Hooting

Edward Pearce

• Beaverbrook by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie
  Hutchinson, 589 pp, £20.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 09 173549 1

Like many another high-toned writer, I started journalistic life on the Express, initially the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was known officially as Sir Max Aitken, unofficially, after his gallant war, as Biggles. He was widely liked, even loved; but though a civilised and kindly boss, he lacked the zest and edge of an ordinarily successful newspaper-owner, never mind the special, bottomless fund of vitality with which his father boiled. Best remembered for his description of the sport of sailing as ‘standing under the shower tearing up ten-pound notes’, he was nevertheless a superior article in every imaginable way to the brutish units of accountancy constituting the present.