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Desmond
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overview
This profile looks at Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook), the
Express newspaper group and contemporary magnate Richard
Desmond.
It covers -
introduction
Anglo-Canadian entrepreneur Lord Beaverbrook boasted that
his UK newspapers were run for influence, rather than
profit.
It has been fashionable to cite that quip as an explanation
for why his group was dismembered after the founder's
death but restructuring of other groups on Fleet Street
and elsewhere during the same period suggests that causation
is more complex.
The group is currently owned by Richard Desmond
after passing through United Media, profiled elsewhere
on this site.
Beaverbrook's group
Max Aitken
(1879-1964), later enobled as Lord Beaverbrook (a reward
for services rendered or simply to get him out of people's
hair) made a fortune in Canada before - like Roy Thomson
and Conrad Black - moving to the
UK.
Throughout the twenties and thirties he conducted quixotic
political campaigns, subsequently serving as a minister
in Churchill's wartime government. His newspaper empire
has been dismantled; its chief monuments are the Beaver's
reputation and a modernist building (all art deco chrome
and black glass) in Fleet Street.
Beaverbrook Newspapers was sold to Trafalgar House Investments
(property and shipping) in 1977, being renamed Express
Newspapers. Five years late Trafalgar's media and shipping
interests were spun off, with Express as part of Fleet
Holdings, absorbed in October 1985 by regional publisher
United Newspapers.
In 1996 United became part of the MAI group, currently
being dismantled after sale of its television interests
to Granada and acquisition of
its major newspapers in late 2000 by Richard Desmond,
Britain's leading publisher of soft-core porn.
For a perspective on the decline and fall we recommend
Robert Picard's lucid The Rise & Fall of Communication
Empires (PDF)
and studies of the Astors, who
vacated the publishing field when demands for funding
became too severe and business became less simpatico.
biography
Son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Max Aitken grew up
near Beaverbrook, New Brunswick, and made a fortune through
corporate reorganisations before heading off to England
in 1910 when Canada became a bit unwelcoming. It's been
suggested that his commercial predations meant that he
was shunned by Canadian polite society; arguably the UK
was instead a bigger theatre in which to strut and make
mischief.
He entered Parliament in alliance with Conservative
leader Andrew Bonar Law, acquiring national newspapers
in opposition to the Harmsworth
family and the Astors, notably
the Pall Mall Gazette (a traditional toy
for rich arrivistes), the Daily Express and Evening
Standard. The Sunday Express was founded in
1918.
After involvement in the downfall of Herbert Asquith -
his memoirs provide an insight into the elevation of David
Lloyd George as Prime Minister - he received a peerage. Lady
Astor dismissed him as Lord Been-a-crook; a subsequent
critic commented that his portrait by Graham Sutherland,
made him look "like a diseased toad bottled in methylated
spirits."
During the twenties and thirties he conducted political
crusades - frequently unclear where personal, party and
national interests stopped - and was a hands-on manager
of the papers. Hearst commented that Beaverbrook used
tabloid methods on broadsheets, with the result that by
1936 the Express had the largest circulation in
the world. In 1922 Beaverbrook and the first Viscount
Rothermere exchanged interests in
each other's groups. Rothermere's Mail took 49%
of Express Newspapers, paid in part with 80,000 Daily
Mail Trust shares. Beaverbrook subsequently used the cross-holdings
to his advantage, with a substantial profit when the arrangement
ended in 1933.
Beaverbrook's campaigns - for Edward VIII, imperial free
trade - were notably unsuccessful, despite his assertion
that the press was "a flaming sword which will cut
through any political armour". Along the way he found
time to romance a variety of femmes fatale, including
Dorothy Schiff of the New York Post, subsequently
acquired by Rupert Murdoch.
He was prominent in Churchill’s wartime government as
Minister of Aircraft Production (40-41), Minister of Supply
(41-42), Minister of War Production (42), Special Envoy
to the United States on Supplies (42), and Lord Privy
Seal (43-45).
studies
AJP Taylor's portrait of Beaverbrook (New York:
Simon & Schuster 1972) - a sort of mirror image of
Orson Welles's love letter to William Randolph Hearst
- has become a classic.
While rightly criticised as too close to his subject -
the forword confesses that "I loved Max Aitken, Lord
Beaverbrook when he was alive. Now that I have learnt
to know him better from the records I love him even more"
- Taylor's verve and intelligence mean that he has not
been superseded by more recent studies such as the intelligent
Beaverbrook- A Life (London: Pimlico 1993) by Anne
Chisholm & Michael Davie.
Beaverbrook's own writings, in particular Men &
Power 1917-19 (London: Hutchinson 1956) - while examples
of 'faction' long before the New Journalism became popular
- are excellent entertainment.
Breakfast With Beaverbrook: Memoirs of an Independent
Woman (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger 1995) by Anne
Moyall - former Beaverbrook aide, co-founder of the Australian
Dictionary of Biography and pioneering historian of
Australian science - is intimate, perceptive and charming. Logan
Gourlay edited The Beaverbrook I Knew (London:
Quartet 1984), a set of reminiscences.
Tom Driberg's Beaverbrook: A Study in Power & Frustration
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 56) is another love
letter by Beaverbrook protege 'William Hickey'. This
Man Beaverbrook (1940) by William Brittain, Newspaper
Lords in British Politics (1958) by Carl Hambro, Beaverbrook,
"a difficult fellow" - the Story of Beaverbrook
at MAP (1945) and G, for God Almighty: a personal
memoir of Lord Beaverbrook (1969) by David Farrer are
of archival interest only.
In contrast Gregory Marchildon's Profits and Politics:
Beaverbrook and the Gilded Age of Canadian Finance
(Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1996) is more revealing
about the vagaries of turn of the century investment banking
- much like 1990s funding of dot coms and 1980s cable
tv companies - than Beaverbrook the man.
There's a perspective in Steel at the Sault: Francis
Clergue, Sir James Dunn & the Algoma Steel Corporation,
1901-1956 (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1984) by
Duncan McDowall and in Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms:
Buying and Selling Securities in Canada 1870-1940
(Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1997) by Christopher Armstrong.
The Fall of the House of Beaverbrook (London: Deutsch
1979) by Lewis Chester & Jonathan Fenby is a account
of dismantling the empire, supplemented by the self-congratulatory
A Growing Concern: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson 1979) by Trafalgar supremo Nigel Broackes.
Voice of Britain: The Inside Story of the Daily Express
(1983) by Roger Allen is self-congratulatory.
Richard Cockett edited My Dear Max: The Letters of
Brendan Bracken to Lord Beaverbrook 1925-58 (London:
Rainbow 1990).
Beaverbrook's own writings - entertaining, invaluable
but not always reliable - include Success and Canada
In Flanders (1922), Politicians & the War 1914-1916
(London: Hutchinson 1928), Men & Power: 1917–1918
(London: Hutchinson 1956), My Early Life (Fredericton:
Brunswick Press 1965), The Abdication of Edward VIII
(London: Hamish Hamilton 1966), The Decline & Fall
of Lloyd George (London: Collins 1966) and Friends
(1959).
Lord Copper and other fiction
He appears, thinly disguised in novels by his mistress
Rebecca West (1892-1983) - the portrait as Francis Pitt
in her Sunflower rivals the vapourings of his friend
Barbara Cartland - HG Wells and Arnold Bennett. Doom,
a 1928 potboiler by the zany William Gerhardie (1895-1977),
features him as Lord Ottercove - publishing tycoon, promoter
of bad novels and hero of the Kiss-Lick Club. Gerhardie
elsewhere commented on his "eyes like Ivan the Terrible's,
burning along every line."
There's something of the Beaver in Lord Raingo
(1926) by Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), Sir Bussy Woodcock
in HG Wells' The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930)
and Sir Magnus Donners in Anthony Powell's A Dance
To The Music of Time. Wells had sought to avert the
publisher's displeasure by commenting "I wanted a
man who had made money fast and had an original mind.
You seem to be the only one who answers to that description
in London." Evelyn Waugh understandably denied that
Beaverbrook was the original of Lord Copper in Scoop
(1938) and Officers & Gentlemen.
Beaverbrook starred - along with West, Wells and fellow
magnate Edward Hulton - in They
Forgot To Read The Directions, a 1924 silent film
in which he drugs three former mistresses before drowning
their babies in the ornamental pool at his Cherkley Court
residence.
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