BEAVERBROOK RETIRES

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27408, 22 July 1954, Page 11

BEAVERBROOK RETIRES

Shares In Papers Go To Trust (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON, July 20. Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadianborn newspaper magnate, who built the “Daily Express” from a small newspaper to one of Britain’s most popular dailies, has relinquished control of it and its associated papers. An announcement tonight from the

“Daily Express” office said: “Lord Beaverbrook has .given his block of shares in the ‘Daily Express’ to the Beaverbrook Foundation, which has been established as a British Empire educational trust. The newspapers have therefore passed out of his control.”

Lord Beaverbrook is 75. The newspapers he controlled included the “Daily Express,” which sells more than 4,000,000 copies each day, the “Sunday Express,” the “Evening Standard,” and the Glasgow “Evening Citizen.”

Lord Beaverbrook, formerly Max Aitken, son of a poor Presbyterian minister, went to England’in 1907 to enter politics and was elected to Parliament in 1910. In spite of warnings he bought the ailing “Express” mainly to support Bonar Law, and made it • prosper. When Law died, Lord Beaverbrook turned to Empire- free trade as his policy and with Lord Rathemere, of the “Daily Mail,” crusaded so strongly that the United Emjure Party, which they formed, forced tne Conservatives to adopt part of their policy. But when the two press lords offered to help Baldwin if they could help choose his next ministry, the offer was indignantly rejected and the long feud between Lord Beaverbrook and Baldwin continued.

Though the “Express” consistently argued during the late thirties that the Empire had no quarrel with Fascism, and that England should keep out of the League of Nations, the circulation of the paper reached new records. However, Lord Beaverbrook did not support Hitler and Mussolini. “Empire ever, Nazism

never” was his motto as he praised Chamberlain as a “champ” at Munich. It is not possible to gauge how great an influence Lord Beaverbrook’s opinions had on British diplomacy and on public opinion. But his policies have been ridiculed even by his own employees. One of them, Evelyn Waugh, in a novel created the character of Lord Monomark of the “Daily Excess” —“a ludicrous egocentric”—and another, David Low, the famous New Zealand cartoonist, frequently lampooned his employer and his pronouncements, even in his own paper. His tolerance of such criticism is a beguiling characteristic. During the war Lord Beaverbrook was made a member of the War Cabinet as Minister of Aircraft Production.