Beaverbrook, Sir Maxwell Aitken

Sir Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, in full Sir William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook of Beaverbrook and of Cherkley, 1st Baronet, (born May 25, 1879, Maple, Ont., Can.—died June 9, 1964, near Leatherhead, Surrey, Eng.), financier in Canada, politician and newspaper proprietor in Great Britain, one of three persons (the others were Winston Churchill and John Simon) to sit in the British cabinet during both World Wars. An idiosyncratic and successful journalist, he never fully achieved the political power that he sought.

Beaverbrook, Sir Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron

As a stockbroker in Montreal, Aitken made a fortune by amalgamating the entire cement industry of Canada. He then moved to England and was elected to the House of Commons in 1910. As private secretary to Andrew Bonar Law (also Canadian-born), he helped him win the Conservative Party leadership in 1911. He also worked with Law to remove the Liberal H.H. Asquith as prime minister in favour of the Liberal David Lloyd George in December 1916. In the same month, Aitken bought a majority interest in the London Daily Express. Subsequently he founded the London Sunday Express and acquired the London Evening Standard (which then absorbed a noted Liberal paper, the Pall Mall Gazette) and the Glasgow Evening Citizen.

After failing to receive government office from Lloyd George in 1916, Aitken accepted a baronetcy in that year and a peerage as Baron Beaverbrook the following year. In 1918 he served in the cabinet as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and minister of information. He aided in breaking up Lloyd George’s postwar coalition in 1922, and in 1930–31 he tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Stanley Baldwin as Conservative leader. During the 1930s he was notable as one of the “press lords” and as a leader of the United Empire Party. In 1938, after Neville Chamberlain made a peace deal with Germany, Aitken’s Express printed a headline that would haunt it for years, a lesson for journalists venturing into prediction: “Britain will not be involved in a European war this year or the next year either.” But the war did come, and Aitken became a member of Winston Churchill’s war cabinet as minister of aircraft production (1940–41) and minister of supply (1941–42). He also served as British lend-lease administrator in the United States (1942) and lord privy seal (1943–45).

In his newspapers Beaverbrook colourfully championed individual enterprise and British imperial interests. He also wrote several books about his political experiences, the most important being Politicians and the Press (1925) and Politicians and the War, 2 vol. (1928). He was caricatured in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop (1938).