Abstract
Though he had died 11 years earlier, the Beaver's shade still stalked the Black Lubyanka when I joined the Daily Express in 1975. You passed his bust on the way upstairs (from the foyer lined with two vast Art Deco friezes he had commissioned – The Spirit of Empire and The Spirit of Industry) to the Big Room where an obtrusive sign hanging from the ceiling instructed subs and reporters to “Make it Early. Make it Accurate”.
You might also occasionally glimpse the chairman, Beaverbrook's son, the dashing wartime flying ace Max Aitken, who, Charles Williams recounts, back in the 20s had enraged Beaverbrook by seeking to marry one of his father's many mistresses.
Not much of the glamour which had long attached to the paper and its Fleet Street home, largely the personal legacy of Beaverbrook, surfaces in this biography. Williams is more interested in the politician, capitalist and unstoppable womaniser than the “press baron” he was almost invariably known as in his lifetime. For Williams, the Daily Express is little more than a vehicle for the Beaver's own – more often than not spectacularly wrong-headed – editorialising, of which the notorious September 1938 “There Will Be No War” article was only one example.
Another was the ill-fated Empire Crusade, demolished by Stanley Baldwin's rebuke to him and Rothermere during the 1931 Westminster St George's by-election. Devised by Baldwin's cousin, Rudyard Kipling, it fits every newspaper owner who has since tried to destroy, or bend to his will, elected governments: “Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.”
Yet Beaverbrook was – like those unlovably propagandist proprietors Northcliffe and Murdoch – also a great popular journalist. Yes, as a disciple of his fellow Canadian Andrew Bonar Law, he helped to bring down Asquith as prime minister in the First World War and joined Churchill's war cabinet in the Second. But he was also a total newspaperman – and news junkie – a lifelong passion since his teenage years writing gossip for the local Daily Sun while working in a dollar-a-week job at a pharmacy in his home town of Newcastle, New Brunswick.
For a distinguished peer, who was a director of Mirror Group Newspapers for seven years, Williams is pretty insouciant about how the Express's success was made -350,000 copies in 1918 to four million in 1949 before its slow decline. Beaverbrook, he says, was “aware [during the 1936 abdication crisis]… that nothing could destroy a tabloid newspaper quicker than finding itself on the wrong side of the Sovereign without proper cause”.
Perhaps this was just a slip – the Express was a middle-market broadsheet until 1977. But it is less easy to excuse the cursory treatment of the paper's most brilliant and longest-serving editor, the Beaverbrook-appointed Arthur Christiansen. Before a single paragraph on the Beaver's sad, if somewhat brutal, parting with the ailing Christiansen in 1959, there are just a handful of perfunctory references to the man who, over a quarter of a century, was as much the architect of the Express's success as Beaverbrook himself.
This would be less striking if it weren't for the space devoted to the Beaver's early business career in Canada or the three entire chapters on his subject's admittedly hyper-active sex life. There are times when the latter read numbingly like an extended William Hickey column: his “maitresse en titre” (Williams’ phrase) Jean Norton was the “daughter of Brigadier General Sir David Kinlock of Gilmerton (11th Baronet); on 3 April 1919 she had married the 27-year-old Honourable Richard Henry Brinsley Norton, son of the 5th Lord Grantley”. Some of this Debrett-ese could have been sacrificed to a fuller account of the most surprising of all his mistresses, Rebecca West, who fell hopelessly – and least explicably – in love with her “pet lamb”. It was not a description that either his enemies or the editorial employees Beaverbrook frequently harangued would easily have recognised.
Those enemies were not all on the left, nor all the employees on the right. His close friendship with Aneurin Bevan, his employment of Michael Foot and the radical Frank Owen (as editor) at the Standard were a case in point. A straw poll of Express journalists in the Christiansen era revealed a significant number of Labour supporters and several declared communists. Some of this political diversity survived into the 70s, in a way that differentiated it from even the David English-run Daily Mail.
Covering the National Union of Railwaymen's conference in Jersey, I was once instructed to look into the supposedly generous perks of delegates, after the union's communist president Dave Bowman had promised to defy Harold Wilson's pay policy as long as “the gambling tables of the West End are groaning with chips”. Thanks entirely to the NUR's patient national officer, Arnold Edmondson, I demonstrated in some detail how modestly they were spending their week in St Helier. I assumed the story would not be used. But it was, on page 2, and I even had a (for me, very rare) herogram – they were real telegrams in those days – from the news editor, Brian Hitchen.
That said, the paper's overall line remained where Beaverbrook had always located it: on the right. Attlee's riposte to Churchill's ill-advised “Gestapo” election broadcast in the 1945 election – “The voice we heard last night was that of Mr Churchill but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook” – was as accurate as it was deadly. The Beaver's friendship with Churchill understandably forms a large part of this book. Yet a structural weakness – which better editing would have overcome – is that the casual reader will still find it baffling that immediately he became PM, Churchill made Beaverbrook minister of aircraft production. However suited his entrepreneurial talents were to the job, this was a man who almost to the last had been a passionate and isolationist opponent of the war that Churchill had long seen as inevitable.
Many chapters later Williams seeks briefly to explain the Beaver's “magic touch” with Churchill. For that, it's hard to beat Roy Jenkins in his Churchill biography: “Beaverbrook's political influence was mostly bad (certainly in the view of Clementine Churchill)… but he knew how to massage Churchill and he appealed to his lifelong weakness for bounders.”