Lord Beaverbrook

William Maxwell Aitken, (1879-1964), the first Lord Beaverbrook, effortlessly traversed the worlds of politics, finance and newspapers, revolutionising them – with not so much as a backward glance – as he did so. Imbued with a small fortune, great restlessness and energy, and an unswerving belief in the British Empire, he moved, as a young man, from his native Canada to London.
There, within a few years, he had propelled himself into Parliament and had acquired the majority shareholding in the Daily Express and the Evening Standard. He quickly gained the reputation of a fearless political fixer, (a reputation, it must be admitted, that was at times unfounded), and he was one of only three men to serve in the cabinet in both wars.

Aitken revelled in his position as an outsider: ostentatiously keeping his Canadian drawl, largely disdaining overtures of two British monarchs, and enjoying his image as a master of intrigue and mischief maker par excellence.

For nearly half a century, when cabinets fell and finance houses collapsed, the whisper across England would always be the same: Where is Max Beaverbrook?

The early years

Aitken was born on 25th May 1879, the fifth child of William Aitken, a dignified and devout Presbyterian preacher of Scottish extraction. He spent his early childhood in the frontier town of Newcastle, New Brunswick, Canada. Later in life he would recall the hardship of his early years. But this was an undoubted exaggeration: though by no means rich, the Aitken family were able to live comfortably in their Canadian provincial backwater.

 

Young Max attended high school where he showed early signs of an ability to make trouble, and tried and failed to gain entry into Dalhousie university. Moving away from his family, he studied to become a lawyer, and helped another aspiring barrister Richard Bedford Bennett, (who later became Prime Minister of Canada), to gain election to the Legislative Assembly of the North West Territories.

He moved again to Halifax, where charm and some luck brought him to the attention of the dominant business family, who employed him to sell bonds on commission. Quickly gaining confidence he engineered a number of increasingly large business deals and began setting up companies, with interests as far wide as the Caribbean and England.

By 1906, by his own reckoning, he was worth $700,000. He continued to manipulate the markets and create mergers – of which the largest and perhaps most lucrative was the Canadian cement merger – drawing censure on more than one occasion from the Canadian authorities.