The Beaver
UNDERSTANDABLY enough, a faintly baffled note has recurred in the obituaries of Lord Beaverbrook. For all his love of self-publicity he remained a paradox and a puzzle. The likeliest judgment is that he was an adventurer of genius. He first sought adventure in acquiring a fortune: then he went adventuring in politics and after that in Fleet Street. Having captured wealth, he sought its corollary, power. It proved a far more elusive booty. And the truth is that few of the public men who have paid seemly tribute to him this week will regret that it so turned out.
The one power Beaverbrook could always command was that of the entertainer. He could, through his newspapers, attract and please a mass audience as none had done before him. He pro- vided a daily variety show brilliantly designed to set them chuckling or nudging or pursing their lips in complacent disapproval. It was done with breath-taking energy and with the born show- man's reckless freedom from self-doubt.
Beaverbrook thought he was doing all this to collect an audience for his political message. This message was a queer amalgam of large ideas and small-minded nostrums and prejudices In fact, of course, the message went largely disregarded. The show was a strident success, but its creator's intentions in staging it again and again ended in frustration. The public which he has so skilfully captured listened to him only when he said what they wanted to hear. To the generation of the Thirties, fearful of the realities of the world, he shouted that there would be no war. They listened gratefully. Later, as the British Empire passed into history, he thumped potently on the drum of nostalgia and resentment at the shrinking of national power. Sometimes he lured his readers into sharing his private vendettas: the feuds became part of the show. But the show always dwarfed its original purpose.
That thick-skinned Barnum-and-Bailey cru- sader was not the whole of Beaverbrook. If it had been, the show might never have been such a success He was a man of famous energy and drive and restlessness: he thrived upon crisis, and if no crisis existed his inclination was to set about creating one. In war his powers were much prized. He was also a man of rare, and frequently self-mocking humour: his editorial campaigning might have been enormously improved if this quality had not been heavy-handedly excluded. It ought to be said, too, that unlike more conven- tional press magnates he delighted in employing
writers and cartoonists who wholly rejected his views. In a quirky and unpredictable way, the Beaverbrook press, for all its Paul Slickeyism and its crudities, has given many journalists a battered corner of independence inside the great word-factory.
All journalists will watch with fascination now to see what happens to that press without its creator. Its old supreme position had already gone. A new type of newspaper empire, business- like and unflamboyant, has arisen under Lord Thomson. On the very day of Lord Beaverbrook's death the Daily Mirror announced that its circu- lation had passed the five million: its more can- did vulgarities have left the Daily Express a long way behind. Perhaps no one yet knows how the old man's empire will evolve without him. The only certainty is that change it surely will.
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