Peerage

On 9th December, Aitken was offered a peerage. If he had not exactly placed Asquith's head on the block, he had certainly been instrumental into bringing him to trial. Sir Max accepted the peerage, ignoring the King's objections.

 

The Morning Post proposed that he should call himself Lord Bunty, after a popular play called Bunty pulls the strings, a satirical if not altogether unfair, reflection on recent events. Instead, he chose the title Beaverbrook, not – as was romantically put about – because it had been a stream near New Brunswick where he had fished as a boy; but, because, more prosaically, he had found it on a map.

 

The 1920s and 1930s established Beaverbrook's reputation as a brilliant exponent of crusader politics. He had, of course, won appointment in the last months of the war as the first ever Minister of Information, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but a series of rows with Lloyd George had led to his resignation, late in

 

Media tycoon

It was therefore the pages of the Daily Express and the running of that newspaper, that felt the full force of his boundless energy. After the fall of Lloyd George, he used it to support Bonar Law in his successful attempt to become Prime Minister: a pyrrhic victory -within months Bonar Law was dead.

 

More satisfying were the huge rises in circulation both in the Daily and Sunday Express, which had been set up in December 1918, (and to a lesser extent in the Evening Standard which he acquired in 1923.) In 1919, the Daily Express sold 400,000 copies a day; by 1938 some 2,329,000 and, much later, by 1960, the astonishing figure of 4,300,000, making it the largest ever selling British newspaper.

 

It will be for his role as a pioneer of newspapers and for his ability to form public opinion that Beaverbrook will be ultimately remembered. He did, of course, try to maintain the hardly plausible outward appearance of a benign proprietor.

 

But anyone who visited Cherkley Court, his country house near Leatherhead, could not be deceived.

There was ticker tape with the latest news continually arriving, there were banks of telephones ringing, soundscribing machines in operation. Amongst it all sat Beaverbrook firing off memorandums, leaking gossip, and barking orders down the telephone to terrified editors.

 

The Daily Express became the voice of intellectual populism with Beaverbrook's appointment of writers such as Michael Foot, John Junor, Woodrow Wyatt, and the cartoonist David Low. It was also a useful stick with which he could beat friends and foes alike.