher, he was one of the foremost spokespeople for the concept of the British Empire, and finally, in World War II, he was among those most responsible for winning the Battle of Britain.

Bibliography

Allen, Robert. Voice of Britain: The Inside Story of the Daily Express. Cambridge, England: P. Stephens, 1983. This somewhat brief and slight book is valuable as a short history of Beaverbrook’s most successful newspaper and as a compendium of many illustrations of actual front pages, cartoons, and other material from the paper.

Busch, Briton C., ed. Canada and the Great War: Western Front Association Papers. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Includes the essay by Canadian national archivist Tim Cook, “Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadian War Records Office in the First World War.”

Cannadine, David. History in Our Time. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Collection of essays about British history, including a profile of Lord Beaverbrook.

Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War. 6 vols. London: Cassell, 1948-1954. Churchill’s personal account of World War II is one of the historical classics of the twentieth century. Beaverbrook plays an important part in the work, and Churchill praised him particularly for his contribution to victory in the Battle of Britain.

Cudlipp, Hugh. The Prerogative of the Harlot: Press Barons and Power. London: Bodley Head, 1980. Cudlipp, a journalist, worked for Beaverbrook and includes a long essay on Beaverbrook in his discussion of several twentieth century newspaper publishers, including William Randolph Hearst, Henry R. Luce, and Lord Northcliffe. The title refers to Stanley Baldwin’s statement against Beaverbrook during the Empire Free Trade campaign.

Pound, Reginald, and Geoffrey Harmsworth. Northcliffe. London: Cassell, 1959. An extensive account of Beaverbrook’s predecessor in the establishment of the popular press in Great Britain. Northcliffe had died in the early 1920’s, but his brother, Lord Rothermere, was Beaverbrook’s major newspaper rival during the interwar years.

Taylor, A. J. P. Beaverbrook. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Taylor’s biography is the major work on Beaverbrook. The author, one of Great Britain’s most respected historians, was a personal friend during the last several years of Beaverbrook’s life, and the portrait painted by Taylor is both admiring and sympathetic but is not entirely uncritical.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. English History: 1914-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Beaverbrook’s biographer has here written the volume in the Oxford History of England series that covers both a crucial period in the history of Great Britain and the primary portion of Beaverbrook’s public life. Taylor’s interpretations are not entirely unbiased, but those biases were often those of Beaverbrook himself.

Young, Kenneth. Churchill and Beaverbrook: A Study in Friendship and Politics. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966. An excellent and well-written account of the two larger-than-life figures. Young details not only their political relationship but also their long personal friendship, and it is the latter that particularly remains with readers.