Beverley Baxter
Sir Arthur Beverley Baxter, FRSL was a journalist and politician. Born in Toronto, Canada, he worked in the United Kingdom for the Daily Express and as a theatre critic for the London Evening Standard and was a Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party from 1935 to his death.
Early life
He was born in Toronto from James Bennett Baxter, a Yorkshire-born Methodist who had emigrated to Canada, and his wife Meribah Elizabeth Lawson, born in Toronto. He left Harbord Collegiate Institute at 15. He worked for the Nordheimer Piano and Music Company selling pianos, and became a sales manager. The family was musical, his father being an organist and leading a choir, his mother a pianist and singer. He had friends in the Canadian music world including Ernest MacMillan and the baritone Edmund Arbuckle Burke.In 1915 Baxter enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force of World War I, becoming a signals lieutenant in the 122nd Battalion, CEF in France. In 1917 he was posted for a time to England. In March 1918 he was again on the Western Front, but contracted influenza and was invalid out back to England again.
Newspaper man
After the war, Baxter settled in London. In 1919 he met fellow Canadian Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express. He went to work at the Express, with some reluctance since he had ambitions to be an author, as a leader writer and reporter. A friend from this period was Gilbert Frankau, who called him "Bax" as others did, and also had a private nickname "the inspired gate-crasher" for Baxter. His association with Beaverbrook was referred to as "Bax and Max".Editor R. D. Blumenfeld put Baxter in charge of page 4 of the paper, with the editorial, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor. Beaverbrook sought to match the circulation of Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail. George Garro-Jones wrote that as a journalist "Beverley Baxter in his day could be trusted to spare nobody."
In 1922 Baxter was appointed the managing editor of the Sunday Express, launched in 1918 by Beaverbrook after he had failed to acquire the Sunday Times, and loss-making for a decade; the editor there was James Douglas. Under the headline "Three Nights of Horror" Baxter reviewed for it in November 1922 a dramatisation of The Secret Agent, which he called "actionless and unmoving", and two other plays.
After two years, Baxter was moved to be the managing editor on the Daily Express in 1924, acting as deputy to Blumenfeld who became editor-in-chief. E. J. Robertson—Ewart John Robertson, another Canadian WWI veteran—employed by Beaverbrook as a manager ran daily operations.
Baxter had a musical connection to the Sitwell circle: William Walton dedicated a piano arrangement of a piece from Façade to his wife Edith. During the General Strike 1926, Osbert Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon waited for and met Baxter outside his Chelsea flat, at 2 am, and discussed moderation of the "bellicose" tone on the strike taken by Express, with the hope of influencing Beaverbrook and seeing the strike resolved.
In 1929 Baxter went to work for the Daily Chronicle group, as editor-in-chief. The Chronicle was edited by Robert Ensor. It was in play, having been sold at half price in 1928 by Yule Catto & Co., who had bought it in 1927 from David Lloyd George, to the entrepreneur William Harrison who chaired the Inveresk Paper Co. In 1930 the Daily Chronicle was amalgamated with the Daily News to form the News Chronicle.
Blumenfeld, "elbowed aside and kicked upstairs" by Beaverbrook, retired later in 1929. Baxter took over as editor-in-chief of the Daily Express. He increased the circulation, which for the first time it exceeded 1,000,000 under his stewardship; in 1933 it topped 2,000,000.
Kemsley Newspapers and appeasement
Baxter left the Beaverbrook stable in 1933, replaced as editor of the Daily Express by Arthur Christiansen. He worked as Public Relations counsel for the Gaumont British Picture Corporation Ltd.In 1935 Baxter was recruited by Allied Newspapers to be an Editorial Adviser by Lord Camrose; in 1937 he moved across to Kemsley Newspapers, controlled by Lord Kemsley, Camrose's brother. In 1936 he began the "London Letter" series for Maclean's Magazine, reporting on British politics and life to Canadians: it ran to 1960. He wrote the "Atticus" gossip column in the Sunday Times and was commended for his journalism by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as "a most loyal supporter of the Government".
During the debates about foreign policy in the late 1930s, Baxter was an advocate of appeasement of Germany. In July 1938 he called for the United Kingdom to go to Germany helpfully, and not to block Germany wherever she tried to expand. He drew a parallel between Germans and Britons, saying that the two had the same human ambitions and sense of destiny.
An article Baxter wrote about two weeks after the Munich Agreement in the Star of 1938 was in a German report from London of 15 October taken to have shown up "in a masterly way the spitefulness of the speeches made by Opposition Conservatives and describes the Führer's answer to them as a well-deserved retort." He appealed to British women in terms of "responsibility to the nation" to support the campaign for "Peace and Preparedness".
Theatre critic
In 1942 Baxter was appointed by Lord Beaverbrook as theatre critic for the Evening Standard, a post which he held for the eight years, combining it with his duties as a Member of Parliament. Milton Shulman, the paper's film critic, would fill in whenever Baxter had miss a first night: he eventually found that Baxter's ability to attend was "becoming somewhat erratic."A first night disaster that became a stock theatrical anecdote played a role in Baxter's losing the job in 1951. In Shulman's account, Gavin Lambert wrote an anonymous "sardonic knifing of all of Fleet Street's working theatre critics but was particularly derisive about the 'merciless volubility' of Beverley Baxter", published in an undergraduate magazine Panorama edited by Kenneth Tynan. Shulman showed the article to Charles Curran, the features editor, who passed it to Baxter.
Tynan was drama critic for The Spectator, and was "brutally unfair" about the acting of Vivien Leigh; Leigh's daughter Suzette and Baxter's daughter Meribah were debutantes who shared a party, as Baxter wrote in one of his "London Letter" columns, on 15 May 1951. Baxter reviewed Tynan's performance as the Player King in Alec Guinness's production of Hamlet at the New Theatre that opened on 17 May in London, writing: "I am a man of a kindly nature, who takes no joy in hurting those who are without defence, but Mr Ken Tynan would not get a chance in a village hall unless he was related to the vicar. His performance was quite dreadful."
Tynan responded with an open letter to the Standard, published 22 May 1951, declaring that his performance was "not 'quite dreadful'; it is, in fact, only slightly less than mediocre": in July Beaverbrook appointed him as replacement for Baxter as the paper's theatre critic. Baxter was then music critic on the Standard. He slammed the 1953 performance of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, suggesting that Edward German's light opera Merrie England would have been more suitable for Elizabeth II's coronation.
In politics
Baxter was selected as Conservative Party candidate for Wood Green in London in 1935. The 1935 general election was called while he was touring in Canada, but he won the seat with a majority of over 21,000. While a Member of Parliament Baxter wrote occasional newspaper articles, particularly for the Daily Sketch, and he became known as a government supporter.Reviewing Norman Thompson's 2013 book Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream based on Baxter's "London Letters", Daniel Gorman commented in Histoire Sociale/Social History that
In his politics, Baxter was a journalistic weathervane. Always a conservative, he variously supported and opposed the successive grandees of the British Conservative party
He noted also that, until the Suez Crisis of 1956, Baxter consistently championed the British Empire and Canada's part in it, his views being in line with Beaverbrook's. His maiden speech in December 1935 argued that the problems of depressed areas in Britain could be alleviated by encouraging emigration to the other countries of the British Empire.
World War II
On 10 March 1940, Baxter published a piece in the Sunday Graphic, criticising Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. who was US ambassador to the United Kingdom, for a lack of advocacy encouraging Americans to enter the war. It was read into the record of the House of Representatives by Fred L. Crawford, on 2 April.In the spring of 1940, Baxter was an advocate for the internment of aliens, writing in the Sunday Chronicle "I'd Intern My German Friends". Later that year, when internments under Defence Regulation 18B had become numerous, he wrote in the Daily Sketch that Friedelind Wagner had been poorly treated. She had been writing anti-German articles for the Sketch, in which he had been involved.
Baxter supported Neville Chamberlain in the Norway debate of May 1940, and the next morning protested vigorously about the attacks on Chamberlain's character, urging him not to regard the vote as one of censure but to show the courage of David Lloyd George. Chamberlain, however, resigned that day.
The incoming Churchill government put Beaverbrook in charge of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, on 14 May. Baxter's reaction was recorded in the diary of Henry Channon, for 12 June 1940: "Beaverbrook himself is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who has finally married the Mayor!" Baxter had an unofficial post with the Ministry, where he was responsible for maintaining production of aero-engines. He became a Churchill loyalist; when Sir John Wardlaw-Milne put down a motion of no confidence after the loss of Libya in June 1942, Baxter put down an amendment assuring Churchill of "unqualified support in the introduction of any measures.. for the intensified prosecution of the war".
Writing under the pseudonym of Cassius, Michael Foot published an anti-Tory work Brendan and Beverley in 1944, singling out Baxter and Brendan Bracken. It meant he had to give up his position as editor of the Evening Standard, owned by Lord Beaverbrook.