William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964)

• financier, politician and publisher, whose newspapers achieved unprecedented mass circulation
• born in Maple, Ontario
• son of a clergyman
• educated at the public school in Maple
• studied law at the University of New Brunswick
• sought his fortune in Montreal, engineered the merger of three companies into the Canada Cement Company
• after amassing a fortune in the cement business, he went to England in 1910; later that year he entered Parliament as Conservative member for Ashton-under-Lyne
• knighted in 1911 and raised to the peerage in 1916, took his title Beaverbrook from a small stream near his home in New Brunswick
• became owner of the London Daily Express in 1916 and built its circulation to over four million a day
• founded the London Sunday Express (1918) and bought the London Evening Standard (1923)
• made a second fortune from his newspaper interests; also attained an enormously influential position in political affairs
• in 1916 he represented the Canadian government as an observer with Canadian troops on the Western Front during World War I
• in 1918 he joined the British cabinet as minister of information
• during World War II he again joined the British cabinet, as minister of aircraft production in 1940 and minister of supply in 1941. In 1942 he was British Lend-Lease administrator in the United States, and he served from 1943 to 1945 as lord privy seal.
• resigned from the Conservative party in 1949; his newspapers became politically independent
• from 1947 to 1953 he was chancellor of the University of New Brunswick
• known to his friends as the Beaver
• wrote:
  • Politicians and the Press (1925)
  • Men and Power: 1917-18 (1956)
  • Decline and Fall of Lloyd George (1963)
• books about Beaverbrook
  • This man Beaverbrook (1940) by William James Brittain
  • Beaverbrook, "a difficult fellow"; the story of Beaverbrook at M.A.P. (1945) by David Farrer
  • Beaverbrook : a study in power and frustration (1956) Tom Driberg
  • Newspaper Lords in British Politics (1958) Carl Joachim Hambro
  • G--for God Almighty; a personal memoir of Lord Beaverbrook (1969) by David Farrer
  • Beaverbrook (1972) A. J. P. Taylor
  • The fall of the house of Beaverbrook (1979) by Lewis Chester and Jonathan Fenby
  • Voice of Britain : the inside story of the Daily Express (1983) by R. Allen
  • Beaverbrook : a life (1992) by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie
  • The Beaverbrook I knew (1984) edited by Logan Gourlay

back to the Well Known Canadians Page