Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

This is a broad, catch-all category of works that fit best here and not elsewhere. If you haven't found it someplace else, you might want to look here.

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Thu Sep 12, 2019 5:21 am

Hereditary peer
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/11/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


The hereditary peers form part of the peerage in the United Kingdom. As of 2019 there are 814 hereditary peers. The numbers of peers – of England, Scotland, Great Britain, and the UK – whose titles are the highest they hold (i.e. are not subsidiary titles) are: dukes, 24 (plus 7 royal dukes); marquesses, 34; earls, 193; viscounts, 112; barons, 444.

Not all hereditary titles are titles of the peerage. For instance, baronets and baronetesses may pass on their titles, but they are not peers. Conversely, the holder of a non-hereditary title may belong to the peerage, as with life peers. Peerages may be created by means of letters patent, but the granting of new hereditary peerages has largely dwindled; only seven hereditary peers have been created after 1965, four of them members of the British royal family.

From 1963 to 1999, all (non-Irish) peers were entitled to sit in the House of Lords, but since the House of Lords Act 1999 was passed, only 92 are permitted to do so, unless they are also life peers.[1] Peers are called to the House of Lords with a writ of summons.

Origins

Further information: History of the peerage

The hereditary peerage, as it now exists, combines several different English institutions with analogous ones from Scotland and Ireland.

English Earls are an Anglo-Saxon institution. Around 1014, England was divided into shires or counties, largely to defend against the Danes; each shire was led by a local great man, called an earl; the same man could be earl of several shires. When the Normans conquered England, they continued to appoint earls, but not for all counties; the administrative head of the county became the sheriff. Earldoms began as offices, with a perquisite of a share of the legal fees in the county; they gradually became honours, with a stipend of £20 a year. Like most feudal offices, earldoms were inherited, but the kings frequently asked earls to resign or exchange earldoms. Usually there were few Earls in England, and they were men of great wealth in the shire from which they held title, or an adjacent one, but it depended on circumstances: during the civil war between Stephen and the Empress Matilda, nine Earls were created in three years.

William the Conqueror and Henry II did not make Dukes; they were themselves only Dukes of Normandy or Aquitaine. But when Edward III of England declared himself King of France, he made his sons Dukes, to distinguish them from other noblemen, much as Royal Dukes are now distinguished from other Dukes. Later Kings created Marquesses and Viscounts to make finer gradations of honour: a rank something more than an Earl and something less than an Earl, respectively.

When Henry III or Edward I wanted money or advice from his subjects, he would order great churchmen, earls, and other great men to come to his Great Council (some of these are now considered the first parliaments); he would generally order lesser men from towns and counties to gather and pick some men to represent them. The English Order of Barons evolved from those men who were individually ordered to attend Parliament, but held no other title; the chosen representatives, on the other hand, became the House of Commons. This order, called a writ, was not originally hereditary, or even a privilege; the recipient had to come to the Great Council at his own expense, vote on taxes on himself and his neighbours, acknowledge that he was the king's tenant-in-chief (which might cost him special taxes), and risk involvement in royal politics – or a request from the king for a personal loan (benevolence). Which men were ordered to Council varied from Council to Council; a man might be so ordered once and never again, or all his life, but his son and heir might never go.

Under Henry VI of England, in the 15th century, just before the Wars of the Roses, attendance at Parliament became more valuable. The first claim of hereditary right to a writ comes from this reign; so does the first patent, or charter declaring a man to be a baron. The five orders began to be called peers. Holders of older peerages also began to receive greater honour than peers of the same rank just created.

If a man held a peerage, his son would succeed to it; if he had no children, his brother would succeed. If he had a single daughter, his son-in-law would inherit the family lands, and usually the same peerage; more complex cases were decided depending on circumstances. Customs changed with time; earldoms were the first to be hereditary, and three different rules can be traced for the case of an Earl who left no sons and several married daughters. In the 13th century, the husband of the eldest daughter inherited the earldom automatically; in the 15th century, the earldom reverted to the Crown, who might re-grant it (often to the eldest son-in-law); in the 17th century, it would not be inherited by anybody unless all but one of the daughters died and left no descendants, in which case the remaining daughter (or her heir) would inherit.

After Henry II became the Lord of Ireland, he and his successors began to imitate the English system as it was in their time. Irish earls were first created in the 13th century, and Irish parliaments began later in the same century; until Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland, these parliaments were small bodies, representing only the Irish Pale. A writ does not create a peerage in Ireland; all Irish peerages are by patent or charter, although some early patents have been lost. After James II left England, he was King of Ireland alone for a time; three creations he ordered then are in the Irish Patent Roll, although the patents were never issued; but these are treated as valid.

The Irish peers were in a peculiar political position: because they were subjects of the King of England, but peers in a different kingdom, they could sit in the English House of Commons, and many did. In the 18th century, Irish peerages became rewards for English politicians, limited only by the concern that they might go to Dublin and interfere with the Irish Government.

Scotland evolved a similar system, differing in points of detail. The first Scottish Earldoms derive from the seven mormaers, of immemorial antiquity; they were named Earls by Queen Margaret. The Parliament of Scotland is as old as the English; the Scottish equivalent of baronies are called lordships of Parliament.

The Act of Union 1707, between England and Scotland, provided that future peerages should be peers of Great Britain, and the rules covering the peers should follow the English model; because there were proportionately many more Scottish peers, they chose a number of representatives to sit in the British House of Lords. The Acts of Union 1800 changed this to peers of the United Kingdom, but provided that Irish peerages could still be created; but the Irish peers were concerned that their honours would be diluted as cheap prizes, and insisted that an Irish peerage could be created only when three Irish peerages had gone extinct (until there were only a hundred Irish peers left). In the early 19th century, Irish creations were as frequent as this allowed; but only three have been created since 1863, and none since 1898. As of 2011, only 66 "only-Irish" peers remain.[a]

a. Counting those listed in the article Peerage of Ireland.

Modern laws

The law applicable to a British hereditary peerage depends on which Kingdom it belongs to. Peerages of England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom follow English law; the difference between them is that Peerages of England were created before the Act of Union 1707, Peerages of Great Britain between 1707 and the Union with Ireland in 1800, and Peerages of the United Kingdom since 1800. Irish Peerages follow the law of the Kingdom of Ireland, which is very like English law, except in referring to the Irish Parliament and Irish officials, generally no longer appointed; no Irish peers have been created since 1898, and they have no part in the present governance of the United Kingdom. Scottish Peerage law is generally similar to English law, but differs in innumerable points of detail, often being more similar to medieval practice.

Women are ineligible to succeed to the majority of hereditary peerages, and only inherit in the absence of a male heir in the other peerages.[2]

Ranks and titles

Image
The House of Lords (old chamber, burned down in 1834) as drawn by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson for Ackermann's Microcosm of London (1808-11).

The ranks of the Peerage in most of the United Kingdom are, in descending order of rank, duke, marquess, earl, viscount and baron;[3] the female equivalents are duchess, marchioness, countess, viscountess and baroness respectively. Women typically do not hold hereditary titles in their own right, one significant change to this however was in 1532 when Henry VIII created the Marquess of Pembroke title for his soon to be wife, Anne Boleyn. Anne held this title in her own right and was therefore ennobled with the same rank as a male Viscount.

In the Scottish peerage, the lowest rank is lordship of Parliament, the male holder thereof being known as a lord of Parliament.[4] A Scottish barony is a feudal rank, and not of the Peerage. The barony by tenure or feudal barony in England and Wales was similar to a Scottish feudal barony, in being hereditary, but is long obsolete, the last full summons of the English feudal barons to military service having occurred in 1327.[5] The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 finally quashed any remaining doubt as to their continued status.

Peerage dignities are created by the Sovereign by either writs of summons or letters patent. Under modern constitutional conventions, no peerage dignity, with the possible exception of those given to members of the Royal Family, would be created except upon the advice of the Prime Minister.

Many peers hold more than one hereditary title; for example, the same individual may be a duke,a marquess, an earl, a viscount and a baron by virtue of different peerages. If such a person is entitled to sit in the House of Lords, he still only has one vote. However, until the House of Lords Act 1999 it was possible for one of the peer's subsidiary titles to be passed to his heir before his death by means of a writ of acceleration, in which case the peer and his heir would have one vote each. Where this is not done, the heir may still use one of the father's subsidiary titles as a "courtesy title", but he is not considered a peer.[6]

Inheritance of titles

The mode of inheritance of a hereditary peerage is determined by the method of its creation. Titles may be created by writ of summons or by letters patent. The former is merely a summons of an individual to Parliament—it does not explicitly confer a peerage—and descent is always to heirs of the body, male and female. The latter method explicitly creates a peerage and names the dignity in question. Letters patent may state the course of descent; normally, only male heirs are allowed to succeed to the peerage. A child is deemed to be legitimate if its parents are married at the time of its birth or marry later; only legitimate children may succeed to a title, and furthermore, an English, Irish, or British (but not Scottish) peerage can only be inherited by a child born legitimate, not legitimated by a later marriage.

Normally, a peerage passes to the next holder on the death of the previous holder. However, Edward IV introduced a procedure known as a writ of acceleration, whereby it was possible for the eldest son of a peer with multiple titles to sit in the House of Lords by virtue of one of his father's subsidiary dignities.

A person who is a possible heir to a peerage is said to be "in remainder". A title becomes extinct (an opposite to extant, alive) when all possible heirs (as provided by the letters patent) have died out, i.e., there is nobody in remainder at the death of the holder. A title becomes dormant if nobody has claimed the title, or if no claim has been satisfactorily proven. A title goes into abeyance if there is more than one person equally entitled to be the holder.

In the past, peerages were sometimes forfeit or attainted under Acts of Parliament, most often as the result of treason on the part of the holder. The blood of an attainted peer was considered "corrupted", consequently his or her descendants could not inherit the title. If all descendants of the attainted peer were to die out, however, then an heir from another branch of the family not affected by the attainder could take the title. The Forfeiture Act 1870 abolished corruption of blood; instead of losing the peerage, a peer convicted of treason would be disqualified from sitting in Parliament for the period of imprisonment.

The Titles Deprivation Act 1917 permitted the Crown to suspend peerages if their holders had fought against the United Kingdom during the First World War. Guilt was to be determined by a committee of the Privy Council; either House of Parliament could reject the committee's report within 40 days of its presentation. In 1919, King George V issued an Order in Council suspending the Dukedom of Albany (together with its subsidiary peerages, the Earldom of Clarence and the Barony of Arklow), the Dukedom of Cumberland and Teviotdale (along with the Earldom of Armagh) and the Viscountcy of Taaffe (along with the Barony of Ballymote). Under the Titles Deprivation Act, the successors to the peerages may petition the Crown for a reinstatement of the titles; so far, none of them has chosen to do so (the Taaffe and Ballymote peerages would have become extinct in 1967).

Nothing prevents a British peerage from being held by a foreign citizen (although such peers cannot sit in the House of Lords, while the term foreign does not include Irish or Commonwealth citizens). Several descendants of George III were British peers and German subjects; the Lords Fairfax of Cameron were American citizens for several generations.

A peer may also disclaim a hereditary peerage under the Peerage Act 1963. To do so, the peer must deliver an instrument of disclaimer to the Lord Chancellor within 12 months of succeeding to the peerage, or, if under the age of 21 at the time of succession, within 12 months of becoming 21 years old. If, at the time of succession, the peer is a member of the House of Commons, then the instrument must be delivered within one month of succession; meanwhile, the peer may not sit or vote in the House of Commons. Prior to the House of Lords Act 1999, a hereditary peer could not disclaim a peerage after having applied for a writ of summons to Parliament; now, however, hereditary peers do not have the automatic right to a writ of summons to the House. Irish peerages may not be disclaimed. A peer who disclaims the peerage loses all titles, rights and privileges associated with the peerage; his wife or her husband is similarly affected. No further hereditary peerages may be conferred upon the person, but life peerages may be. The peerage remains without a holder until the death of the peer making the disclaimer, when it descends normally.

Merging in the Crown

A title held by someone who becomes monarch is said to merge in the Crown and ceases to exist, for the Sovereign cannot hold a dignity from himself. The Dukedom of Cornwall and of Rothesay, and the Earldom of Carrick, are special cases, which when not in use are said to lapse to the Crown: they are construed as existing, but held by no one, during such periods. These peerages are also special because they are never directly inherited. The Dukedom of Cornwall was held formerly by the eldest son of the King of England, and the Dukedom of Rothesay, the Earldom of Carrick, and certain non-peerage titles (Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland) by the eldest son of the King of Scotland. Since those titles have been united, the dukedoms and associated subsidiary titles are held by the eldest son of the monarch. In Scotland, the title Duke of Rothesay is used for life. In England and Northern Ireland, the title Duke of Cornwall is used until the heir-apparent is created Prince of Wales. At the same time as the Principality is created, the Duke is also created Earl of Chester. The earldom is a special case, because it is not hereditary, instead revesting or merging in the Crown if the Prince succeeds to the Crown or predeceases the monarch: thus George III was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester a month after his father's death.

The Dukedom of Cornwall is associated with the Duchy of Cornwall; the former is a peerage dignity, while the latter is a private estate held by the Duke of Cornwall with certain privileges under the law. For example, the duchy is exempt from the provisions of the Town and County Planning Act 1990. Therefore, the planning laws of England and Wales do not apply to the duchy. This was evidenced in 2002 when Kerrier District Council objected to duchy plans to commence development on one of its properties.[citation needed] Income from the Duchy of Cornwall goes to the Duke of Cornwall, or, when there is no duke, to the Sovereign (but the money is then paid to the heir to the throne under the Sovereign Grant Act 2011). The duchy is now considered to be a private estate and conveys to the Prince of Wales the majority of his income. The only other Duchy in the United Kingdom is the Duchy of Lancaster, which is also an estate rather than a peerage dignity. The Dukedom of Lancaster merged in the Crown when Henry of Monmouth, Duke of Lancaster became King Henry V. Nonetheless, the Duchy of Lancaster still continues to exist, theoretically run by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Normally, however, the Chancellor does not exercise any actual duties related to the Duchy, so he is normally available as a Minister without Portfolio. The Duchy is the inherited property that belongs personally to the monarch, rather than to the Crown. Thus, while income from the Crown Estate is turned over to the Exchequer in return for a civil list payment, the income from the Duchy forms a part of the Privy Purse, the personal funds of the Sovereign.

See also: Category:British and Irish peerages which merged in the Crown.

Writs of summons

At the beginning of each new parliament, each peer who has established his or her right to attend Parliament is issued a writ of summons. Without the writ, no peer may sit or vote in Parliament. Writs of summons generally follow the same form. Firstly, they set out the titles of the Sovereign, and then those of the recipient. Next, they note the date for Parliament's calling and the reason for its calling. This portion of the writ differs based on whether Parliament is at the time sitting, or prorogued, or dissolved. Then, after commanding the recipient to attend, the writ indicates that the sovereign him or herself witnesses it. The form of writs issued while Parliament is dissolved is as follows:

Elizabeth the Second by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Our other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, To Our right trusty and well beloved XXXX Chevalier Greeting.

Whereas by the advice and assent of Our Council for certain arduous and urgent affairs concerning Us, the state, and defence of Our United Kingdom and the Church, We have ordered a certain Parliament to be holden to Our City of Westminster on the XX day of XX next ensuing and there to treat and have conference with the Prelates, Great Men, and Peers of Our Realm. We strictly enjoining Command you upon the faith and allegiance by which you are bound to Us that the weightness of the said affairs and imminent perils considered, waiving all excuses, you be at the said day and place personally present with Us and with the said Prelates, Great Men, and Peers to treat and give your counsel upon the affairs aforesaid. And this as you regard Us and Our honour and the safety and defence of the said Kingdom and Church and dispatch of the said affairs in nowise do you omit Witness Ourself at Westminster the XX day of XX in the XX year of Our Reign.


In the case of writs issued when Parliament is prorogued, the form of the first sentence of the second paragraph changes:

Whereas by reason of certain arduous and urgent affairs concerning Us the State and defence of Our United Kingdom and the Church We did lately with the advice and consent of Our Council ordain Our present Parliament to be holden at Our City of Westminster on the XX day of XX in the XX year of Our Reign which Parliament hath been from that time by several adjournments and prorogations adjourned prorogued and continued to and until the XX day of XX now next ensuing at Our City aforesaid to be then there holden. We strictly enjoining Command ...


In the case of writs issued during a session of Parliament, the form of the first sentence of the second paragraph changes:

Whereas Our Parliament for arduous and urgent affairs concerning Us the state and defence of Our United Kingdom and the Church is now met at Our City of Westminster We strictly enjoining Command ...


Image
Charles I (pictured) attempted to withhold a writ of summons for John Digby, 1st Earl of Bristol in 1626.

It is established precedent that the sovereign may not deny writs of summons to qualified peers. In 1626, King Charles I ordered that the writ of summons of John Digby, 1st Earl of Bristol not be issued. Lord Bristol had been charged with treason but was never tried. He complained to the House of Lords, which resolved that the denial of a writ to an eligible peer was without precedent and that the sovereign should immediately issue a writ of summons, which did occur.

Baronies by writ

By modern English law, if a writ of summons was issued to a person who was not a peer, that person took his seat in Parliament, and the parliament was a parliament in the modern sense (including representatives of the Commons), that single writ created a barony, a perpetual peerage inheritable by male-preference primogeniture. This was not medieval practice, and it is doubtful whether any writ was ever issued with the intent of creating such a peerage. The last instance of a man being summoned by writ without already holding a peerage was under the early Tudors; the first clear decision that a single writ (as opposed to a long succession of writs) created a peerage was in Lord Abergavenny's case of 1610. The House of Lords Act 1999 also renders it doubtful that such a writ would now create a peer if one were now issued; however, this doctrine is applied retrospectively: if it can be shown that a writ was issued, that the recipient sat and that the council in question was a parliament, the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords determines who is now entitled to the peerage as though modern law had always applied. Several such long-lost baronies were claimed in the 19th and 20th centuries, though the committee was not consistent on what constituted proof of a writ, what constituted proof of sitting, and which 13th-century assemblages were actually parliaments.[7] Even a writ issued in error is held to create a peerage unless the writ was cancelled before the recipient took his seat; the cancellation would have been performed by the now obsolete writ of supersedeas.

Peerages created by writ of summons are presumed to be inheritable only by the recipient's heirs of the body. The House of Lords has settled such a presumption in several cases, including Lord Grey's Case (1640) Cro Cas 601, the Clifton Barony Case (1673), the Vaux Peerage Case (1837) 5 Cl & Fin 526, the Braye Peerage Case (1839) 6 Cl & Fin 757 and the Hastings Peerage Case (1841) 8 Cl & Fin 144. The meaning of heir of the body is determined by common law. Essentially, descent is by the rules of male primogeniture, a mechanism whereby normally, male descendants of the peer take precedence over female descendants, with children representing their deceased ancestors, and wherein the senior line of descent always takes precedence over the junior line per each gender. These rules, however, are amended by the proviso whereby sisters (and their heirs) are considered co-heirs; seniority of the line is irrelevant when succession is through a female line. In other words, no woman inherits because she is older than her sisters. If all of the co-heirs but one die, then the surviving co-heir succeeds to the title. Otherwise, the title remains abeyant until the sovereign "terminates" the abeyance in favour of one of the co-heirs. The termination of an abeyance is entirely at the discretion of the Crown.

A writ of acceleration is a type of writ of summons that enables the eldest son of a peer to attend the House of Lords using one of his father's subsidiary titles. The title is strictly not inherited by the eldest son, however; it remains vested in the father. A writ may be granted only if the title being accelerated is a subsidiary one, and not the main title, and if the beneficiary of the writ is the heir-apparent of the actual holder of the title. A total of ninety-four writs of acceleration have been issued since Edward IV issued the first one, including four writs issued in the twentieth century. The only individual who recently sat in the House of Lords by writ of acceleration is Viscount Cranborne in 1992, through the Barony of Cecil which was actually being held by his father, the Marquess of Salisbury. (Viscount Cranborne succeeded to the marquessate on the death of his father in 2003.)

There are no Scottish peerages created by writ; neither can Scottish baronies go into abeyance, for Scots law does not hold sisters as equal heirs regardless of age. Furthermore, there is only one extant barony by writ in the Peerage of Ireland, that of La Poer, now held by the Marquess of Waterford. (Certain other baronies were originally created by writ but later confirmed by letters patent.)

Letters patent

More often, letters patent are used to create peerages. Letters patent must explicitly name the recipient of the title and specify the course of descent; the exact meaning of the term is determined by common law. For remainders in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, the most common wording is "to have and to hold unto him and the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten and to be begotten". Where the letters patent specifies the peer's heirs male of the body as successors, the rules of agnatic succession apply, meaning that succession is through the male line only. Some very old titles, like the Earldom of Arlington, may pass to heirs of the body (not just heirs-male), these follow the same rules of descent as do baronies by writ and seem able to fall into abeyance as well. Many Scottish titles allow for passage to heirs general of the body, in which case the rules of male primogeniture apply; they do not fall into abeyance, as under Scots law, sisters are not treated as equal co-heirs. English and British letters patent that do not specify a course of descent are invalid, though the same is not true for the letters patent creating peers in the Peerage of Scotland. The House of Lords has ruled in certain cases that when the course of descent is not specified, or when the letters patent are lost, the title descends to heirs-male.

Limitation to heirs of the body

It is generally necessary for English patents to include limitation to heirs "of the body", unless a special remainder is specified (see below). The limitation indicates that only lineal descendants of the original peer may succeed to the peerage. In some very rare instances, the limitation was left out. In the Devon Peerage Case (1831) 2 Dow & Cl 200, the House of Lords permitted an heir who was a collateral descendant of the original peer to take his seat. The precedent, however, was reversed in 1859, when the House of Lords decided in the Wiltes Peerage Case (1869) LR 4 HL 126 that a patent that did not include the words "of the body" would be held void.

Special remainder

It is possible for a patent to allow for succession by someone other than an heir-male or heir of the body, under a so-called special remainder. Several instances may be cited: the Barony of Nelson (to an elder brother and his heirs-male), the Earldom of Roberts (to a daughter and her heirs-male), the Barony of Amherst (to a nephew and his heirs-male) and the Dukedom of Dover (to a younger son and his heirs-male while the eldest son is still alive). In many cases, at the time of the grant the proposed peer in question had no sons, nor any prospect of producing any, and the special remainder was made to allow remembrance of his personal honour to continue after his death and to preclude an otherwise certain rapid extinction of the peerage. However, in all cases the course of descent specified in the patent must be known in common law. For instance, the Crown may not make a "shifting limitation" in the letters patent; in other words, the patent may not vest the peerage in an individual and then, before that person's death, shift the title to another person. The doctrine was established in the Buckhurst Peerage Case (1876) 2 App Cas 1, in which the House of Lords deemed invalid the clause intended to keep the Barony of Buckhurst separate from the Earldom of De La Warr (the invalidation of clause may not affect the validity of the letters patent itself). The patent stipulated that if the holder of the barony should ever inherit the earldom, then he would be deprived of the barony, which would instead pass to the next successor as if the deprived holder had died without issue.

Amendment of letters patent

Image
Letters patent granting the Dukedom of Marlborough to Sir John Churchill were later amended by Parliament

Letters patent are not absolute; they may be amended or revoked by Act of Parliament. For example, Parliament amended the letters patent creating the Dukedom of Marlborough in 1706. The patent originally provided that the dukedom could be inherited by the heirs-male of the body of the first duke, Captain-General Sir John Churchill. One son had died in infancy and the other died in 1703 from smallpox. Under Parliament's amendment to the patent, designed to allow the famous general's honour to survive after his death, the dukedom was allowed to pass to the Duke's daughters, the Lady Henrietta, the Countess of Sunderland, the Countess of Bridgewater and the Lady Mary, and their heirs-male, and thereafter "to all and every other the issue male and female, lineally descending of or from the said Duke of Marlborough, in such manner and for such estate as the same are before limited to the before-mentioned issue of the said Duke, it being intended that the said honours shall continue, remain, and be invested in all the issue of the said Duke, so long as any such issue male or female shall continue, and be held by them severally and successively in manner and form aforesaid, the elder and the descendants of every elder issue to be preferred before the younger of such issue."

Number of hereditary peers

The number of peers has varied considerably with time. At the end of the Wars of the Roses, which killed many peers, and degraded or attainted many others, there were only 29 Lords Temporal; but the population of England was also much smaller then. The Tudors doubled the number of Peers, creating many but executing others; at the death of Queen Elizabeth, there were 59.

Creation of English peerage dignities by Stuart monarchs

Sovereign / Reign / Peers

James I / 1603–1625 / 62
Charles I / 1625–1649 / 59
Charles II / 1660–1685 / 64
James II / 1685–1689 / 8
William III & Mary II / 1689–1702 / 30
Anne / 1702–1714 / 30
Total / 1603–1714 / 253


The number of peers then grew under the Stuarts and all later monarchs. By the time of Queen Anne's death in 1714, there were 168 peers. In 1712, Queen Anne was called upon to create 12 peers in one day in order to pass a government measure,[8][9] more than Queen Elizabeth I had created during a 45-year reign.

Several peers were alarmed at the rapid increase in the size of the Peerage, fearing that their individual importance and power would decrease as the number of peers increased. Therefore, in 1719, a bill was introduced in the House of Lords to place a limitation on the Crown's power. It sought to permit no more than six new creations, and thereafter one new creation for each other title that became extinct. But it did allow the Crown to bestow titles on members of the Royal Family without any such limitation. The Bill was rejected in its final stage in the Lords, but it was passed in the Lords when it was reintroduced in the next year. Nonetheless, the House of Commons rejected the bill by 269 to 177.

George III was especially profuse with the creation of titles, mainly due to the desire of some of his Prime Ministers to obtain a majority in the House of Lords. During his 12 years in power, Lord North had about 30 new peerages created. During William Pitt the Younger's 17-year tenure, over 140 new peerages were awarded.

A restriction on the creation of peerages, but only in the Peerage of Ireland, was enacted under the Acts of Union 1800 that combined Ireland and Great Britain into the United Kingdom in 1801. New creations were restricted to a maximum of one new Irish peerage for every three existing Irish peerages that became extinct, excluding those held concurrently with an English or British peerage; only if the total number of Irish peers dropped below 100 could the Sovereign create one new Irish peerage for each extinction.

There were no restrictions on creations in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. The Peerage continued to swell through the 19th century. In the 20th century, there were even more creations, as Prime Ministers were eager to secure majorities in the House of Lords. Peerages were handed out not to honour the recipient but to give him a seat in the House of Lords.

Current status

Image
In 1984 Harold Macmillan, a former Prime Minister, was the last non-royal recipient of a hereditary peerage, the Earldom of Stockton.

Image
Matt Ridley, well-known popular science writer and conservative journalist, is the Viscount Ridley

Since the start of the Labour government of Harold Wilson in 1964, the practice of granting hereditary peerages has largely ceased (except for members of the royal family). Only seven hereditary peers have been created since 1965: four in the Royal Family (the Duke of York, the Earl of Wessex, the Duke of Cambridge, and the Duke of Sussex) and three additional creations under Margaret Thatcher's government (the Viscount Whitelaw, the Viscount Tonypandy and the Earl of Stockton). The two Viscounts died without male heirs, extinguishing their titles. Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton received the Earldom often awarded to former Prime Ministers after they retired from the House of Commons.

There is no statute that prevents the creation of new hereditary peerages; they may technically be created at any time, and the government continues to maintain pro forma letters patent for their creation. The most recent policies outlining the creation of new peerages, the Royal Warrant of 2004, explicitly apply to both hereditary and life peers.[10] However, successive governments have largely disowned the practice, and the Royal Household website currently describes the Queen as the fount of honour for "life peerages, knighthoods and gallantry awards", with no mention of hereditary titles.[11]

Roles

Until the coming into force of the Peerage Act 1963, peers could not disclaim their peerage in order to sit in the House of Commons, and thus a peerage was sometimes seen as an impediment to a future political career. The law changed due to an agreement that the Labour MP Tony Benn having been deprived of his seat due to an inadvertent inheritance was undemocratic; and the desire of the Conservatives to put their choice of Prime Minister (ultimately Alec Douglas-Home) into the House of Commons, which by that time was deemed politically necessary.

In 1999, the House of Lords Act abolished the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords. Out of about 750 hereditary peers, only 92 may sit in the House of Lords. The Act provides that 90 of those 92 seats are to be elected by other members of the House: 15 by vote of the whole house (including life peers), 42 by the Conservative hereditary peers, two by the Labour hereditary peers, three by the Liberal Democrat hereditary peers, and 28 by the crossbench hereditary peers. Elections were held in October and November 1999 to choose those initial 90 peers, with all hereditary peers eligible to vote. Hereditary peers elected hold their seats until their death, resignation or exclusion for non-attendance (the latter two means introduced by the House of Lords Reform Act 2014), at which point by-elections are held to maintain the number at 92.

The remaining two hold their seats by right of the hereditary offices of Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain. These offices are hereditary in themselves, and in recent times have been held by the Dukes of Norfolk and the Marquesses of Cholmondeley respectively. These are the only two hereditary peers whose right to sit is automatic.

The Government reserves a number of political and ceremonial positions for hereditary peers. To encourage hereditary peers in the House of Lords to follow the party line, a number of Lords-in-Waiting (government whips) are usually hereditary peers. This practice was not adhered to by the Labour government of 1997–2010 due to the small number of Labour hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

Modern composition of the hereditary peerage

Image
Many hereditary peers are associated with famous estates such as Hatfield House; many notable estates are open to the public.

The peerage has traditionally been associated with high gentry, the British nobility, and in recent times, the Conservative Party. Only a tiny proportion of wealthy people are peers, but the peerage includes a few of the very wealthiest, such as Hugh Grosvenor (the Duke of Westminster) and Lord Salisbury of Hatfield House. Most of the largest stately homes belong to the National Trust due to forms of estate tax. A few peers own one or more of England's largest estates passed down through inheritance, particularly those with medieval roots: until the late 19th century the dominant English and Scottish land division on death was primogeniture.

However, the proliferation of peerage creations in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century resulted in even minor political figures entering the ranks of the peerage; these included newspaper owners (e.g. Alfred Harmsworth) and trade union leaders (e.g. Walter Citrine). As a result, there are many hereditary peers who have taken up careers which do not fit traditional conceptions of aristocracy. For example, Arup Kumar Sinha, 6th Baron Sinha is a middle-class computer technician working for a travel agency; Matt Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, is a popular science writer; and Peter St Clair-Erskine, 7th Earl of Rosslyn is a former Metropolitan Police Service Commander. The Earl of Longford was a socialist and prison reformer, while Tony Benn, who renounced his peerage as Viscount Stansgate (only for his son to reclaim the family title after his death) was a senior government minister (later a writer and orator) with solidly left-wing policies.

Gender distribution

See also: List of peerages inherited by women

As the vast majority of hereditary peerages can only be inherited by men, the number of peeresses is very small; only 18 out of 758 hereditary peers by succession, or 2.2%, were female, as of 1992.[12] From 1963 (when female hereditary peers were allowed to enter the House of Lords) to 1999, there has been a total of 25 female hereditary peers.[13]

Of those 92 currently sitting in the House of Lords, only one – Margaret of Mar, 31st Countess of Mar – is female. Originally there were five female peers elected under the House of Lords Act 1999 (all of them Crossbenchers), but four of these have since died or resigned,[14] and no female has won a by-election to a vacant Lords seat since 1999.[15]

See also

• List of hereditary baronies in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
• List of hereditary peers elected to sit in the House of Lords under the House of Lords Act 1999
• By-elections to the House of Lords
• List of hereditary peers in the House of Lords by virtue of a life peerage
• Substantive title
• Writ of acceleration
• Roll of the Peerage
• The Hereditary Peerage Association

Notes

1. "Members of the House of Lords". UK Parliament. 2012. Archived from the original on 2013-01-03.
2. House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, Rules of Royal Succession: Eleventh Report of Session 2010–12, 7 December 2011.
3. "Ranks of the Peerage". Debrett's. Retrieved 11 November 2006.[dead link]
4. "Forms of Address for use orally and in correspondence". Ministry of Justice (information formerly managed by the Department for Constitutional Affairs). The Crown Office. June 2003. Archived from the original on March 6, 2007. Retrieved 11 November 2006.
5. Sanders, I.J. English Baronies, Oxford, 1960, preface, vii
6. "Burke's Guide to British Titles: Courtesy Titles". Burke's Peerage and Gentry. 2005. Archived from the original on 11 July 2006. Retrieved 13 November 2006.
7. Complete Peerage, Vol IX, Appendix B; the date of the last writ issued to an uncertain since the records of the House of Lords for most of the reign of Henry VIII are lost. There is a solitary fifteenth-century writ summoning a man and his heirs male; this would now be a patent.
8. Harry Graham, The Mother of Parliaments (Little, Brown & company, 1911), p. 33
9. Justin McCarthy. The Reign of Queen Anne, Vol. 2 (Chatto & Windus, 1902) p. 115.
10. Article 9, Royal Warrant 2004
11. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on January 16, 2013. Retrieved November 29, 2012.
12. Adonis, Andrew (1993). Parliament Today (2nd ed.). p. 194.
13. http://researchbriefings.files.parliame ... 8-0014.pdf
14. Myrtle Robertson, 11th Baroness Wharton, Cherry Drummond, 16th Baroness Strange, Davina Ingrams, 18th Baroness Darcy de Knayth and Flora Fraser, 21st Lady Saltoun
15. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-21184477

References

• Blackstone, William (1765). Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Cox, Noel (1997). "The British Peerage: The Legal Standing of the Peerage and Baronetage in the overseas realms of the Crown with particular reference to New Zealand". New Zealand Universities Law Review. 17 (4): 379–401.
• May, Erskine (1896). Constitutional History of England since the Accession of George the Third (11th ed.). London: Longmans, Green and Co. Archived from the original on 18 July 2006.
• First Report from the Committee for Privileges (Report). 18 October 1999. HL 106-I. Archived from the original on 8 September 2008.
• "House of Lords Debates, Vol. 600, col. 1156". The United Kingdom Parliament. 1998–1999. Archived from the original on 30 June 2004.
• McCallion, Peter (2003). "Letter to The Earl Alexander of Tunis". Hereditary Peerage Association.
• "Peerage". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). London: Cambridge University Press. 1911.

UK Legislation

• Text of the House of Lords Act 1999. (c. 34). as in force today (including any amendments) within the United Kingdom, from legislation.gov.uk.
• Text of the Peerage Act 1963. (1963 c. 48). as in force today (including any amendments) within the United Kingdom, from legislation.gov.uk.
• Text of the Titles Deprivation Act 1917. (7 & 8 George 5 c 47). as in force today (including any amendments) within the United Kingdom, from legislation.gov.uk.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Fri Sep 13, 2019 6:33 am

Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/12/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


TIBETAN REFUGEES

Sir. – Recent devastating events in Tibet caused over 15,000 Tibetans to cross the perilous Himalayas into India. It may be a long time before these unfortunate people can safely return to their overrun country. Our own consciences should allow us neither to neglect nor forget them.

The Indian Government has manfully coped with this addition to its own problems at home. In this country we are bound in honour to help relieve needs of the Tibetan refugees, because from 1905 to 1947 there was a special relationship between Tibet and the United Kingdom – a relationship handed on to the new India.

On balance we think it wisest to concentrate chiefly on collecting money which can be used for the benefit of the refugees, not least in the purchase of necessary antibiotics and other medicaments. The Tibet Society has opened a Tibet Relief Fund for which we now appeal in the hope of a generous response. Donations should be sent to the address below or direct to the National Bank Ltd. (Belgravia Branch), 21 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W.I.

Yours faithfully,

... Harmsworth ... The Tibet Relief Fund, 58 Eccleston Square, S.W. I., Letter to the Times, July 31, 1959, p.7.

-- Tibet Society, by tibetsociety.com




Image
The Right Honourable
The Viscount Northcliffe
Portrait of Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, by Gertrude Kasebier
Born Alfred Charles William Harmsworth
15 July 1865
Chapelizod, County Dublin, Ireland
Died 14 August 1922 (aged 57)
Carlton House Gardens, London, England
Nationality British
Education Stamford School, Stamford, Lincolnshire, England
Occupation Publisher
Title 1st Viscount Northcliffe
Parent(s) Alfred Harmsworth & Geraldine Mary Maffett
Relatives Cecil Harmsworth (brother)
Harold Harmsworth (brother)
Leicester Harmsworth (brother)
Hildebrand Harmsworth (brother)

Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (15 July 1865 – 14 August 1922) was a British newspaper and publishing magnate. As owner of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, he was an early developer of popular journalism, and he exercised vast influence over British popular opinion during the Edwardian era. Lord Beaverbrook said he was "the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street."[1] About the beginning of the 20th century there were increasing attempts to develop popular journalism intended for the working class and tending to emphasize sensational topics. Harmsworth was the main innovator.

Northcliffe had a powerful role during the First World War, especially by criticizing the government regarding the Shell Crisis of 1915. He directed a mission to the new ally, the United States, during 1917, and was director of enemy propaganda during 1918.

His Amalgamated Press employed writers such as Arthur Mee and John Hammerton, and its subsidiary, the Educational Book Company, published The Harmsworth Self-Educator, The Children's Encyclopædia, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia.

Biography

Early life and success


Born in Chapelizod, County Dublin, the son of Alfred and Geraldine Harmsworth, he was educated at Stamford School in Lincolnshire, England, from 1876 and at Henley House School in Kilburn, London from 1878.[2] A master at Henley House who was to prove important to his future was J. V. Milne, the father of A. A. Milne, who according to H. G. Wells was at school with him at the time and encouraged him to start the school magazine.[3] In 1880 he first visited the Sylvan Debating Club, founded by his father, and of which he later served as Treasurer.

Alfred Harmsworth (3 July 1837 – 16 July 1889) was a British barrister, and the father of several of the United Kingdom's leading newspaper proprietors, five of whom were honoured with hereditary titles – two viscounts, one baron and two baronets. Another son designed the iconic bulbous Perrier mineral water bottle.[1]

Alfred Harmsworth was born on 3 July 1837 in Marylebone, London, the only son of Charles Harmsworth and Hannah Carter.[2]

On 21 September 1864, at St Stephen's Church, Dublin, he married Geraldine Mary Maffett (1838–1925), one of the eight children of William Maffett, a land agent in County Down, and his second wife Margaret Finlayson. They lived in Dublin until 1867, when they moved to London, initially to St John's Wood, and later to Hampstead when the family's fortunes declined, in part due to Harmsworth's "fondness for alcohol", although they were always short of money, in part due to having so many children.[2][3]

The Harmsworths had 14 children, three of whom died in infancy:[4]

Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922)
Geraldine Adelaide Hamilton Harmsworth (1866–1945), married Sir Lucas White King, mother of Cecil Harmsworth King[4]
Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (1868–1940)
Cecil Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth (1869–1948)
Sir Leicester Harmsworth, 1st Baronet (1870–1937)
Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, 1st Baronet (1872–1929)
Violet Grace Harmsworth (1873–1961), married William Wild[3]
Charles Harmsworth (1874–1942)
St John Harmsworth (1876–1933)
Maud Harmsworth (1877–187?)
Christabel Rose Harmsworth (1880–1967)
Vyvyan George Harmsworth (1881–1957)
Muriel Harmsworth (1882–188?)
Harry Stanley Giffard Harmsworth (1885–188?)

Christabel was named after the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst, as Harmsworth was an ardent believer in women's suffrage.[3] In 1939, there were five Lady Harmsworths.[4]

Harmsworth was a barrister of the Middle Temple and one of the standing counsel for the Great Northern Railway.[5] He has been described as an "unsuccessful" barrister.[6] It was not until after his death that the press empire created by his sons "really took off".[4] Harmsworth was the founder of the Sylvan Debating Club, for which he served as Secretary for a number of years.

Harmsworth died on 16 July 1889.[2] He is buried at East Finchley Cemetery. He died of cirrhosis of the liver, as did his son Hildebrand, both in their 50s.[3]

-- Alfred Harmsworth (Barrister), by Wikipedia


Beginning as a freelance journalist, he initiated his first newspaper, Answers (original title: Answers to Correspondents), and was later assisted by his brother Harold, who was adept in business matters. Harmsworth had an intuitive sense for what the reading public wanted to buy, and began a series of cheap but successful periodicals, such as Comic Cuts (tagline: "Amusing without being Vulgar") and the journal Forget-Me-Not for women. From these periodicals, he developed the largest periodical publishing company in the world, Amalgamated Press.[4] His half-penny periodicals published in the 1890s played a role in the decline of the Victorian penny dreadfuls.[5]

Harmsworth was an early developer of popular journalism. He bought several failing newspapers and made them into an enormously profitable news group, primarily by appealing to the general public. He began with The Evening News during 1894, and then merged two Edinburgh papers to form the Edinburgh Daily Record. That same year he funded an expedition to Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic with the intention of making attempts to travel to the North Pole.[6]

On 4 May 1896 he began publishing the Daily Mail in London, which was a success, having the world record for daily circulation until Harmsworth's death
; taglines of the Daily Mail included "the busy man's daily journal" and "the penny newspaper for one halfpenny". Prime Minister Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, said it was "written by office boys for office boys".[7] Harmsworth then transformed a Sunday newspaper, the Weekly Dispatch, into the Sunday Dispatch, then the greatest circulation Sunday newspaper in Britain. He also initiated the Harmsworth Magazine (later London Magazine 1898–1915), utilizing one of Britain's best editors, Beckles Willson, who had been editor of many successful publications, including The Graphic.[8]

During 1899 Harmsworth was responsible for the unprecedented success of a charitable appeal for the dependents of soldiers fighting in the South African War by inviting Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Sullivan to write the song "The Absent-Minded Beggar".[9]

Harmsworth also initiated The Daily Mirror during 1903, and rescued the financially desperate Observer and The Times during 1905 and 1908, respectively.[10] During 1908, he also acquired The Sunday Times.


Chapter 6: The Times

Beyond the academic field, the Milner Group engaged in journalistic activities that sought to influence public opinion in directions which the Group desired. One of the earliest examples of this, and one of the few occasions on which the Group appeared as a group in the public eye, was in 1905, the year in which Milner returned from Africa. At that time the Group published a volume, The Empire and the Century, consisting of fifty articles on various aspects of the imperial problem. The majority of these articles were written by members of the Milner Group, in spite of the fact that so many of the most important members were still in Africa with Lord Selborne. The volume was issued under the general editorship of Charles S. Goldman, a friend of John Buchan and author of With General French and the Cavalry in South Africa. Among those who wrote articles were W. F. Monypenny, Bernard Holland, John Buchan, Henry Birchenough, R. B. Haldane, Bishop Lang, L. S. Amery, Evelyn Cecil, George Parkin, Edmund Garrett, Geoffrey Dawson, E. B. Sargant (one of the Kindergarten), Lionel Phillips, Valentine Chirol, and Sir Frederick and Lady Lugard.

This volume has many significant articles, several of which have already been mentioned. It was followed by a sequel volume, called The Empire and the Future, in 1916. The latter consisted of a series of lectures delivered at King's College, University of London, in 1915, under the sponsorship of the Royal Colonial Institute. The lectures were by members of the Milner Group who included A. L. Smith, H. A. L. Fisher, Philip Kerr, and George R. Parkin.(1) A somewhat similar series of lectures was given on the British Dominions at the University of Birmingham in 1910-1911 by such men as Alfred Lyttelton, Henry Birchenough, and William Hely-Hutchinson. These were published by Sir William Ashley in a volume called The British Dominions.

These efforts, however, were too weak, too public, and did not reach the proper persons. Accordingly, the real efforts of the Milner Group were directed into more fruitful and anonymous activities such as The Times and The Round Table.

The Milner Group did not own The Times before 1922, but clearly controlled it at least as far back as 1912. Even before this last date, members of the innermost circle of the Milner Group were swarming about the great newspaper. In fact, it would appear that The Times had been controlled by the Cecil Bloc since 1884 and was taken over by the Milner Group in the same way in which All Souls was taken over, quietly and without a struggle. The midwife of this process apparently was George E. Buckle (1854-1935), graduate of New College in 1876, member of All Souls since 1877, and editor of The Times from 1884 to 1912. (2) The chief members of the Milner Group who were associated with The Times have already been mentioned. Amery was connected with the paper from 1899 to 1909. During this period he edited and largely wrote the Times History of the South African War. Lord Esher was offered a directorship in 1908. Grigg was a staff writer in 1903-1905, and head of the Imperial Department in 1908-1913. B. K. Long was head of the Dominion Department in 1913-1921 and of the Foreign Department in 1920-1921. Monypenny was assistant editor both before and after the Boer War (1894-1899, 1903-1908) and on the board of directors after the paper was incorporated (1908-1912). Dawson was the paper's chief correspondent in South Africa in the Selborne period (1905-1910), while Basil Williams was the reporter covering the National Convention there (1908-1909). When it became clear in 1911 that Buckle must soon retire, Dawson was brought into the office in a rather vague capacity and, a year later, was made editor. The appointment was suggested and urged by Buckle. (3) Dawson held the position from 1912 to 1941, except for the three years 1919-1922. This interval is of some significance, for it revealed to the Milner Group that they could not continue to control The Times without ownership. The Cecil Bloc had controlled The Times from 1884 to 1912 without ownership, and the Milner Group had done the same in the period 1912-1919, but, in this last year, Dawson quarreled with Lord Northcliffe (who was chief proprietor from 1908-1922) and left the editor's chair. As soon as the Milner Group, through the Astors, acquired the chief proprietorship of the paper in 1922, Dawson was restored to his post and held it for the next twenty years. Undoubtedly the skillful stroke which acquired the ownership of The Times from the Harmsworth estate in 1922 was engineered by Brand. During the interval of three years during which Dawson was not editor, Northcliffe entrusted the position to one of The Time's famous foreign correspondents, H. W. Steed.


-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley


The Amalgamated Press subsidiary the Educational Book Company published the Harmsworth Self-Educator, The Children's Encyclopædia, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia.[11] He brought his younger brothers into his media empire, and they all flourished: Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, Cecil Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth, Sir Leicester Harmsworth, 1st Baronet and Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, 1st Baronet.

Ennobled

Harmsworth was created a Baronet, of Elmwood, in the parish of St Peters in the County of Kent during 1904.[12] During 1905, Harmsworth was named to the peerage as Baron Northcliffe, of the Isle of Thanet in the County of Kent,[13] and during 1918 was named as Viscount Northcliffe, of St Peter's in the County of Kent, for his service as the director of the British war mission in the United States.[14]

Marriage

Alfred Harmsworth married Mary Elizabeth Milner on 11 April 1888. She was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) and Dame of Grace, Order of St John (D.St.J) during 1918. They did not have any children.[15]

Children

Alfred Harmsworth had four acknowledged children by two different women. The first, Alfred Benjamin Smith, was born when Harmsworth was seventeen years old; the mother was a sixteen-year-old maidservant in his parents' home.[16] Smith died during 1930, allegedly in a mental home.[17] By 1900, Harmsworth had acquired a new mistress, an Irishwoman named Kathleen Wrohan, about whom little is known but her name; she bore him two further sons and a daughter, and died during 1923.[18]

Political influence

By 1914 Northcliffe controlled 40 per cent of the morning newspaper circulation in Britain, 45 per cent of the evening and 15 per cent of the Sunday circulation.[19]

Image
June, 1917

Northcliffe's ownership of The Times, the Daily Mail and other newspapers meant that his editorials influenced both "the classes and the masses".[20] In an era before radio, television or internet, that meant that Northcliffe dominated the British press "as it never has been before or since by one man".[21]

Northcliffe's editorship of the Daily Mail in the years just preceding the First World War, when the newspaper displayed "a virulent anti-German sentiment", caused The Star to declare
, "Next to the Kaiser, Lord Northcliffe has done more than any living man to bring about the war."[22] His newspapers—especially The Times—reported the Shell Crisis of 1915 with such zeal that it helped to end the Liberal government of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, forcing Asquith to form a coalition government (the other causal event was the resignation of Admiral Fisher as First Sea Lord).

It should perhaps be pointed out that the Cecil Bloc was a social rather than a partisan group — at first, at least. Until 1890 or so it contained members of both political parties, including the leaders, Salisbury and Gladstone. The relationship between the two parties on the topmost level could be symbolized by the tragic romance between Salisbury's nephew and Gladstone's niece, ending in the death of the latter in 1875. After the split in the Liberal Party in 1886, it was the members of the Cecil Bloc who became Unionists — that is, the Lytteltons, the Wyndhams, the Cavendishes. As a result, the Cecil Bloc became increasingly a political force. Gladstone remained socially a member of it, and so did his protege, John Morley, but almost all the other members of the Bloc were Unionists or Conservatives. The chief exceptions were the four leaders of the Liberal Party after Gladstone, who were strong imperialists: Rosebery, Asquith, Edward Grey, and Haldane. These four supported the Boer War, grew increasingly anti-German, supported the World War in 1914, and were close to the Milner Group politically, intellectually, and socially. (7)

-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley


Lord Northcliffe's newspapers propagandized for creating a Minister of Munitions (a job first held by David Lloyd George) and helped to bring about Lloyd George's appointment as prime minister during 1916. Lloyd George offered Lord Northcliffe a job in his cabinet, but Northcliffe refused and was appointed director for propaganda.[23]

This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda. It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name "British Commonwealth of Nations" in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George's war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.

-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley


Such was Northcliffe's influence on anti-German propaganda during the First World War that a German warship was sent to shell his house, Elmwood, in Broadstairs,[24] in an attempt to assassinate him.[25] His former residence still bears a shell hole out of respect for his gardener's wife, who was killed in the attack. On 6 April 1919, Lloyd George made an excoriating attack on Harmsworth, terming his arrogance "diseased vanity". By that time Harmsworth's influence was decreasing.

Northcliffe's enemies accused him of power without responsibility
, but his papers were a factor in settling the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, and his mission to the United States at the start of the Great War has been judged a success by the historians.[26]

Northcliffe's personality shaped his career. He was monolingual and not well-educated; he knew little history or science. He had a lust for power and for money, while leaving the accounting paperwork to his brother Harold. He imagined himself Napoleon reborn, and did resemble the emperor physically and in terms of enormous energy and ambition. Above all, he had a boyish enthusiasm for everything. Norman Fyfe, an intimate friend, states he was:

Boyish in his power of concentration upon the matter of the moment, boyish in his readiness to turn swiftly to a different matter and concentrate on that. . . . Boyish the limited range of his intellect, which seldom concerns itself with anything but the immediate, the obvious, the popular. Boyish his irresponsibility, his disinclination to take himself or his publications seriously; his conviction that whatever benefits them is justifiable, and that it is not his business to consider the effect of their contents on the public mind.[27]


Sport

In 1903 Harmsworth initiated the Harmsworth Cup, the first international award for motorboat racing.[28]

Motoring

Harmsworth was a friend of Claude Johnson, chief executive of Rolls-Royce Limited, and during the years preceding the First World war became an enthusiast of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost car.[29]

Death

Image
Lord Northcliffe circa 1921 driving a Fordson tractor at Henry Ford's farm near Dearborn, Michigan. Northcliffe was on a world tour at the time, trying to recover his health, but he died in 1922. He had been closely involved in the purchase of Fordson tractors by the British government during World War I.

Image
Monument to Northcliffe at St Dunstan-in-the-West

Alfred Harmsworth's health declined during 1921 due mainly to a streptococcal infection. He went on a world tour to revive himself, but it failed to do so. He died of endocarditis in a hut on the roof of his London house, No. 1 Carlton House Gardens, during August, 1922,[30] and left three months' pay to each of his six thousand employees. The viscountcy, barony, and baronetcy of Northcliffe became extinct.

A monument to Northcliffe at St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, London, was unveiled in 1930. The obelisk was designed by Edwin Lutyens and the bronze bust is by Kathleen Scott. His body was buried at East Finchley Cemetery in North London.[31]

Styles of address

1865–1904: Mr Alfred Harmsworth.
1904–1905: Sir Alfred Harmsworth, Baronet (Bt).
1905–1918: The Right Honourable The Lord Northcliffe[a]
1918–1922: The Right Honourable The Viscount Northcliffe
1. Although The Viscount Northcliffe was the Harmsworth Baronet of Elmwood, by custom the post-nominal Bt is omitted, since Peers of the Realm do not list subsidiary hereditary titles.

Legacy

Historian Ian Christopher Fletcher states:

Northcliffe's drive for success and respectability bounded main outlet in the commercial world of journalism, not the political world the parties and parliaments. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment, underlying the relentless acquisition of newspapers and perfection of their "copy," was the simple incorporation of millions of readers into his press empire.[32]


A. J. P. Taylor, however, says, "Northcliffe could destroy when he used the news properly. He could not step into the vacant place. He aspired to power instead of influence, and as a result forfeited both."[33]

P. P. Catterall and Colin Seymour-Ure conclude that:

More than anyone [he] ... shaped the modern press. Developments he introduced or harnessed remain central: broad contents, exploitation of advertising revenue to subsidize prices, aggressive marketing, subordinate regional markets, independence from party control.[34]


The A. Harmsworth Glacier in North Greenland was named by Robert Peary in his honour. Harmsworth had gifted Peary expedition ship "Windward" following a lecture on Polar exploration he gave at the Royal Geographical Society in 1897.[35]

Promotion of Group Settlement Scheme

Through his newspaper career, Northcliffe promoted the ideas which resulted in the Group Settlement Scheme. The scheme promised land in Western Australia to British settlers prepared to emigrate and develop the land. A town founded specifically to assist the new settlements was named Northcliffe, in recognition of Lord Northcliffe's promotion of the scheme.

Northcliffe lived for a time at 31 Pandora Road, West Hampstead – this site is now marked with an English Heritage blue plaque.

See also

• Daily Mail aviation prizes

References

1. Lord Beaverbrook, Politicians and the War, 1914–1916 (1928) 1:93.
2. "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Retrieved 3 October 2013.
3. H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography, Chapter 6
4. Boyce (2004).
5. Springhall, John (1998). Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-312-21394-7. OCLC 38206817.
6. Brice, Arthur Montefiore, and H. Fisher. "The Jackson-Harmsworth Polar Expedition, Notes of the Last Year's Work." The Geographical Journal 8.6 (1896): 543–564. online
7. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1975
8. "Victorian Secrets". History of Harmsworth Magazine. victoriansecrets.co.uk. Archived from the original on 27 December 2013. Retrieved 26 December 2012.
9. Cannon, John. "The Absent-Minded Beggar", Gilbert and Sullivan News, March 1987, Vol. 11, No. 8, pp. 16–17, The Gilbert and Sullivan Society, London.
10. "Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe | British publisher". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 27 December 2017.
11. Boyce (2004).
12. "No. 27696". The London Gazette. 15 July 1904. p. 4556.
13. "No. 27871". The London Gazette. 5 January 1906. p. 107.
14. "No. 30533". The London Gazette. 19 February 1918. p. 2212.
15. Taylor, S. J. (1996). The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 47. ISBN 978-0297816539.
16. Taylor The Great Outsiders pp.10–11
17. Taylor The Great Outsiders p. 222
18. Taylor The Great Outsiders pp. 47–48 and p. 222.
19. Tompson, "Fleet Street Colossus" p. 115.
20. Blake, Robert (1955). The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life & Times of Andrew Bonar Law 1858–1918. p. 294.
21. Fromkin, David (1989). A Peace to End All Peace. p. 233.
22. Bingham, Adrian (May 2005). "Monitoring the popular press: an historical perspective". History & Policy.
23. Boyce (2004).
24. 51.3739°N 1.4337°E
25. "Kent Today & Yesterday". 1 January 2010. Retrieved 19 July 2011.
26. John Cannon, ed., The Oxford Companion to British History (2002) p. 454.
27. Hamilton Fyfe, Northcliffe an Intimate Biography (1930) p. 106.
28. "Harmsworth Cup | motorboat racing award". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 27 December 2017.
29. Pugh, Peter (2001). The Magic of a Name The Rolls-Royce Story: The First 40 Years. Icon Books. ISBN 978-1-84046-151-0.
30. Wilson, A. N. (2005). "12: Chief". After the Victorians. Hutchinson. pp. 191–2. ISBN 978-0-09-179484-2. Retrieved 23 November 2013.
31. "Alfred Harmsworth – Find a Grave". findagrave.com. Retrieved 29 November 2013.
32. Ian Christopher Fletcher , "Northcliffe, Lord" in Fred M. Leventhal, ed., Twentieth-century Britain: an encyclopedia(Garland, 1995) pp 573–74
33. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (1965) p 27.
34. P. P. Catterall and Colin Seymour-Ure, "Northcliffe, Viscount". in John Ramsden, ed. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century British Politics (2002) p. 475.
35. Daniel E. Harmon, Robert Peary. 2013

Further reading

• Boyce, D. George (2004). Harmsworth, Alfred Charles William, Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
• Chalaby, Jean K. "‘Smiling Pictures Make People Smile’: Northcliffe's journalism." Media History 6.1 (2000): 33-44.
• Koss, Stephen. The rise and fall of the political press in Britain Vol. 2: the Twentieth Century (1984).
• Pound, Reginald, and Geoffrey Harmsworth. Northcliffe (Cassell, 1959).
• Sullivan, March (September 1922). "Northcliffe: Living, Dying, Dead". The World's Work: A History of Our Time. XLIV: 648–654. Retrieved 4 August 2009.
• Taylor, S.J. The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere, and the Daily Mail (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996).
• Thompson, J. Lee. Press Barons in Politics 1865–1922 (London, 1996).
• Thompson, J. Lee. "Fleet Street Colossus: The Rise and Fall of Northcliffe, 1896-1922." Parliamentary History 25.1 (2006): 115-138. online
• Thompson, J. Lee. "‘To Tell the People of America the Truth’: Lord Northcliffe in the USA, Unofficial British Propaganda, June–November 1917." Journal of Contemporary History 34.2 (1999): 243-262.

External links

• Works written by or about Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe at Wikisource
• DMGT, Rothermere and Northcliffe
• Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe on Spartacus Educational
• Who's Who: Lord Northcliffe
• Europeana Collections 1914–1918 makes 425,000 First World War items from European libraries available online, including relevant volumes of The Northcliffe Papers
• Newspaper clippings about Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Fri Sep 13, 2019 8:07 am

Mary Harmsworth, Viscountess Northcliffe
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/13/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
Photographed 9 May 1902.

Mary Elizabeth Harmsworth, Viscountess Northcliffe, GBE, DStJ, ARRC (née Milner; 22 December 1867 – 29 July 1963), later Lady Hudson, was the daughter of Robert Milner, of Kidlington, Oxfordshire, England, [mother is Ann Garland].[1][2]

Robert Milner
Birthdate: 1837
Death: 1900 (63)
Immediate Family:
Son of Thomas Milner and Jane Peck
Husband of Ann Garland
Father of Henry Garland Milner and Mary Harmsworth, Viscountess Northcliffe, Lady Hudson, GBE, DStJ, ARRC
Managed by: James Beresford Loel
Last Updated: February 23, 2015

-- Robert Milner, by geni.com


Marriages

Mary Elizabeth Milner married, firstly, Alfred Charles William Harmsworth (born 16 July 1865, Chapelizod, County Dublin, Ireland – died 14 August 1922) on 11 April 1888, at which time her married name became Harmsworth, and she was styled as Baroness Northcliffe, effective 27 December 1905. The westernmost tip of Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic was named in her honour by an expedition financed by her husband. She was later elevated to Viscountess Northcliffe on 14 January 1918. This union was childless, which weigh heavily on her and her husband. Six months after her husband's death, she remarried, on 4 April 1923, to Sir Robert Arundal Hudson.[2]

Death

Lady Hudson died in Virginia Water, Surrey, aged 95.[2]

Awards and honors

• Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) — 1918
• Registered as an Associate Royal Red Cross (ARRC) — 1919
• Dame of Grace of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem — 1919

Sources

1. Mosley, Charles, ed. (2003). Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knighthood (107 ed.). Burke's Peerage & Gentry. p. 3410. ISBN 978-0-9711966-2-9.
2. "Lady Hudson". The Times. The Times Digital Archive. 31 July 1963. p. 12.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Fri Sep 13, 2019 8:12 am

Balfour Mission [British War Mission]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/13/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Northcliffe, Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount (cr. 1917), 1st Baron of Isle of Thanet (cr. 1905); baronet (cr. 1904); newspaper proprietor; born Chapelizod, Co. Dublin,July 15, 1854; eldest son of the late Alfred Harmsworth, barrister-at-law, of the Middle Temple, and Geraldine Mary, daughter of William Maffett, Pembroke Pl., Co. Dublin; married, in 1888, Mary Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the late Robert Milner, Kidlington, Oxford, and St. Vincent, West Indies; appointed chairman of the British War Mission in the United States on May 31, 1917, and sailed to take up duties on June 2, 1917. Returned to England on Nov. 3, 1917, to establish the London Headquarters of the British War Mission in the U.S.A., at Crewe House, Curzon St., W. Other addresses: -- 8, Buckingham St., S.W.; Elmwood, St. Peter's, Thanet; Grand Falls House, Newfoundland.

-- Who's Who in the British War Mission in the United States of America, 1918, by High Commissioner, The Earl of Reading, Published by Edward J. Clode, New York, First Edition, December, 1917; Second Edition, October,l 1918


Image
The Balfour Mission, outside the home of Breckinridge Long at 2829 16th Street NW, Washington DC, where the group stayed during the trip (today the Mexican Cultural Institute).[1]

Image
Balfour in New York, 11 May 1917

The Balfour Mission, also referred to as the Balfour Visit, was a formal diplomatic visit to the United States by the British Government during World War I, shortly after the United States declaration of war on Germany (1917).

The mission's purpose was to promote wartime cooperation, and to assess the war-readiness of Britain's new partner.[2] British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, President Woodrow Wilson and Wilson's chief advisor, Colonel House had a meeting that discussed the secret treaties which bound Britain and France to Italy and others. Members of the delegation met with many senior leaders in the national government, finance, industry and politics, to explain the British positions. Other meetings dealt with the supply of munitions and other exports, and the proposed Balfour Declaration.

France sent a separate mission at the same time, and these were followed later in 1917 by missions from Italy, Russia, Belgium and Japan, all of whom were invited to address the US Congress.[3]


History

The mission left England on 11 April and arrived in Washington, on 22 April, having landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 20 April.[4][5]

Balfour addressed both houses of Congress – the House of Representatives on 5 May[6][7] and the Senate on 8 May[4][8][9] – becoming the first British person to do so.[10]

Balfour, [url=[/b]]Colonel Edward M. House[/url] and Wilson dined at the White House on 30 April, after which Balfour recounted the details of the secret treaties regarding Italy and the Near East to Wilson. On 18 May, Balfour sent Wilson copies of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Allied Notes of March–April 1915, the Treaty of London (1915) and the Treaty of Bucharest (1913).[11]

Cecil Spring Rice, the British Ambassador to the United States, stated that the mission had created "an entirely new atmosphere in Anglo-American relations".[10]

Travelling group

The travelling party included:[2][5]

• Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister
• Walter Cunliffe, 1st Baron Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England
Eric Drummond, 7th Earl of Perth, who in 1920 became the first Secretary-General of the League of Nations (1920–1933)

• Ian Malcolm
• Cecil Dormer
• Geoffrey G. Butler
• Tom Bridges, major general
• Herbert Henry Spender-Clay
• Dudley de Chair, admiral who was Naval Adviser to Foreign Office on Blockade Affairs
• Vincent Lawford

Others in the party included:

• War Office — Colonel Goodwin, Colonel Langhorne, Major L. W. B. Rees, and Major C. E. Dansey
• Blockade Department Experts — Lord Eustace Percy; Andrew Archibald Paton; F. P. Robinson, of the Board of Trade; S. McKenna, of the War Trade Intelligence Department, and M. D. Peterson of the Foreign Trade Department, Foreign Office.
• Wheat Commission — Alan Anderson, Chairman, and H. D. Vigor.
• Munitions — Walter Layton (Later Baron Layton), Director of Requirements and Statistics Branch, Secretariat of the Ministry of Munitions; C. T. Phillips, American and Transport Department, Ministry of Munitions; Captain Leeming, Mr. Amos.
• Ordnance and Lines of Communication — Captain Heron.
• Supplies and Transports — Major F. K. Puckle.

See also

• Diplomatic history of World War I

References

1. Burk 2014, pp. 102–103.
2. Burk 2014, p. 99.
3. GPO 1917.
4. Venzon 2013, p. 63.
5. Towne 2015, pp. 15–18.
6. GPO 1917, p. 32.
7. "Balfour Tells of Aims of War in House". The Seattle Times. May 6, 1917. p. 21.
8. GPO 1917, p. 25.
9. "Balfour Predicts Victory for U.S. in Senate". The Seattle Times. May 8, 1917. p. 3.
10. Tillman 2015, p. 11.
11. Tillman 2015, p. 10.

Bibliography

• Burk, Kathleen (24 April 2014). "The Balfour Mission, April—May 1917: the American Giant Awakens". Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 (RLE The First World War). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-70051-7.
• GPO (1917). Visiting War Missions to the United States: Proceedings in the Senate and House of Representatives, Congress of the United States, on the Occasion of the Receptions Tendered to the War Missions of France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Belgium, and Japan. Fb &C Limited. ISBN 978-1-332-83156-2.
• Loper, Richard Lee (1967). The Balfour Mission: Anglo-American Diplomacy, April–May, 1917.
• Tillman, Seth P. (8 December 2015). Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-7672-3.
• Towne, Charles Hanson (1 September 2015). The Balfour Visit: How America Received Her Distinguished Guest. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-341-06014-4. Archived from the original on 21 April 2017.
• Venzon, Anne Cipriano (2 December 2013). "Balfour Mission". The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis. p. 63. ISBN 978-1-135-68453-2. Archived from the original on 3 February 2014.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Sep 16, 2019 5:42 am

William Frederick Travers O'Connor
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/15/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
9th Panchen Lama and Sir William Frederick Travers O'Connor, taken in Calcutta. According to a paper by Braham Norwick in PIATS 2000, this photo was published in 1924 in Charles Bell's Tibet Past and Present(1924), p. 84

Sir William O'Connor, CIE CSI CVO
Birth name William Frederick Travers O'Connor
Born 30 July 1870
Longford, Ireland
Died 14 December 1943
Chelsea, London
Buried St Luke's Church Office, Headley Road, Grayshott, Hindhead, GU26 6LF
Allegiance United Kingdom
Service/branch Flag of the British Army.svg British Army Flag of Indian Army.svg Indian Army
Years of service 1890–1925
Rank Lieutenant Colonel
Unit Royal Artillery
Battles/wars Tirah Campaign, British expedition to Tibet, World War I
Awards Order of the Indian Empire, Royal Victorian Order,The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Knight Bachelor

Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Frederick Travers O'Connor CIE CSI CVO (30 July 1870 – 14 December 1943)[1][2][3][4] was an Irish diplomat and officer in the British and British Indian armies. He is remembered for his travels in Asia, cartography, study and publication of local cultures and language, his actions on the Younghusband expedition to Tibet, Royal Geographic Society council member,[5] member of the Royal Automobile Club[6] and for his work negotiating and signing the Nepal–Britain Treaty of 1923.

Early life

O'Connor was born in 1870, Longford, Ireland,[1] son of land agent[1] Matthew Weld O'Connor, and Harriet Georgina,[7] daughter of Anthony O’Reilly, of Baltrasna, County Meath. He had a sister, Lina O'Connor, and two younger brothers Matthew O'Connor and Myles O'Connor.[8] He was educated at Charterhouse School[1][9] as a Junior Scholar, in Verites house, 1884-1887.[10][8] Member of Charterhouse shooting team in 1885, and placing 7th,[10][8] winning the House Shooting Cup in 1885.[8]

Image
Wilkinson 1821 pattern sabre, serial number 29781 made in 1889, etched with W.F.T.O'C. initials.

He passed through the Royal Military Academy in 1888 and was gazetted to the Royal Artillery in 1890.[11] He received Henry Wilkinson sabre number 29781 in 1889, as gift from a family member.

Military career

14 February 1890 – Joined 14th Field Academy Royal Artillery at Shorncliffe as Second Lieutenant.[1][4]

14 February 1893 – Promoted to Lieutenant.[12]

1894 – Served in Indian mountain battery stationed near Darjeeling.[1][9]

1897–98 – Employed in the Swat valley and Tirah Campaigns, patrolling the Kurrum Valley.[13] Awarded medal and 3 clasps.[14]

1 October 1899 – Promoted to Captain.[15]

1899–1903 – Appointed inspecting officer of the Kashmir Imperial Service Troops, stationed at Gilgit near the border of Afghanistan and Chinese Turkmenistan.[1]

Image
1903-04-13 Routes between Tibet and India by Captain W. F. O'Connor, Royal Artillery

Image
Younghusband team in 1904, O'Connor standing second from left

11 December 1903 – Departed Sikkim as interpreter, secretary and chief intelligence officer[16] to Sir Francis Younghusband's Lhasa mission as part of British expedition to Tibet.[1][9][17] Awarded medal and clasp.[18]

1904 – Employed former Sengchen Lama's personal attendant Sherab Gyatso to be his personal language teacher and suspected intelligence informant.[19]

21 May 1904 - Fought, and wounded, in battle to capture village of Pala.[20] David (born Dorje) MacDonald briefly took over O'Connor's interpreter duties during recovery.[9]

Image
O'Connor and domestic staff at Gyantse in 1905

1905 – Posted as the first British Trade Agent at the new Trade Mart in Gyantse, under the Anglo-Tibet Convention.[1][8][9]

May 1905 – Investigated theft of remains of Younghusband mission money from boxes left at Gyantse.[9]


Summer 1906 – Stayed with Gertrude Bell whilst she worked on her travel book The Desert and the Sown[21].

Image
Frederick O'Connor (representative of English Trade in Tibet for British Raj, and secretary of Younghusband) and Thubten Chokyi Nyima, 9th Panchen Lama, in a Peugeot car, one of the two first in Tibet, in 1907

Image
Peugeot in front of the Gyantse fortress in Freddie 1907

1907 – Import of two motor cars, by carrying over the Himalayas, into Tibet.[22] One was an 8hp Clement brought as a gift for Thubten Choekyi Nyima, the 9th Panchen Lama, who presided over Tashi Lhunpo monastery near Shigatse. The other was his own 6.5hp Baby Peugeot (Peugeot Type 69).[23]

1908 – Accompanied Sikkimese Prince on world tour and also to meet 13th Dali Lama.[9] O'Connor was the first Indian Government official to meet the Dalai Lama.[9]

14 February 1908 – Promoted to Major.[24]

30 September 1909 – Appointed His Majesty's council for the districts of Seistan and Kain.[25][1]

1910 – Serving in Mashad[9] as Consul-General and Agent to the Governor-General.[7]

1912 – Transferred to Shiraz, capital province of Fars,[1] as Consul.[7]

28 October 1913 – Met with the Edwin Montagu, Under-Secretary of State for India, at lunch arranged by Gertrude Bell, for 1.5 hour briefing and questions on the status of the frontier.[21]

November 1915 – Taken captive by Persian army[1][13]

14 February 1916 - Promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel.[26][4]

August 1916 – Released from Persian captivity as part of prisoner exchange.[1][13]

1918 – Met with Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Information and sent to Siberia to further the cause of the Allies and their friends amongst the Russians.[1][27]

9 April 1918 – Sailed from the Liverpool to New York on board the SS Carpathia,[28] taking 11 days,[27] to meet with senior military[13] and diplomats regarding the US policy in Siberia.

3 June 1918 – Arrived in to Vladivostok[27] and served as Resident.[7]

January 1921 – Appointed political officer at Gangtok.[9]

March 1921 – Left position in Gangtok and returned to England, when mother fell seriously ill.[9]

21 December 1921 – Signed Nepal–Britain Treaty of 1923 as British Envoy at the Court of Nepal.[29][7]

1925 – Retired from military service.[1]

Distinctions

• The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, Companion (C.I.E.), 1904[30]
• Royal Victorian Order, Commander (C.V.O.), 1922[1]
The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Companion (O.S.I.), 1924
• Knight Bachelor, 1925

Later life

2 February 1930 - Article in Detroit Free Press newspaper showing O'Connor leading tiger hunt in India.[31]

28 June 1931 – Article in The Indianapolis Sunday Star newspaper saying O'Connor inviting 5 Americans on tiger hunt for $100,000 ($20,000 each).
[32]

30 June 1931 – Bankruptcy petition filed.[33]

29 July 1931 – Receiving Order issued on a creditor's petition.[33][6]

11:00 12 August 1931 – Date First Bankruptcy Meeting.[33]

30 October 1931 – Date of bankruptcy public examination.[33]

13 Jul 1932 – Arrived in Southampton from New York on the RMS Berengaria.

Image
Group at Louis D. Lighton’s ranch, Southern California, 1938. Left to right: Heather Thatcher, Luis D. Lighton, Lillian Disney, Walt Disney, Ranch Foreman, William Frederic Travers O’Connor, Hope Loring.

Upon the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Axis-affiliated Empire of Japan on December 7, 1941, 500 United States Army troops moved in the next day to occupy Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California for the next eight months—the only Hollywood film studio under military occupation in history—as America began a massive build up to fight in World War II. The soldiers were stationed there to protect a nearby Lockheed aircraft plant from enemy air raids, convert parking garages into ammunition depots, and fixing equipment in large soundstages.[1] From there, Disney was approached with requests from the U.S. services to produce propaganda films.[2] The Navy was the first, and other branches of the government, including the Army Air Forces, the Department of Agriculture, and the Treasury Department, rapidly caught on to Disney’s creative approach to generating educational films, propaganda, and insignias.

During World War II, Disney made films for every branch of the United States Armed Forces and government.[3][4] This was accomplished through the use of animated graphics by means of expediting the intelligent mobilization of servicemen and civilians for the cause of the war. Over 90% of Disney employees were devoted to the production of training and propaganda films for the government.[3] Throughout the duration of the war, Disney produced over 400,000 feet of educational war films, most at cost, which is equal to 68 hours of continuous films. In 1943 alone, 204,000 feet of film was produced. [2]

As well as producing films for different government divisions from 1942 to 1943, Disney was asked to create animation for a series of pictures produced by Colonel Frank Capra for the U.S. Army.[2] This series included films such as Prelude to War and America goes to War. Although these films were originally intended for servicemen, they were released to theaters because of their popularity.

-- Walt Disney's World War II propaganda production, by Wikipedia


16 July 1934 – Crossed border from Canada to Seattle, to go to L.A. and tour the US.[34]

27 November 1938 – The Old House performed by John McCormack at the Royal Albert Hall in London.[8]

November 1939 – The Old House recorded by John McCormack.[8]

14 December 1943 – Death, Chelsea.[1]

17 December 1943 – Funeral, St Luke's Church Office, Headley Road, Grayshott, Hindhead, GU26 6LF

Works

• Routes in Sikkim, 1900.[35]
• Report on Tibet, 1903.[36]
• Rules for the Phonetic Transcription into English of Tibetan Words, with Charles Alfred Bell,1904[37][38]
Lhasa: an account of the country and people of Central Tibet, with Perceval Landon and Herbert James Walton, 1905.[39]
• Folk Tales from Tibet with Illustrations by a Tibetan Artist and Some Verses from Tibetan Love Songs, 1906.[40]
• On the frontier and beyond: a record of thirty years' service, 1931[27]
• Wrote music and lyrics to The Old House,[1][3] Quietide and One Hundred Years Ago, 1937.[1]

• Things mortal, 1940.[8]

References

1. "The Annual Register Volume 185". 1943.
2. Alex., McKay, (1997). Tibet and the British Raj: the frontier cadre, 1904–1947. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. ISBN 0700706275. OCLC 37390564.
3. "LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress)". id.loc.gov. The Library of Congress. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
4. "(550) – Army lists > 1913–1919 – Quarterly Army Lists (First Series) 1879–1922 > 1917 > Third quarter > Volume 3 – British Military lists – National Library of Scotland". digital.nls.uk. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
5. "Obituaries". The Geographical Journal. 103 to 104: 304. 1944.
6. "THE BANKRUPTCY ACTS, 1914 AND 1926" (PDF). Edinburgh Gazette. 4 August 1934. Retrieved 8 May2018.
7. F., Riddick, John (1998). Who was who in British India. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313292329. OCLC 39045191.
8. O'Connor, Frederick (1940). Things Mortal. London: Hodder and Stoutghton Limited.
9. Alex., McKay, (2009). Tibet and the British Raj : the frontier cadre, 1904-1947 (2nd ed.). Dharamsala, H.P.: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. ISBN 9788186470923. OCLC 435961312.
10. Charterhouse register, 1872-1900. RareBooksClub.com. 2012. ISBN 1236288785.
11. "The London Gazette 25th February 1890".
12. "London Gazette 4th April 1893".
13. 1933–, Newton, David, (2009). Kipling's Canadian : Colonel Fraser Hunter, MPP, maverick soldier-surveyor in "the Great Game". Victoria, BC: Trafford. ISBN 9781425191412. OCLC 606116081.
14. Archives, The National. "The Discovery Service". discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
15. "The London Gazette 12th December 1905".
16. "Frederick O'Connor (biographical details)". cosmos.ucc.ie. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
17. 1940–, Allen, Charles, (2004). Duel in the snows : the true story of the Younghusband mission to Lhasa. London: John Murray. ISBN 0719554276. OCLC 53709120.
18. Archives, The National. "The Discovery Service". discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
19. Netherlands), International Association for Tibetan Studies. Seminar (9th : 2000 : Leiden, (2002). Tibetan studies : PIATS 2000 : Tibetan studies : proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Leiden 2000. Blezer, Henk., Ardussi, John., Buffetrille, Katia., Diemberger, Hildegard., Huber, Toni. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9004127755. OCLC 52449349.
20. 1869–1927., Landon, Perceval, (2000). Lhasa : an account of the country and people of Central Tibet and of the progress of the mission sent there by the English Government in the year 1903-4. Varanasi: Pilgrims. ISBN 8177690574. OCLC 647450672.
21. 1868–1926,, Bell, Gertrude Lowthian,. Gertrude Bell : complete letters. Volume I and II. Bell, Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe, Lady, 1851–1930,. [United States]. ISBN 9781500826901. OCLC 967604643.
22. "Images of First Cars to Cross the Himalayas into Tibet 102 Years Ago and Secret Photos of Japan from 1898 for Sale".
23. "Bonhams : TIBET Album, likely to have belonged an army mechanic responsible for the first motor cars Tibet". http://www.bonhams.com. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
24. "London Gazette 10 April 1908".
25. "London Gazette 15 October 1909".
26. "The London Gazette 19 May 1916".
27. O'Connor, Frederick (1931). On the frontier and beyond: a record of thirty years' service. London: John Murray.
28. US Department of Labor Immigration Service, Form 500, 1918-04-09
29. "TREATY SERIES NO. 31 ( 1925). TREATY BETWEKS UNITED KINGDOM AND NEPAL TOGETHER WITH Note respecting the Importation of Arms and Ammunition into Nepal" (PDF).
30. "The London Gazette 16th December 1904".
31. "Tiger Hunting in India". Detroit Free Press. 2 February 1930.
32. "The Indianapolis Sunday Star". The Indianapolis Sunday Star. 28 June 1931.
33. "The London Gazette – 31st July 1931".
34. US Department of Labor Immigration Service, Form 54S, 1934-07-16
35. O'Connor, W. F. (1900). Routes in Sikkim. India: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing.
36. "William Frederick Travers O'Connor - Wikisource, the free online library". en.wikisource.org. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
37. Martin, Emma (21 July 2016). "Translating Tibet in the Borderlands: Networks, Dictionaries, and Knowledge Production in Himalayan Hill Stations". Transcultural Studies. 0 (1): 86–120. ISSN 2191-6411.
38. William Jones (1962). Journal Of The Asiatic Society 1961 Vol Iii.
39. O'Connor, Frederick (1905). Lhasa: an account of the country and people of Central Tibet.
40. Connor, Capt. W. F (1906). Folk Tales from Tibet with Illustrations by a Tibetan Artist and Some Verses from Tibetan Love Songs. London: Hurst and Blackett LTD.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Sep 16, 2019 6:29 am

Part 1 of 2

Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/15/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
The Right Honourable The Lord Beaverbrook PC ONB
Lord Beaverbrook in 1943



Lord Privy Seal
In office
24 September 1943 – 27 July 1945
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Preceded by Viscount Cranborne
Succeeded by Arthur Greenwood
Minister of War Production
In office
4 February 1942 – 19 February 1942
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Preceded by Office created
Succeeded by Oliver Lyttelton (as Minister of Production)
Minister of Supply
In office
29 June 1941 – 4 February 1942
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Preceded by Sir Andrew Duncan
Succeeded by Sir Andrew Duncan
Minister of Aircraft Production
In office
14 May 1940 – 1 May 1941
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Preceded by Office created
Succeeded by John Moore-Brabazon
Minister of Information
In office
10 February – 4 November 1918
Prime Minister David Lloyd George
Preceded by Office created
Succeeded by The Lord Downham
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In office
10 February – 4 November 1918
Prime Minister David Lloyd George
Preceded by Sir Frederick Cawley
Succeeded by The Lord Downham
Member of Parliament
for Ashton under Lyne
In office
3 December 1910 – 23 December 1916
Preceded by Alfred Scott
Succeeded by Albert Stanley
Personal details
Born William Maxwell Aitken
25 May 1879
Maple, Ontario, Canada
Died 9 June 1964 (aged 85)
Surrey, England
Political party Liberal Unionist
Conservative
Spouse(s) Gladys Henderson Drury
(m. 1906; died 1927)
Marcia Anastasia Christoforides
(m. 1963)
Children Hon. Janet Aitken
Sir Max Aitken, 2nd Baronet
Captain Hon. Peter Aitken
Occupation Legislator, author, entrepreneur

William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, PC, ONB (25 May 1879 – 9 June 1964) was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century. His base of power was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the Daily Express, which appealed to the conservative working class with intensely patriotic news and editorials. During the Second World War he played a major role in mobilising industrial resources as Winston Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production.[1]

The young Max Aitken had a gift for making money and was a millionaire by 30. His business ambitions quickly exceeded opportunities in Canada and he moved to Britain. There he befriended Bonar Law and with his support won a seat in the House of Commons at the general election held in December 1910. A knighthood followed shortly after. During the First World War he ran the Canadian Records office in London, and played a role in the removal of H. H. Asquith as prime minister in 1916. The resulting coalition government (with Lloyd George as prime minister and Bonar Law as Chancellor of the Exchequer), rewarded Aitken with a peerage and, briefly, a Cabinet post as Minister of Information.

Post-war, the now Lord Beaverbrook concentrated on his business interests. He built the Daily Express into the most successful mass-circulation newspaper in the world, with sales of 2.25 million copies a day across Britain. He used it to pursue personal campaigns, most notably for tariff reform and for the British Empire to become a free trade bloc. Beaverbrook supported the government of Stanley Baldwin and that of Neville Chamberlain throughout the 1930s and was persuaded by another longstanding political friend, Winston Churchill, to serve as his Minister of Aircraft Production from May 1940.
Churchill and others later praised his Ministerial contributions.[2] He resigned due to ill-health in 1941 but later in the war was appointed Lord Privy Seal. Beaverbrook spent his later life running his newspapers, which by then included the Evening Standard and the Sunday Express.[3] He served as Chancellor of the University of New Brunswick and developed a reputation as a historian with his books on political and military history.[4][5]

Early life

Aitken was born in Maple, Ontario, Canada, in 1879, one of the ten children of William Cuthbert Aitken, a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister,[6] and Jane (Noble), the daughter of a prosperous local farmer and storekeeper. When he was a year old, the family moved to Newcastle, New Brunswick, which Aitken later considered to be his hometown. It was here, at the age of 13, that he set up a school newspaper, The Leader. Whilst at school, he delivered newspapers, sold newspaper subscriptions and was the local correspondent for the St. John Daily Star.[7]

Aitken took the entrance examinations for Dalhousie University, but because he had declined to sit the Greek and Latin papers he was refused entry. He registered at the King's College Law School, but left after a short while. This was to be his only formal higher education. Aitken worked in a shop, then borrowed some money to move to Chatham, New Brunswick, where he worked as a local correspondent for the Montreal Star, sold life insurance and collected debts. Aitken attempted to train as a lawyer and worked for a short time in the law office of R B Bennett, a future prime minister of Canada. Aitken managed Bennett's successful campaign for a place on Chatham town council. When Bennett left the law firm, Aitken moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, where he again sold life insurance before moving to Calgary where he helped to run Bennett's campaign for a seat in the legislative assembly of the North-West Territories in the 1898 general election. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a meat business, Aitken returned to Saint John and to selling insurance.[8]

Early business career

In 1900, Aitken made his way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where John F. Stairs, a member of the city's dominant business family, gave him employment and trained him in the business of finance. In 1904, when Stairs launched the Royal Securities Corporation, Aitken became a minority shareholder and the firm's general manager. Under the tutelage of Stairs, who would be his mentor and friend, Aitken engineered a number of successful business deals and was planning a series of bank mergers. Stairs' unexpected early death in September 1904 led to Aitken acquiring control of the company and moving to Montreal, then the business capital of Canada. There he bought and sold companies, invested in stocks and shares and also developed business interests in both Cuba and Puerto Rico.[9] He started a weekly magazine, the Canadian Century in 1910, invested in the Montreal Herald and almost acquired the Montreal Gazette.[8] In 1907 he founded the Montreal Engineering Company.[10] In 1909, also under the umbrella of his Royal Securities Company, Aitken founded the Calgary Power Company Limited, now the TransAlta Corporation, and oversaw the building of the Horseshoe Falls hydro station.[11]

In 1910–1911 Aitken acquired a number of small regional cement plants in Canada, including Sir Sandford Fleming's Western Canada Cement Co. plant at Exshaw, Alberta, and amalgamated them into Canada Cement, eventually controlling four-fifths of the cement production in Canada. Canada was booming economically at the time, and Aitken had a monopoly on the material. There were irregularities in the stock transfers leading to the conglomeration of the cement plants, resulting in much criticism of Aitken, as well as accusations of price-gouging and poor management of the cement plants under his company's control.[12] Aitken sold his shares, making a large amount of money.


Aitken had made his first visit to Britain in September 1908, and when he returned there in the spring of 1910, in an attempt to raise money to form a steel company, he decided to make the move permanent,[8] but not before he led the underwriting, with a preponderance of British money, of an amalgamation of smaller units into the Steel Company of Canada.[13] Very shortly later Aitken moved his family to the UK.[14]

Move to Britain

Image
Cherkley Court

In 1910, Aitken moved to Britain and he became friends with Bonar Law, a native of New Brunswick and the only Canadian to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The two men had a lot in common: they were both sons of the manse from Scottish-Canadian families and both were successful businessmen. Aitken persuaded Bonar Law to support him in standing for the Unionist Party in the December 1910 general election at Ashton-under-Lyne. Aitken was an excellent organiser and, with plenty of money for publicity, he won the seat by 196 votes.[8][15]

Aitken rarely spoke in the House of Commons, but did promise substantial financial support to the Unionist Party, and in 1911 he was knighted by King George V. Aitken's political influence grew when Bonar Law replaced A.J. Balfour as leader of the Unionist party late in 1911. Aitken bought Cherkley Court near Leatherhead and entertained lavishly there.
In 1913 the house was offered as a venue for negotiations between Bonar Law and the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, over Ulster and Irish home rule.[8] Later in life Aitken wrote about his early political efforts:[16]

“ Empire Fiscal Union was, in fact, my only reason for entering politics in Britain and for continuing to take an interest in public life. My devotion to Bonar Law, my belief in his Leadership, my faith in his ability to give to the Empire some day, perhaps some day soon, the Union I so ardently desired, had kept me in close and intimate touch with him and his political problems. ”


Aitken continued to grow his business interests while in Parliament and also began to build a British newspaper empire. After the death of Charles Rolls in 1910, Aitken bought his shares in Rolls-Royce Limited, and over the next two years gradually increased his holding in the company. However, Claude Johnson, Rolls-Royce's Commercial managing director, resisted Aitken's attempt to gain control of the company, and in October 1913 he sold his holding to James Buchanan Duke, of the American Tobacco Company.[17] In January 1911 Aitken secretly invested £25,000 in the failing Daily Express. An attempt to buy the Evening Standard failed but he did gain control of another London evening paper, The Globe. In November 1916 a share deal worth £17,500, with Lawson Johnson, landed Aitken a controlling interest in the Daily Express, but again he kept the deal secret.[8]

First World War

Image
Lord Beaverbrook

During the First World War the Canadian government placed Aitken in charge of creating the Canadian War Records Office in London, and he made certain that news of Canada's contribution to the war was printed in Canadian and British newspapers. He was innovative in the employment of artists, photographers, and film makers to record life on the Western Front. Aitken also established the Canadian War Memorials Fund that evolved into a collection of art works by the premier artists and sculptors in Britain and Canada.[18] His visits to the Western Front, with the honorary rank of colonel in the Canadian Army, resulted in his 1916 book Canada in Flanders, a three-volume collection that chronicled the achievements of Canadian soldiers on the battlefields. After the war Aitken wrote several books including Politicians and the Press in 1925 and Politicians and the War in 1928.

Aitken became increasingly hostile towards the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith whom he considered to be mismanaging the war effort. Aitken's opinion of Asquith did not improve when he failed to get a post in the Cabinet reshuffle of May 1915. An attempt by Bonar Law to secure the KCMG for Aitken was also blocked by Asquith. Aitken was happy to play a small part, which he greatly exaggerated, as a go-between when Asquith was forced from office and replaced by David Lloyd George in December 1916.[8] Lloyd George offered to appoint Aitken as President of the Board of Trade. At that time, an MP taking a cabinet post for the first time had to resign and stand for re-election in a by-election. Aitken made arrangements for this, but then Lloyd George decided to appoint Albert Stanley instead. Aitken was a friend of Stanley and agreed to continue with the resignation, so that Stanley could take Aitken's seat in Parliament and be eligible for ministerial office. In return, Aitken received a peerage on 23 January 1917 as the 1st Baron Beaverbrook,[19][20] the name "Beaverbrook" being adopted from a small community near his boyhood home. He had initially considered "Lord Miramichi", but rejected it on the advice of Louise Manny as too difficult to pronounce.[21][22][23] The name "Beaverbrook" also had the advantage of conveying a distinctive Canadian ring to the title.

Later in 1917, Beaverbrook's controlling stake in the Daily Express became public knowledge and he was criticised by parts of the Conservative Party for financing a publication they regarded as irresponsible and often unhelpful to the party.[8]

In February 1918, Beaverbrook became the first Minister of Information in the newly formed Ministry of Information, was also made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and was sworn of the Privy Council.[24] Beaverbrook became responsible for propaganda in Allied and neutral countries and Lord Northcliffe (owner of the Daily Mail and The Times) became Director of Propaganda with control of propaganda in enemy countries. Beaverbrook established the British War Memorials Committee within the Ministry, on lines similar to the earlier Canadian war art scheme, but when he established a private charity that would receive income from BWMC exhibitions, it was regarded as a conflict of interest and he dropped the scheme.[18] Beaverbrook had a number of clashes with the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour over the use of intelligence material. He felt that intelligence should become part of his department, but Balfour disagreed. Eventually the intelligence committee was assigned to Beaverbrook but they then resigned en masse to be re-employed by the Foreign Office. In August 1918, Lloyd George became furious with Beaverbrook over a leader in the Daily Express threatening to withdraw support from the government over tariff reform. Beaverbrook increasingly came under attack from MPs who distrusted a press baron being employed by the state. Beaverbrook survived but became increasingly frustrated with his limited role and influence, and in October 1918, he resigned due to ill health.[8] A tooth had become infected with actinomycosis and the often fatal disease progressed into his throat; his English doctors were unable to discover a cure and it was a Portuguese medic who cured him by administering orally iodine solution until the fungus was arrested.[14]

A J P Taylor later wrote that Beaverbrook was a pathbreaker who "invented all the methods of publicity" used by Britain to promote the war, including the nation's first war artists, the first war photographers, and the first makers of war films. He was especially effective in promoting the sales of war bonds to the general public. Nevertheless, he was widely disliked and distrusted by the political elite, who were suspicious of all they sneeringly called "press lords."[25]

Baron of Fleet Street

Image
Lord Beaverbrook, c. August 1941

After the war, Beaverbrook concentrated on running the Daily Express. He turned the dull newspaper into a glittering and witty journal with an optimistic attitude, filled with an array of dramatic photo layouts. He hired first-rate writers such as Francis Williams and the cartoonist David Low. He embraced new technology and bought new presses to print the paper in Manchester. In 1919 the circulation of the Daily Express was under 40,000 a day; by 1937 it was 2,329,000 a day, making it the most successful of all British newspapers and generating huge profits for Beaverbrook whose wealth was already such that he never took a salary. After the Second World War, the Daily Express became the largest-selling newspaper in the world, with a circulation of 3,706,000. Beaverbrook launched the Sunday Express in December 1918, but it only established a significant readership after John Junor became its editor in 1954. In 1923, in a joint deal with Lord Rothermere, Beaverbrook bought the Evening Standard. Beaverbrook acquired a controlling stake in the Glasgow Evening Citizen and, in 1928, he launched the Scottish Daily Express.[8]

Consolidation was rampant. James Curran and Jean Seaton state:

after the death of Lord Northcliffe in 1922, four men -- Lords Beaverbrook, Rothermere (1868-1940), Camrose (1879-1954) and Kemsley (1883-1968) -- became the dominant figures in the inter-war press. In 1937, for instance, they owned nearly one in every two national and local daily papers sold in Britain, as well as one in every three Sunday papers that were sold. The combined circulation of all their newspapers amounted to over thirteen million.[26]


Beaverbrook purchased The Vineyard, Fulham, a "tiny Tudor house in Hurlingham Road" which ... "far from the centre of London I was relieved of casual callers and comparatively free of long-winded visitors. I provided facilities by means of private telephone lines without any direct contact with the Telephone Exchanges. Thus the political conferences held there were safeguarded against interruption."[27] Powerful friends and acquaintances such as Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill, Frederick Edwin Smith, Philip Sassoon, Diana and Duff Cooper, Balfour and Tim Healy were guests at both Cherkley and the Vineyard. The circle included Valentine Castlerosse, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, who was godfather to Beaverbrook's youngest son Peter, but this did nothing to repair the rift that developed between them when Beaverbrook endorsed Irish Home Rule.[14]

Beaverbrook, the first baron of Fleet Street, was often denounced as excessively powerful because his newspapers supposedly could make or break almost anyone. Beaverbrook enjoyed using his papers to attack his opponents and to promote his friends. From 1919 to 1922 he attacked David Lloyd George and his government on several issues. He began supporting independent Conservative candidates and campaigned for fifteen years to remove Stanley Baldwin from the leadership of the Conservative Party. He very shrewdly sold the majority of his share holdings before the 1929 crash and in the resulting depression launched a new political party to promote free trade within the British Empire. Empire Free Trade Crusade candidates had some success. An Independent Conservative who supported Empire Free Trade won the Twickenham by-election in 1929. The Empire Free Trade candidate won the South Paddington by-election in October 1930. In February 1931, Empire Free Trade lost the Islington East by-election and by splitting the vote with the Conservatives allowed Labour to hold a seat they had been expected to lose.[14] Duff Cooper's victory for the Conservatives in St. George's Westminster by-election in March 1931 marked the end of the movement as an electoral force.[8][28]

On 17 March 1931, during the St. George's Westminster by-election, Stanley Baldwin described the media barons who owned British newspapers as having "Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."[14] In the 1930s, while personally attempting to dissuade King Edward VIII from continuing his affair with American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, Beaverbrook's newspapers published every titbit of the affair, especially allegations about pro-Nazi sympathies. Beaverbrook supported the Munich Agreement and hoped the newly named Duke of Windsor would seek a peace deal with Germany.

Testifying before a Parliamentary inquiry in 1947, former Express employee and future MP Michael Foot alleged that Beaverbrook kept a blacklist of notable public figures who were to be denied any publicity in his papers because of personal disputes. Foot said they included Sir Thomas Beecham, Paul Robeson, Haile Selassie and Noël Coward. Beaverbrook himself gave evidence before the inquiry and vehemently denied the allegations; Express Newspapers general manager E.J. Robertson denied that Robeson had been blacklisted, but did admit that Coward had been "boycotted" because he had enraged Beaverbrook with his film In Which We Serve, for in the opening sequence Coward included an ironic shot showing a copy of the Daily Express floating in the dockside rubbish bearing the headline "No War This Year".[29][30][31]

In the late 1930s, Beaverbrook used his newspapers to promote the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government. The slogan 'There will be no war' was used by the Daily Express.[32]

Kerr, Brand, Curtis, and the whole inner core of the Milner Group began a campaign to undermine the [Versailles] treaty, the League of Nations, and the whole peace settlement. Those who are familiar with the activities of the "Cliveden Set" in the 1930s have generally felt that the appeasement policy associated with that group was a manifestation of the period after 1934 only. This is quite mistaken. The Milner Group, which was the reality behind the phantom-like Cliveden Set, began their program of appeasement and revision of the settlement as early as 1919....

Nowhere is the whole point of view of the Milner Group better stated than in a speech of General Smuts to the South African Luncheon Club in London, 23 October 1923. After violent criticism of the reparations as too large and an attack on the French efforts to enforce these clauses, he called for a meeting "of principals" to settle the problem. He then pointed out that a continuation of existing methods would lead to the danger of German disintegration, "a first-class and irreparable disaster.... It would mean immediate economic chaos, and it would open up the possibility of future political dangers to which I need not here refer. Germany is both economically and politically necessary to Central Europe." He advocated applying to Germany "the benevolent policy which this country adopted toward France after the Napoleonic War.... And if, as I hope she will do, Germany makes a last appeal ... I trust this great Empire will not hesitate for a moment to respond to that appeal and to use all its diplomatic power and influence to support her, and to prevent a calamity which would be infinitely more dangerous to Europe and the world than was the downfall of Russia six or seven years ago." Having thus lined Britain up in diplomatic opposition to France, Smuts continued with advice against applying generosity to the latter country on the question of French war debts, warning that this would only encourage "French militarism."

"Do not let us from mistaken motives of generosity lend our aid to the further militarization of the European continent. People here are already beginning to be seriously alarmed about French armaments on land and in the air. In addition to these armaments, the French government have also lent large sums to the smaller European States around Germany, mainly with a view to feeding their ravenous military appetites. There is a serious danger lest a policy of excessive generosity on our part, or on the part of America, may simply have the effect of enabling France still more effectively to subsidize and foster militarism on the Continent.... If things continue on the present lines, this country may soon have to start rearming herself in sheer self-defence."


This speech of Smuts covers so adequately the point of view of the Milner Group in the early period of appeasement that no further quotations are necessary. No real change occurred in the point of view of the Group from 1920 to 1938, not even as a result of the death of democratic hopes in Germany at the hands of the Nazis. From Smuts's speech of October 1923 before the South African Luncheon Club to Smuts's speech of November 1934 before the RIIA, much water flowed in the river of international affairs, but the ideas of the Milner Group remained rigid and, it may be added, erroneous. Just as the speech of 1923 may be taken as the culmination of the revisionist sentiment of the Group in the first five years of peace, so the speech of 1934 may be taken as the initiation of the appeasement sentiment of the Group in the last five years of peace. The speeches could almost be interchanged. We may call one revisionist and the other appeasing, but the point of view, the purpose, the method is the same. These speeches will be mentioned again later.

The aim of the Milner Group through the period from 1920 to 1938 was the same: to maintain the balance of power in Europe by building up Germany against France and Russia; to increase Britain's weight in that balance by aligning with her the Dominions and the United States; to refuse any commitments (especially any commitments through the League of Nations, and above all any commitments to aid France) beyond those existing in 1919; to keep British freedom of action; to drive Germany eastward against Russia if either or both of these two powers became a threat to the peace of Western Europe.

-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Sep 16, 2019 10:01 am

Part 2 of 2

Second World War

Image
Lord Beaverbrook during the Second World War

During the Second World War, in May 1940, his friend Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, appointed Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production. With Churchill's blessing, Beaverbrook overhauled all aspects of war-time aircraft production. He increased production targets by 15% across the board, took control of aircraft repairs and RAF storage units, replaced the management of plants that were underperforming, and released German Jewish engineers from internment to work in the factories.

In 1933 the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany. Thereafter life became increasingly harsh for various sectors of the population: pacifists, liberals, Marxists, members of certain churches, gypsies, Jews, and others.

From 1933 onwards the more percipient members of these groups began to leave Germany. Slow at first, the volume of emigration grew with each fresh phase of Nazi oppression: the Nuremberg race-laws of 1935; the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938; Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, in November 1938 ....

Some 50,000 of these emigrants came to Great Britain, many intending to re-emigrate to Palestine or the United States. A large number of them were penniless, though many had once held positions of considerable importance as scientists, scholars, teachers, journalists, or had enjoyed comfortable middle-class status as doctors, dentists, lawyers, large-scale businessmen. Now they were strangers in a strange land speaking a strange language; in a word, they were refugees.

Innumerable committees sprang up in Britain to assist the settlement of the refugees, formed by, inter alia, the Quakers, the churches, academics and doctors. In 1933 the Central British Fund for German Jewry was founded to help the largest single group involved. In 1939 its manifold services to the refugees were carried out from Bloomsbury House, London. In 1933 too, representative leaders of the Anglo-Jewish community promised the British government that it would meet all the expenses involved in accommodating and supporting the German Jewish refugees without ultimate charge to the state.

This promise exerted some influence on the relationship between the refugees and their British hosts: there was sympathy tinged with suspicion on the one hand; gratitude tempered by insecurity on the other.

The outbreak of war between Nazi Germany and Britain in September 1939 changed the refugee into an enemy alien and placed an unforeseen strain on the relationship (and on the promise). This book examines through the personal experiences of a few refugees the period of adjustment, with special reference to the bizarre episode of internment, until a new equilibrium was reached between Britain and its new citizens....

The Characters in Order of Appearance

MAC GOLDSMITH. Highly successful German engineer and industrialist, he and his wife finally settled in Britain in 1937. Interned 4 September 1939; released November 1939. Now retired, after a prestigious career, in Leicester.

EDITH JACOBUS. Came to England with her husband and daughter from Germany in August 1936. Interned May 1940. She has remarried and lives in Leamington Spa.

HENRY BERG. Came to England from Germany under a Zionist youth scheme in March 1939, following a period in Dachau concentration camp. Interned July 1940. He now lives in Oxford.

PAUL JACOBSTHAL. Born 1880 in Berlin; died 1957 in Oxford, where he was a Fellow of Christ Church. Interned July 1940; released September 1940.

CHAIM RABIN. Went from Germany to Palestine and thence to England to study Hebrew and Arabic. Interned July 1940. He is now Professor of Hebrew at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

LEON FELDMAN. Came to England from Berlin in April 1939 on a children's transport. Interned June 1940; deported to Canada, where he was later released. He is now Professor of Hebraic Studies at Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey, and the founding rector of the Hochschule fur Judische Studien, Heidelberg, where he is an honorary professor.

FELIX DARNBACHER. Came to England from Leipzig in 1933 as a schoolboy. Interned July 1940; deported to Australia; released in England to join the Pioneer Corps. He is now an architect living in Jerusalem.

HEINZ KIEWE. Textile journalist living in Germany, he came to London in March 1933. Interned May 1940; released February 1941. He now owns a beautiful art-needlework shop in Oxford.

PETER KATZ. Came to Britain from Germany via Holland as a schoolboy in 1934. Interned May 1940 aged sixteen; released to return to school in October 1940. He now lives in Oxford.

BATYA EMANUEL. Her family left Germany in the 1930s to settle in Cardiff. Batya was still very young in 1940, but her father and one of her brothers were interned. She now lives in Jerusalem.

JAKOB FELSENSTEIN. Frankfurt solicitor, he came to England in April 1933. Interned July 1940; deported to Australia; released in England in July 1941. He died in Jerusalem in 1981.

PASTOR ARNOLD EHRHARDT. Born Konigsberg 1903. Studied theology under Karl Barth in Basel after being forbidden to lecture in the law faculty at Frankfurt University in 1935. Came to England in July 1939; interned May 1940. He died in 1965 at Manchester, where he was Bishop Frazer Lecturer for Church History at the University.

MARTIN OSTWALD. Came to England from Germany via the concentration camp of Saxenhausen, on a children's transport in March 1939. Interned May 1940; deported to Canada, where he was released in 1942. He is now Professor of Classics at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

ULRICH SKALLER. German timber-merchant, he came to England in October 1938. Interned May 1940; released August 1940. He now lives in retirement in Putney, London.

EUGEN GLUECKAUF. Scientist, he left Germany for England in 1933. Interned May 1940; released October 1940. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and worked as a consultant for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, Oxon. He died in 1981.

MOSES ABERBACH. Came to England in December 1938 on a children's transport. Interned May 1940; released July 1940. He is now a professor at the Baltimore Hebrew College, USA.

KURT AND FREDA. Escaped from Germany via Holland in May 1940. Immediately interned; released August 1942. They now live in Leicester.

MARIE NEURATH. Escaped with fiance Otto Neurath on the same boat as Kurt and Freda and interned on arrival. Released in February 1941. She is now widowed and lives in London.

DR H. A doctor in a Vienna hospital, she came to England on a domestic permit via Denmark in 1938. Interned May 1940. She now lives in London.

KLAUS LOEWALD. Came from Berlin to England. Interned June 1940; deported to Australia, where he was released to join the Australian Army in August 1942. He now teaches history at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales.

JULIUS CARLEBACH. Left Hamburg in December 1938 and came on a children's transport to England. Interned June I940; released October 1940. He now teaches sociology at the University of Sussex.

ERNST MANASSE. Came to England from Germany on a Zionist youth scheme in March I939 after a sojourn in Dachau concentration camp. Interned July 1940; released October 1940. He is now retired and lives in Oxford.

RUDI GUTTMAN. Sent to school in England from Germany in 1934. Interned July 1940; deported to Australia; released in Britain early in 1941 to join the Pioneer Corps. Now an engineer living in Tel Aviv.

ERICH MARK. Came to England from Germany as a young boy. Interned June 1940; released October 1940. Now lives in Belgium.

HENRY PRAIS. Came to Britain in 1939 with a Zionist youth group on an agricultural permit. Interned July 1940; released December 1940. Now a retired Professor of French living in Jerusalem.

Image
Map 1: Map showing the sites of the internment-camps in Great Britain

Image
Map 2: Map showing the sites of the internment-camps on the Isle of Man

-- Britain's Internees in the Second World War, by Miriam Kochan


He seized materials and equipment destined for other departments and was perpetually at odds with the Air Ministry.[33] His appeal for pots and pans "to make Spitfires" was afterwards revealed by his son Sir Max Aitken to have been nothing more than a propaganda exercise. Still, a Time Magazine cover story declared, "Even if Britain goes down this fall, it will not be Lord Beaverbrook's fault. If she holds out, it will be his triumph. This war is a war of machines. It will be won on the assembly line."[34]

Under Beaverbrook, fighter and bomber production increased so much so that Churchill declared: "His personal force and genius made this Aitken's finest hour." Beaverbrook's impact on wartime production has been much debated but he certainly energised production at a time when it was desperately needed. However, it has been argued that aircraft production was already rising when Beaverbrook took charge and that he was fortunate to inherit a system which was just beginning to bear fruit.[35] Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Head of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain wrote that "We had the organization, we had the men, we had the spirit which could bring us victory in the air but we had not the supply of machines necessary to withstand the drain of continuous battle. Lord Beaverbrook gave us those machines, and I do not believe that I exaggerate when I say that no other man in England could have done so."[14][36][37]

Beaverbrook resigned on 30 April 1941 and, after a month as Minister of State, Churchill appointed him to the post of Minister of Supply. Here Beaverbrook clashed with Ernest Bevin who, as Minister of Labour and National Service, refused to let Beaverbrook take over any of his responsibilities. In February 1942, Beaverbrook became Minister of War Production and again clashed with Bevin, this time over shipbuilding. In the face of Bevin's refusal to work with him, Beaverbrook resigned after only twelve days in the post. In September 1943 he was appointed Lord Privy Seal, outside of the Cabinet, and held that post until the end of the war.[8]

In 1941, Beaverbrook headed the British delegation to Moscow with his American counterpart Averell Harriman. This made Beaverbrook the first senior British politician to meet Soviet leader Joseph Stalin since Adolf Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Much impressed by Stalin and the sacrifice of the Soviet people, he returned to London determined to persuade Churchill to launch a second front in Europe to help draw German resources away from the Eastern Front to aid the Soviets.[38] Despite their disagreement over the second front, Beaverbrook remained a close confidant of Churchill throughout the war, and could regularly be found with Churchill until the early hours of the morning. Clement Attlee commented that "Churchill often listened to Beaverbrook's advice but was too sensible to take it."

In addition to his ministerial roles, Beaverbrook headed the Anglo-American Combined Raw Materials Board from 1942 to 1945 and accompanied Churchill to several wartime meetings with President Roosevelt. He was able to relate to Roosevelt in a different way to Churchill and became close to Roosevelt during these visits. This friendship sometimes irritated Churchill who felt that Beaverbrook was distracting Roosevelt from concentrating on the war effort. For his part Roosevelt seems to have enjoyed the distraction.


Later life

Beaverbrook devoted himself to Churchill's 1945 general election campaign, but a Daily Express headline warning that a Labour victory would amount to the 'Gestapo in Britain' (adapted from a passage in a radio election speech by Churchill on June 4[39]) was a huge mistake and completely misjudged the public mood.[7] Beaverbrook renounced his British citizenship and left the Conservative Party in 1951 but remained an Empire loyalist throughout his life. He opposed both Britain's acceptance of post-war loans from America and Britain's application to join the European Economic Community in 1961.[8] In 1953 he became chancellor-for-life of the University of New Brunswick through an Act of the local legislature.

The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is a public university with two primary campuses in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick. It is the oldest English-language university in Canada, and among the oldest public universities in North America.[4] UNB was founded by a group of seven Loyalists who left the United States after the American Revolution.[5]

-- University of New Brunswick, by Wikipedia


[40] He became the university's greatest benefactor, fulfilling the same role for the city of Fredericton and the province as a whole. He would provide additional buildings for the university, scholarship funds, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Beaverbrook Skating Rink, the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, with profits donated to charity, the Playhouse, Louise Manny's early folklore work, and numerous other projects. He bought the archive papers of both Bonar Law and David Lloyd George and placed them in the Beaverbrook Library within the Daily Express Building.[8]

Personal life

Image
Gladys Drury, sometime before her marriage

On 29 January 1906, in Halifax, Aitken married Gladys Henderson Drury, daughter of Major-General Charles William Drury CBE (a first cousin of Admiral Sir Charles Carter Drury) and Mary Louise Drury (née Henderson). They had three children before her death on 1 December 1927.[14] Their son Max Aitken Jr. became a fighter pilot with 601 Squadron, rising to Wing Commander with 16 victories in World War II. Beaverbrook remained a widower for many years until 1963 when he married Marcia Anastasia Christoforides (1910–1994), the widow of his friend Sir James Dunn. Beaverbrook was rarely a faithful husband, and even in old age was often accused of treating women with disrespect.[8] In Britain he established the then-married Jean Norton as his mistress at Cherkley. Aitken left Norton for a Jewish ballet dancer named Lily Ernst whom he had rescued from pre-war Austria.[41]

Charles Williams’s new biography of the press baron Max Beaverbrook might more accurately have been subtitled Not Remotely a Gentleman. Margot Asquith identified him as “a vulgar Canadian of the lowest reputation”. Not only did he wear brown shoes with a blue suit, he was generally regarded as a thumping crook. Hugh Cudlipp, who worked for him on the Sunday Express, called him “tyrannous, vindictive and malicious”. He was a treacherous friend (“However dire the dangers of his enmity may be,” wrote Violet Bonham Carter, “they pale before the perils of his friendship”) and, according to this biography, “a hard and demanding sexual master”....

Over the next decade, he went on to make enormous amounts of money, in a series of complicated and probably shady deals involving cement and utilities, and in 1910 he moved to London to make even more. That year, supported by Rudyard Kipling, his fellow imperialist, he was elected Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. The next year, to howls of indignation from Canada, he was knighted, and in 1916 given a baronetcy. In 1917, Lloyd George, who owed Aitken a favour or two, recommended him for a peerage, and the King reluctantly agreed, creating him Baron Beaverbrook. Kipling designed him a coat of arms featuring two beavers....

His other, related, crusade was isolationism and appeasement, which he stuck with, in a treasonous manner, even after 1939. In Jan 1940, he met the Duke of Windsor at the house of Walter Monckton, who was so appalled by their conversation that he reported it to a friend in the Foreign Office, who circulated a memo to colleagues...

The next year, Churchill sent him to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin, where everyone agreed that they got on famously. “Stalin and Max did everything two lovers can do except sleep together,” wrote Robert Bruce Lockheart, the journalist and spy, “and that only because too busy”.

The Russian war effort became the Beaver’s new crusade. Stalin, he told the House of Lords, would “go down in the long list of Russian heroes as Stalin the Great”. And he brazenly defended the show trials and purges: “It is now clear that the men who were shot down would have betrayed Russia to her German enemy.”...

His first wife, Gladys Drury, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was 18 when she married him, aged 26. “Her figure was stocky rather than refined,” Williams ungallantly notes, “but she was (an important asset) even shorter than Beaverbrook himself”. Her sister, Helen, had a more refined figure, and by one account Beaverbrook seduced her, too, “and kept [her] financially dependent on him most of her life”.

Williams quite often refers to Beaverbrook’s “instinctive dislike of the English upper class”, but this did not extend to its female members. His name was “linked” to those of Bridget Paget, Daphne Weymouth, Sibell Lygon, Edwina Mountbatten, Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies and Doris Delevingne, who once declared that “an Englishwoman’s bed is her castle”. In 1919, Diana Manners wrote to Duff Cooper from the Paris Peace Conference about Venetia Montagu: “It’s a disgusting case – her face lights up when that animated little deformity so much as turns to her. [She and Beaverbrook] are living in open sin at the Ritz in a tall silk suite with a common bath…”

His first serious mistress was Jean Norton, whom he betrayed remorselessly during their 20 years together, and before her death replaced her with a younger model, Lily Ernst, the Viennese ballerina. Ernst rejected him when he shouted “bloody old Jew” at a beggar in Cannes, but he wore her down. “The best thing I knew about Max Beaverbrook,” said Michael Foot, “was that Lily Ernst truly loved him.” Of course, he did not love her back.

Clement Attlee is reported to have said that Beaverbrook was the only evil man he had met. This thorough biography leaves one in no doubt that he was an ironclad, ocean-going monster.

-- Max Beaverbrook: press magnate, minister, ironclad monster, by Lewis Jones, The Telegraph, May 2019


Historian

After the First World War, Beaverbrook had written Politicians and the Press in 1925, and Politicians and the War in two volumes, the first in 1928 and the second in 1932,[42] republished in one volume in 1960.[43] Upon their original publication, the books were largely ignored by professional historians and the only favourable reviews were in Beaverbrook's own newspapers.[44] However, when the combined edition of Politicians and the War came out, the reviews were more positive.[45] A. J. P. Taylor said it was "Tacitus and Aubrey rolled into one".[46][45]

Later Taylor said: "The enduring merits of the book are really beyond cavil. It provides essential testimony for events during a great political crisis...It contains character sketches worthy of Aubrey. On a wider canvas, it displays the behaviour of political leaders in wartime. The narrative is carried along by rare zest and wit, yet with the detached impartialty of the true scholar".[47] Sir John Elliot in 1981 said the work "will remain, despite all carping, the authoritative narrative; nor does the story want in the telling thereof".[48]

Men and Power 1917–1918 was published in 1956. It is not a coherent narrative but divided by separate episodes centred on one man, such as Carson, Robertson, Rothermere and others. The reviews were favourable, with Taylor's review in The Observer greatly pleasing Beaverbrook.[49] The book sold over 23,000 copies.[50]

When The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George was published in 1963, favourable reviewers included Clement Attlee, Roy Jenkins, Robert Blake, Lord Longford, Sir C. P. Snow, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Richard Crossman and Denis Brogan.[51] Kenneth Young said the book was "the finest of all his writing".[51]

Beaverbrook was both admired and despised in Britain, sometimes at the same time: in his 1956 autobiography, David Low quotes H.G. Wells as saying of Beaverbrook: "If ever Max ever gets to Heaven, he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course."[citation needed]

Beaverbrook was of an imperialist mindset, with the quote, "There are countries so underdeveloped today that the gift of independence is like the gift of a razor to a child" attributed to him in a panel discussion on Canadian TV.[52]

Death

Lord Beaverbrook died in Surrey in 1964, aged 85. He had recently attended a birthday banquet organised by fellow Canadian press baron, Lord Thomson of Fleet, where he was determined to be seen on his usual good form, despite suffering from cancer. The Beaverbrook Foundation continues his philanthropic interests. In 1957, a bronze statue of Lord Beaverbrook was erected at the centre of Officers' Square in Fredericton, New Brunswick, paid for by money raised by children throughout the province. A bust of him by Oscar Nemon stands in the park in the town square of Newcastle, New Brunswick, not far from where he sold newspapers as a young boy.[40] His ashes are in the plinth of the bust.[14]

Legacy

Image
Beaverbrook House, formerly the Old Manse Library, and earlier the boyhood home of Aitken, in Newcastle, Miramichi, New Brunswick (IR Walker 1983)

Beaverbrook and his wife Lady Beaverbrook left a considerable legacy to both New Brunswick and the United Kingdom. In 2016, he was named a National Historic Person on the advice of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.[53] His legacy, and memorials, includes the following buildings:

• University of New Brunswick
o Aitken House[54]
o Aitken University Centre
o Lady Beaverbrook Gymnasium
o Lady Beaverbrook Residence[55]
o Beaverbrook House (UNBSJ E-Commerce Centre)
• City of Fredericton, New Brunswick
o Lady Beaverbrook Arena (formerly operated by the University of New Brunswick)
o The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, including world-renowned art collection (New Brunswick's provincial gallery)
o The Fredericton Playhouse
o Lord Beaverbrook Hotel
o Lord Beaverbrook statue in Officer's Square
• City of Miramichi, New Brunswick
o Max Aitken Academy
o Lord Beaverbrook Arena (LBA)
o Beaverbrook Kin Centre (formerly the Beaverbrook Theatre and Town Hall)
o Beaverbrook House (his boyhood home and formerly the Old Manse Library)
o Lord Beaverbrook bust in Queen Elizabeth Park
o Aitken Avenue
• City of Campbellton, New Brunswick
o Lord Beaverbrook School
• City of Saint John, New Brunswick
o Lord Beaverbrook Rink
• City of Ottawa, Ontario
o Beaverbrook
• City of Calgary, Alberta
o Lord Beaverbrook High School
• McGill University
o The Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications[56]

Beaverbrook's published works

Image
Bust of Lord Beaverbrook, where his ashes are deposited, in the town square of Newcastle, Miramichi, New Brunswick (IR Walker 2008)

• Canada in Flanders. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916.
• Success.. Small, Maynard and Company, 1922, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7661-5409-4.
• Politicians and the Press. London: Hutchinson, 1925.
• Politicians and the War, Vol. 1. London: Oldbourne, 1928.
• Politicians and the War, Vol. 2. London: Oldbourne, 1932.
• The Resources of The British Empire. London: Lane Publications, 1934.
• Why Didn't you Help the Finns? Are you in the Hands of the Jews? And 10 Questions, Answers. London: London Express, 1939.
• Spirit of the Soviet Union. London: The Pilot Press, 1942.
• Don't Trust to Luck. London: London Express Newspaper, 1954.
• The Three Keys to Success. London: Hawthorn Books, 1956.
• Men and Power, 1917–1918. North Haven, Connecticut: The Shoe String Press, 1956.
• Friends: Sixty years of Intimate personal relations with Richard Bedford Bennett. London: Heinemann, 1959.
• Courage, The Story of Sir James Dunn. Fredericton: Brunswick Press, 1961.
• My Early Life. Fredericton: Atlantic Advocate Book, 1962.
• The Divine Propagandist. London: Heinnemann, 1962.
• The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George: and great was the fall thereof.. London: Collins, 1963, 1981 ISBN 978-0-313-23007-3. online
• The Abdication of Edward VIII. NY: Atheneum, 1966.

Descendants

• Hon. Janet Gladys Aitken (9 July 1908 – 18 November 1988); she married Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, on 12 December 1927 and they were divorced in 1934. They have one daughter and two granddaughters. She remarried Hon. William Montagu on 5 March 1935. They have one son and three grandchildren. She remarried again, Major Thomas Kidd, on 11 July 1942. They have two children, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
o Lady Jeanne Campbell (10 December 1928 – 9 June 2007); she married Norman Mailer in 1962 and they were divorced in 1963. They have a daughter. She remarried John Sergeant Cram in March 1964. They have one daughter.
 Kate Mailer (b. 18 August 1962)
 Cusi Cram (b. 1967)
o William Montagu (9 February 1936 – 6 November 2002); he married Edna Ahlers in 1969. They have three children:
 Michael Drogo Montagu (b. 1968)
 Nicola Lilian Montagu (b. 1971)
 Monette Edna Montagu (b. 1973)
o Jane Kidd (b. 1943); she married Graham Morison Vere Nicoll in 1972.
o John Kidd (b. 12 December 1944); he married Wendy Madeleine Hodge on 2 April 1973. They have three children and three grandchildren:
 Jack Kidd (b. 1973)
 Jemma Kidd (b. 20 September 1974); she married Arthur Wellesley, Marquess of Douro, on 4 June 2005. They have three children.
 Jodie Kidd (b. 25 September 1978); she married Aidan Butler on 10 September 2005 and they were divorced in 2007. She remarried David Blakeley on 16 August 2014 and they were divorced on 1 May 2015.
• Sir John William Maxwell Aitken, for three days before disclaiming, 2nd Baron Beaverbrook (15 February 1910 – 30 April 1985); he married Cynthia Monteith on 26 August 1939 and they were divorced in 1944. He remarried Ursula Kenyon-Slaney on 15 August 1946 and they were divorced in 1950. They have two daughters, five grandchildren, and two great-granddaughters. He remarried again Violet de Trafford (daughter of Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 4th Baronet) on 1 January 1951. They have two children, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
o Hon. Kirsty Jane Aitken (b. 22 June 1947); she married Jonathan Morley on 6 September 1966 and they were divorced in 1973. They have two sons and two granddaughters. She remarried Christopher Smallwood in 1975. They have one daughter.
 Dominic Max Michael Morley (b. 1967)
 Sebastian Finch Morley (b. 1969); he married Victoria Whitbread in 1993. They have two daughters.
 Violet Mary Davina Morley (b. 3 February 2004)
 Myrtle Rose Beatrice Morley (b. 13 December 2005)
 Eleanor Bluebell Smallwood (b. 1982)
o Hon. Lynda Mary Kathleen Aitken (b. 30 October 1948); she married Nicholas Saxton on 25 April 1969 and they were divorced in 1974. She remarried Jonathan Dickson in 1977. They have two sons.
 Joshua James Dickson (b. 20 February 1977)
 Leo Casper Dickson (b. 1981)
o Maxwell Aitken, 3rd Baron Beaverbrook (b. 29 December 1951); he married Susan O'Ferrall on 19 July 1974. They have four children and four grandchildren.
o Hon. Laura Aitken (b. 18 November 1953); she married David Mallet in 1984. They have one son. She remarried Martin K. Levi in 1992. They have two children.
 David Sonny Victor Maxwell Mallet (b. 1984)
 Lucci Violet Levi (b. 1993)
 Louis Max Adam Levi (b. 1 December 1994)
• Captain Hon. Peter Rudyard Aitken (b. 22 March 1912 - 3 August 1947); he married Janet Macneil on 25 January 1934 and they were divorced in 1939. They have one daughter and three grandsons. He remarried Marie Patricia McGuire on 28 October 1942. They have two sons and four grandsons.
o Caroline Ann Christine Aitken (b. 4 April 1935); she married Conyers Baker on 7 September 1957. They have three sons:
 William Hugh Massey Baker (b. 26 June 1958)
 Philip Massey Baker (b. 13 March 1960)
 Jonathan Piers Massey Baker (b. 14 July 1967)
o Timothy Maxwell Aitken (b. 28 October 1944); he married Annete Hansen on 10 May 1966. He remarried Julie Filstead in 1972. They have two sons.
 Theodore Maxwell Aitken (b. 1976)
 Charles Howard Filstead Aitken (b. 1979)
o Peter Michael Aitken (b. 20 February 1946); he married, secondly, Hon. Joan Rees-Williams in 1981 and they were divorced in 1985. He remarried Iryna Iwachiw on 12 September 1992.
 James Aitken
 Jason Aiken

In popular culture

Image
Lord Beaverbrook plaque in Maple, Ontario

For a period of time Beaverbrook employed novelist Evelyn Waugh in London and abroad. Waugh later lampooned his employer by portraying him as Lord Copper in Scoop and as Lord Monomark in both Put Out More Flags and Vile Bodies.

The Kinks recorded "Mr Churchill Says" for their 1969 album Arthur, which contains the lines: "Mr Beaverbrook says: 'We've gotta save our tin/And all the garden gates and empty cans are gonna make us win...'."

Beaverbrook was one of eight notable Britons cited in Bjørge Lillelien's famous "Your boys took a hell of a beating" commentary at the end of an English football team defeat to Norway in 1981, mentioned alongside British Prime Ministers Churchill, Thatcher and Attlee.[57][58]

In the alternate history novel, Dominion by C. J. Sansom, Beaverbrook serves as Prime Minister for most of the novel, which sees Britain as a puppet state of a longer-lived Nazi Germany.[59]

See also

• Canadian peers and baronets
• Churchill war ministry

References

1. "Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 6 July 2011.
2. Churchill 1949
3. Peter Jackson & Tom de Castella (14 July 2011). "Clash of the press titans". BBC News. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
4. John Ramsden (Editor) (2005). Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century British Politics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-861036-X.
5. Peter Mavrikis (Editor) (2005). History of World War II. Marshall Cavendish Corporation. ISBN 978-0-7614-7231-5.
6. who served under the Bounty or Augmentation Scheme, see Beaverbrook 1963 p.107
7. Frank N. Magill (Editor) (1999). Dictionary of World Biography Vol VII The 20th Century A-Gl. Salem Press. ISBN 0-89356-321-8.
8. HCG Matthew & Brian Harrison (Editors) (2004). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Vol 1 (Arron-Amory). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-861351-2.
9. Gregory P. Marchildon, Profits and politics: Beaverbrook and the gilded age of Canadian finance(1996).
10. Gregory P. Marchildon (1996). "5. The Montreal Engineering Company". Profits and politics: Beaverbrook and the gilded age of Canadian finance. University of Toronto Press. pp. 97–121. ISBN 9780802007407.
11. "100 Years, 100 People:1909–1919". TransAlta. 2 December 2011. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
12. The New York Times, 13 May 1911, "Canadian Cement Scandal,"; Edmonton Bulletin, Nov. 30, 1911
13. Taylor 1972
14. Janet Aitken Kidd (1988). The Beaverbrook Girl: An Autobiography. Collins.
15. Firstworldwar.com. "Who's Who – Lord Beaverbrook". Firstworldwar.com. Retrieved 15 October2014.
16. Beaverbrook 1963, pp. 16–17
17. Peter Pugh (2001). The Magic of a Name: The Rolls-Royce Story, The First 40 Years. Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-151-9.
18. Merion Harries & Susie Harries (1983). The War Artists, British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century. Michael Joseph, The Imperial War Museum & the Tate Gallery. ISBN 071812314X.
19. Blake 1955, pp. 346–347.
20. "No. 29913". The London Gazette. 23 January 1917. p. 842.
21. "St John NB & The Magnificent Irvings + Art heist at Beaverbrook Gallery." wordpress.com, 18 August. 2008. Retrieved: 6 July 2011.
22. Rayburn, A. Naming Canada: Stories about Canadian Place Names. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
23. Rayburn 1975
24. "No. 30557". The London Gazette. 5 March 1918. p. 2775.
25. Taylor 1972, pp. 137 (quote), 129, 135, 136.
26. James Curran; Jean Seaton (2009). Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain. Routledge. p. 72. ISBN 9781135248581.
27. Beaverbrook 1963, p. 65ff
28. F. W. S. Craig (1975). Minor Parties at British Parliamentary Elections 1885–1974. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-349-02346-2.
29. Movie 'In Which We Serve' 0:05:57
30. Sweet 2005, p. 173.
31. Anne Chisholm & Machael Davie (1993). Lord Beaverbrook: A Life. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-56879-9.
32. Geoffrey Cox 'Countdown to War' page 104
33. Geoffrey Best (2005). Churchill and War. Humbledon and London. ISBN 1852854642.
34. "Great Britain: Shirts On." Time, 16 September 1940.
35. Deighton 1980, pp. 164–165.
36. "The Battle of Britain". The London Gazette (Supplement). No. 37719. 11 September 1946. pp. 4543–.
37. spitfiresite.com: "Battle of Britain in the Words of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding"
38. "Lord Beaverbrook." Archived 29 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine Spartacus. Retrieved: 6 July 2011.
39. Hennessy, Peter (1992), Never Again, p.82-3, Jonathan Cape, London
40. unb.ca: "A Conversation with Ann Moyal, Lord Beaverbrook’s Researcher", JNBS vol 7 no 2
41. Leonie Jameson (2 December 1996). "Sex and Power". The Independent. Retrieved 1 May 2017.
42. Stubbs, John O. (1982). "Beaverbrook as Historian: "Politicians and the War, 1914-1916" Reconsidered". Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies. The North American Conference on British Studies. 14 (3/4): 235–253. doi:10.2307/4048514. JSTOR 4048514.
43. Taylor, p. 102.
44. Taylor, p. 251.
45. Jump up to:a b Dalhousie Review v59 n1 p129: "Lord Beaverbrook: Historian Extraordinary" by JM McEwen
46. Taylor, p. 645.
47. Taylor, pp. 102–103.
48. John Elliot, ‘Aitken, William Maxwell, first Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964)’, Dictionary of National Biography (1981).
49. Taylor, pp. 629–630.
50. Taylor, p. 629.
51. Taylor, p. 655.
52. "Fighting Words: The perils of independence and Irish cry-babies". CBC Digital Archives. Retrieved 2 March 2017.
53. Sir William Maxwell Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook), Parks Canada backgrounder, Feb. 15, 2016
54. "Aitken House." unbf.ca. Retrieved: 6 July 2011.
55. "Lady Beaverbrook Residence." Archived 6 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine unb.ca.Retrieved: 6 July 2011.
56. "The Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications." mcgill.ca. Retrieved: 6 July 2011.
57. Video on YouTube
58. "News." BBC via Youtube. Retrieved: 13 March 2012.
59. Sansom, C.J. "My nightmare of a Nazi Britain." The Guardian, 19 October 2012.

Bibliography

• Bingham, Adrian. "'An Organ of Uplift?' The popular press and political culture in interwar Britain." Journalism Studies 14#5 (2013): 651-662.
• Boyce, D. George. "Aitken, William Maxwell, first Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964)" Oxford dictionary of national biography (2004), A short scholarly biography
• Chisholm, Anne, and Michael Davie. Beaverbrook: a life (Random House (UK), 1992).
• Curran, James; Jean Seaton (2009). Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain. Routledge.
• Dick, Murray. "Just fancy that: An analysis of infographic propaganda in The Daily Express, 1956–1959." Journalism Studies 16#2 (2015): 152-174.
• Deighton, Len. Battle of Britain. London: Johnathon Cape, 1980. ISBN 0-224-01826-4
• Koss, Stephen E. The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: The twentieth century, Volume 2 (1984) online
• Lovell, Kristopher. "The ‘Common Wealth Circus’: Popular Politics and the Popular Press in Wartime Britain, 1941–1945." Media History 23#3-4 (2017): 427-450.
• Marchildon, Gregory P. Profits and politics: Beaverbrook and the gilded age of Canadian finance (U of Toronto Press, 1996).
• Rayburn, A. Geographical Names of New Brunswick. Ottawa: Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, 1975
• Richards, David Adams. Lord Beaverbrook (Extraordinary Canadians). Toronto, Ontario:Penguin Canada, 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-06614-8
• Schneer, Jonathan. Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet (Basic Books, 2015).
• Sweet, Matthew. Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. ISBN 978-0-571-21297-2
• Taylor, A.J.P. (1972). Beaverbrook: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-02170-7.
Primary sources[edit]
• Aitken Kidd, Janet (1988). The Beaverbrook Girl : An Autobiography. London: Collins.
• Lord Beaverbrook (1963). The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George. London: Collins.

External links

• Lord Beaverbrook, a Week at the Office
• National Film Board of Canada biography
• Works by Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Max Aitken at Internet Archive
• Works by or about Lord Beaverbrook at Internet Archive
• Ontario Plaques – Lord Beaverbrook
• "Archival material relating to Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook". UK National Archives.
• The Beaverbrook Papers at the UK Parliamentary Archives
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Max Aitken
• The Lord Beaverbrook, A bygone era
• Newspaper clippings about Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Sep 16, 2019 11:25 am

Part 1 of 2

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal [EXCERPT]
by Eric Schlosser
© 2002, 2001 by Eric Schlosser

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Chapter 1: The American Way

The Founding Fathers


CARL N. KARCHER is one of the fast food industry's pioneers. His career extends from the industry's modest origins to its current hamburger hegemony. His life seems at once to be a tale by Horatio Alger, a fulfillment of the American dream, and a warning about unintended consequences. It is a fast food parable about how the industry started and where it can lead. At the heart of the story is southern California, whose cities became prototypes for the rest of the nation, whose love of the automobile changed what America looks like and what Americans eat.

Carl was born in 1917 on a farm near Upper Sandusky, Ohio. His father was a sharecropper who moved the family to new land every few years .. The Karchers were German-American, industrious, and devoutly Catholic. Carl had six brothers and a sister. "The harder you work." their father always told them, "the luckier you become." Carl dropped out of school after the eighth grade and worked twelve to fourteen hours a day on the farm, harvesting with a team of horses, baling hay, milking and feeding the cows. In 1937, Ben Karcher, one of Carl's uncles, offered him a job in Anaheim, California. After thinking long and hard and consulting with his parents, Carl decided to go west He was twenty years old and six-foot-four, a big strong farm boy. He had never set foot outside of northern Ohio. The decision to leave home felt momentous, and the drive to California took a week. When he arrived in Anaheim - and saw the palm trees and orange groves, and smelled the citrus in the air - Carl said to himself, "This is heaven."

Anaheim was a small town in those days, surrounded by ranches and farms. It was located in the heart of southern California's citrus belt, an area that produced almost all of the state's oranges, lemons, and tangerines. Orange County and neighboring Los Angeles County were the leading agricultural counties in the United States, growing fruits, nuts, vegetables, and flowers on land that only a generation earlier had been a desert covered in sagebrush and cactus. Massive irrigation projects, built with public money to improve private land, brought water from hundreds of miles away. The Anaheim area alone boasted about 70,000 acres of Valencia oranges, as well as lemon groves and walnut groves. Small ranches and dairy farms dotted the land, and sunflowers lined the back roads. Anaheim had been settled in the late nineteenth century by German immigrants hoping to create a local wine industry and by a group of Polish expatriates trying to establish a back-to-the-land artistic community. The wineries flourished for three decades; the art colony collapsed within a few months. After World War I, the heavily German character of Anaheim gave way to the influence of newer arrivals from the Midwest, who tended to be Protestant and conservative and evangelical about their faith. Reverend Leon L. Myers - pastor of the Anaheim Christian Church and founder of the local Men's Bible Club - turned the Ku Klux Klan into one of the most powerful organizations in town. During the early 1920s, the Klan ran Anaheim's leading daily newspaper, controlled the city government for a year, and posted signs on the outskirts of the City greeting newcomers with the acronym "KIGY" (Klansmen I Greet You).

Carl's uncle Ben owned Karcher's Feed and Seed Store, right in the middle of downtown Anaheim. Carl worked there seventy-six hours a week, selling goods to local farmers for their chickens, cattle, and hogs. During Sunday services at St. Boniface Catholic Church, Carl spotted an attractive young woman named Margaret Heinz sitting in a nearby pew. He later asked her out for ice cream, and the two began. dating. Carl became a frequent visitor to the Heinz farm on North Palm Street. It had ten acres of orange trees and a Spanish-style house where Margaret, her parents, her seven brothers, and her seven sisters lived. The place seemed magical. In the social hierarchy of California's farmers, orange growers stood at the very top; their homes were set amid fragrant evergreen trees that produced a lucrative income. As a young boy in Ohio, Carl had been thrilled on Christmas mornings to receive a single orange as a gift from Santa. Now oranges seemed to be everywhere.

Margaret worked as a secretary at a law firm downtown. From her office window on the fourth floor, she could watch Carl grinding feed outside his uncle's store. After briefly returning to Ohio, Carl went to work for the Armstrong Bakery in Los Angeles. The job soon paid $.24 a week, $6 more than he'd earned at the feed store - and enough to start a family. Carl and Margaret were married in 1939 and had their first child within a year.

Carl drove a truck for the bakery, delivering bread to restaurants and markets in west L.A. He was amazed by the number of hot dog stands that were opening and by the number of buns they went through every week. When Carl heard that a hotdog cart was for sale - on Florence Avenue across from the Goodyear factory - he decided to buy it. Margaret strongly opposed the idea, wondering where he'd find the money. He borrowed $311 from the Bank of America, using his car as collateral for the loan, and persuaded his wife to give him $15 in cash from her purse. ''I'm in business for myself now," Carl thought, after buying the cart, "I'm on my way." He kept his job at the bakery and hired two young men to work the cart during the hours he was delivering bread. They sold hot dogs, chili dogs, and tamales for a dime each, soda for a nickel. Five months after Carl bought the cart, the United States entered World War II, and the Goodyear plant became very busy. Soon he had enough money to buy a second hot dog cart, which Margaret often ran by herself, selling food and counting change while their daughter slept nearby in the car.

Southern California had recently given birth to an entirely new lifestyle -- and a new way of eating. Both revolved around cars. The cities back East had been built in the railway era, with central business districts linked to outlying suburbs by commuter train and trolley. But the tremendous growth of Los Angeles occurred at a time when automobiles were finally affordable. Between 1920 and 1940, the population of southern California nearly tripled, as about 2 million people arrived from across the United States. While cities in the East expanded through immigration and became more diverse, Los Angeles became more homogenous and white. The city was inundated with middle-class arrivals from the Midwest, especially in the years leading up to the Great Depression. Invalids, retirees, and small businessmen were drawn to southern California by real estate ads promising a warm climate and a good life. It was the first large-scale migration conducted mainly by car. Los Angeles soon became unlike any other city the world had ever seen, sprawling and horizontal, a thoroughly suburban metropolis of detached homes - a glimpse of the future, molded by the automobile. About 80 percent of the population had been born elsewhere; about half had rolled into town during the previous five years. Restlessness, impermanence, and speed were embedded in the culture that soon emerged there, along with an openness to anything new. Other cities were being transformed by car ownership, but none was so profoundly altered. By 1940, there were about a million cars in Los Angeles, more cars than in forty-one states.

The automobile offered drivers a feeling of independence and control. Daily travel was freed from the hassles of rail schedules, the needs of other passengers, and the location of trolley stops. More importantly, driving seemed to cost much less than using public transport - an illusion created by the fact that the price of a new car did not include the price of building new roads. Lobbyists from the oil, tire, and automobile industries, among others, had persuaded state and federal agencies to assume that fundamental expense. Had the big auto companies been required to pay for the roads - in the same way that trolley companies had to lay and maintain track - the landscape of the American West would look quite different today.

The automobile industry, however, was not content simply to reap the benefits of government-subsidized road construction. It was determined to wipe out railway competition by whatever means necessary. In the late 1920s, General Motors secretly began to purchase trolley systems throughout the United States, using a number of front corporations. Trolley systems in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Montgomery, Alabama, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and El Paso, Texas, in Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles - more than one hundred trolley systems in all- were purchased by GM and then completely dismantled, their tracks ripped up, their overhead wires torn down. The trolley companies were turned into bus lines, and the new buses were manufactured by GM.

General Motors eventually persuaded other companies that benefited from road building to help pay for the costly takeover of America's trolleys. In 1947, GM and a number of its allies in the scheme were indicted on federal antitrust charges. Two years later, the workings of the conspiracy, and its underlying intentions, were. exposed during a trial in Chicago. GM, Mack Truck, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California were all found guilty on one of the two counts by the federal jury. The investigative journalist Jonathan Kwitny later argued that the case was "a fine example of what can happen when important matters of public policy are abandoned by government to the self-interest of corporations." Judge William J. Campbell was not so outraged. As punishment, he ordered GM and the other companies to pay a fine of $5,000 each. The executives who had secretly plotted and carried out the destruction of America's light rail network were fined $1 each. And the postwar reign of the automobile proceeded without much further challenge.

The nation's car culture reached its height in southern California, inspiring innovations such as the world's first motel and the first drive-in bank. A new form of eating place emerged. "People with cars are so lazy they don't want to get out of them to eat!" said Jesse G. Kirby, the founder of an early drive-in restaurant chain. Kirby's first "Pig Stand" was in Texas, but the chain soon thrived in Los Angeles, alongside countless other food stands offering "curb service." In the rest of the United States, drive-ins were usually a seasonal phenomenon, closing at the end of every summer. In southern California, it felt like summer all year long, the drive-ins never closed, and a whole new industry was born.

The southern California drive-in restaurants of the early 1940s tended to be gaudy and round, topped with pylons, towers, and flashing signs. They were "circular-meccas of neon," in the words of drive-in historian Michael Witzel, designed to be easily spotted from the road. The triumph of the automobile encouraged not only a geographic separation between buildings, but also a manmade landscape that was loud and bold. Architecture could no longer afford to be subtle; it had to catch the eye of motorists traveling at high speed. The new drive-ins competed for attention, using all kinds of visual lures, decorating their buildings in bright colors and dressing their waitresses in various costumes. Known as "carhops," the waitresses - who carried trays of food to patrons in parked cars - often wore short skirts and dressed up like cowgirls, majorettes, Scottish lasses in kilts. They were likely to be attractive, often received no hourly wages, and earned their money through tips and a small commission on every item they sold. The carhops had a strong economic incentive to be friendly to their customers, and drive-in restaurants quickly became popular hangouts for teenage boys. The drive-ins fit perfectly with the youth culture of Los Angeles. They were something genuinely new and different, they offered a combination of girls and cars and late-night food, and before long they beckoned from intersections all over town.

Speedee Service

BY THE END OF 1944, Carl Karcher owned four hot dog carts in Los Angeles. In addition to running the carts, he still worked full-time for the Armstrong Bakery. When a restaurant across the street from the Heinz farm went on sale, Carl decided to buy it. He quit the bakery, bought the restaurant, fixed it up, and spent a few weeks learning how to cook. On January 16, 1945, his twenty-eighth birthday, Carl's Drive-In Barbeque opened its doors. The restaurant was small, rectangular, and unexceptional, with red tiles on the roof. Its only hint of flamboyance was a five-pointed star atop the neon sign in the parking lot. During business hours, Carl did the cooking, Margaret worked behind the cash register, and carhops served most of the food. After closing time, Carl stayed late into the night, cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the floors. Once a week, he prepared the "special sauce" for his hamburgers, making it in huge kettles on the back porch of his house, stirring it with a stick and then pouring it into one-gallon jugs.

After World War II, business soared at Carl's Drive-In Barbeque, along with the economy of southern California. The oil business and the film business had thrived in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s. But it was World War II that transformed southern California into the most important economic region in the West. The war's effect on the state, in the words of historian Carey McWilliams, was a "fabulous boom." Between 1940 and 1945, the federal government spent . nearly $20 billion in California, mainly in and around Los Angeles, building airplane factories and steel mills, military bases and port facilities. During those six years, federal spending was responsible for nearly half of the personal income in southern California. By the end of World War II, Los Angeles was the second-largest manufacturing center in America, with an industrial output surpassed only by that of Detroit. While Hollywood garnered most of the headlines, defense spending remained the focus of the local economy for the next two decades, providing about one-third of its jobs.

The new prosperity enabled Carl and Margaret to buy a house five blocks away from their restaurant. They added more rooms as the family grew to include twelve children: nine girls and three boys. In the early 1950s Anaheim began to feel much less rural and remote. Walt Disney bought 160 acres of orange groves just a few miles from Carl's Drive-In Barbeque, chopped down the trees, and started to build Disneyland. In the neighboring town of Garden Grove, the Reverend Robert Schuller founded the nation's first Drive-in Church, preaching on Sunday mornings at a drive-in movie theater, spreading the Gospel through the little speakers at each parking space, attracting large crowds with the slogan "Worship as you are ... in the family car." The city of Anaheim started to recruit defense contractors, eventually persuading Northrop, Boeing, and North American Aviation to build factories there. Anaheim soon became the fastest-growing city in the nation's fastest-gr-owing state. Carl's Drive-In Barbeque thrived, and Carl thought its future was secure. And then he heard about a restaurant in the "Inland Empire." sixty miles east of Los Angeles, that was selling high-quality hamburgers for 15 cents each - 20 cents less than what Carl charged. He drove to E Street in San Bernardino and saw the shape of things to come. Dozens of people were standing in line to buy bags of "McDonald's Famous Hamburgers."

Richard and Maurice McDonald had left New Hampshire for southern California at the start of the Depression, hoping to find jobs in Hollywood. They worked as set builders on the Columbia Film Studios back lot, saved their money, and bought a movie theater in Glendale. The theater was not a success. In 1937 they opened a drive-in restaurant in Pasadena, trying to cash in on the new craze, hiring three carhops and selling mainly hot dogs. A few years later they moved to a larger building on E Street in San Bernardino and opened ,the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In. The new restaurant was located near a high school, employed twenty carhops, and promptly made the brothers rich. Richard and "Mac" McDonald bought one of the largest houses in San Bernardino, a hillside mansion with a tennis court and a pool.

By the end of the 1940s the McDonald brothers had grown dissatisfied with the drive-in business. They were tired of constantly looking for new carhops and short-order cooks - who were in great demand - as the old ones left for higher-paying jobs elsewhere. They were tired of replacing the dishes, glassware, and silverware their teenage customers constantly broke or ripped off. And they were tired of their teenage customers. The brothers thought about selling the restaurant. Instead, they tried something new.

The McDonalds fired all their carhops in 1948, closed 'their restaurant, installed larger grills, and reopened three months later with a radically new method of preparing food. It was designed to increase .the speed, lower prices, and raise the volume of sales. The brothers eliminated almost two-thirds of the items on their old menu. They got rid of everything that had to be eaten with a knife, spoon, or fork. The only sandwiches now sold were hamburgers or cheeseburgers. The brothers got rid of their dishes and glassware, replacing them with paper cups, paper bags, and paper plates. They divided the food preparation into separate tasks performed by different workers. To fill a typical order, one person grilled the. hamburger; another "dressed" and wrapped it; another prepared the milk shake; another made the fries; and another worked the counter. For the first time, the guiding principles of a factory assembly line were applied to a commercial kitchen. The new division of labor meant that a worker only had to be taught how to perform one task. Skilled and expensive short-order cooks were no longer necessary. All of the burgers were sold with the same condiments: ketchup, onions, mustard, and two pickles. No substitutions were allowed. The McDonald brothers' Speedee Service System revolutionized the restaurant business. An ad of theirs seeking franchisees later spelled out the benefits of the system: "Imagine -- No Carhops - No Waitresses - No Dishwashers "- No Bus Boys - The McDonald's System is Self-Service!"

Richard McDonald designed a new building for the restaurant, hoping to make it easy to spot from the road. Though untrained as an architect, he came up with a design that was simple, memorable, and archetypal. On two sides of the roof he put golden arches, lit by neon at night, that from a distance formed the letter M. The building effortlessly fused advertising with architecture and spawned one of the most famous corporate logos in the world.

The Speedee Service System, however, got off to a rocky start. Customers pulled up to the restaurant and honked their horns, wondering what had happened to the carhops, still expecting to be served. People were not yet accustomed to waiting in line and getting their own food. Within a few weeks, however, the new system gained acceptance, as word spread about the low prices and good hamburgers. The McDonald brothers now aimed for a much broader clientele. They . employed only young men, convinced that female workers would attract teenage boys to the restaurant and drive away other customers. Families soon lined up to eat at McDonald's. Company historian John F. Love explained the lasting significance of McDonald's new self-service system: "Working-class families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food."

San Bernardino at the time was an ideal setting for all sorts of cultural experimentation. The town was an odd melting-pot of agriculture and industry located 'on the periphery of the southern California boom, a place that felt out on the edge. Nicknamed "San Berdoo," it was full of citrus' groves, but sat next door to the smokestacks and steel mills of Fontana. San Bernardino had just sixty thousand inhabitants;· but millions of people passed through there every year. It was the last stop on Route 66, end of the line for truckers, tourists, and migrants from the East. Its main street was jammed with drive-ins and cheap motels. The same year the McDonald brothers opened their new self-service restaurant, a group of World War II veterans in San Berdoo, alienated by the dullness of civilian life, formed a local motorcycle club, borrowing the nickname of the U.S. Army's Eleventh Airborne Division: "Hell's Angels." The same town that gave the world the golden arches also gave it a biker gang that stood for a totally antithetical set of values. The Hell's Angels flaunted their dirtiness, celebrated disorder, terrified families and small children instead of trying to sell them burgers, took drugs, sold drugs, and injected into American pop culture an anger and a darkness and a fashion statement - T-shirts and tom jeans, black leather jackets and boots, long hair, facial hair, swastikas, silver skull rings and other satanic trinkets, earrings, nose rings, body piercings, and tattoos - that would influence a long line of rebels from Marlon Brando to Marilyn Manson. The Hell's Angels were the anti-McDonald's, the opposite of clean and cheery. They didn't care if you had a nice day, and yet were as deeply American in their own way as any purveyors of Speedee Service. San Bernardino in 1948 supplied the nation with a new yin and yang, new models of conformity and rebellion. "They get angry when they read about how filthy they are," Hunter Thompson later wrote of the Hell's Angels, "but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier."

Burgerville USA

AFTER VISITING SAN BERNARDINO and seeing the long lines at McDonald's, Carl Karcher went home to Anaheim and decided to open his own self-service restaurant. Carl instinctively grasped that the new car culture would forever change America. He saw what was coming, and his timing was perfect. The first Carl's Jr. restaurant opened' in 1956 - the same year that America got its first shopping mall and that Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pushed hard for such a bill; during World War II, he'd been enormously impressed by Adolf Hitler's Reichsautobahn, the world's first superhighway system. The Interstate Highway Act brought autobahns to the United States and became the largest public works project in the nation's history, building 46,000 miles of road with more than $130 billion of federal money. The new highways spurred car sales, truck sales, and the construction of new suburban homes. Carl's first self-service restaurant was a success, and he soon opened others near California's new freeway off-ramps. The star atop his drive-in sign became the mascot of his fast food chain. It was a smiling star in little booties, holding a burger and a shake.

Entrepreneurs from all over the country went to San Bernardino, visited the new McDonald's, and built imitations of the restaurant in their hometowns. "Our food was exactly the same as McDonald's." the founder of a rival chain later admitted. "If I had looked at McDonald's . and saw someone flipping hamburgers while he was hanging by his feet, I would have copied it." America's fast food chains were not launched by large corporations relying upon focus groups and market research. They were started by door-to-door salesmen, short-order cooks, orphans, and dropouts, by eternal optimists looking for a piece of the next big thing. The start-up costs of a fast food restaurant were low, the profit margins promised to be high, and a wide assortment of ambitious people were soon buying grills and putting up signs.

William Rosenberg dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, delivered telegrams for Western Union, drove an ice cream truck, worked as a door-to-door salesman, sold sandwiches and coffee to factory workers in Boston, and then opened a small doughnut shop in 1948, later calling it Dunkin' Donuts. Glen W. Bell, Jr., was a World War II veteran, a resident of San Bernardino who ate at the new McDonald's and decided to copy it, using the assembly-line system to make Mexican food and founding a restaurant chain later known as Taco Bell. Keith G. Cramer, the owner of Keith's Drive-In Restaurant in Daytona Beach, Florida, heard about the McDonald brothers' new restaurant, flew to southern California, ate at McDonald's, returned to Florida, and with his father-in-law, Matthew Burns, opened the first Insta-Burger-King in 1953. Dave Thomas started working in a restaurant at the age of twelve, left his adoptive father, took a room at the YMCA, dropped out of school at fifteen, served as a busboy and a cook, and eventually opened his own place in Columbus, Ohio, calling it Wendy's Old-Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant. Thomas S. Monaghan spent much of his childhood in a Catholic orphanage and a series of foster homes, worked as a soda jerk, barely graduated from high school, joined the Marines, and bought a pizzeria in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his brother, securing the deal through a down payment of $75. Eight months later Monaghan's brother decided to quit and accepted a used Volkswagen Beetle for his share of a business later known as Domino's.

The story of Harland Sanders is perhaps the most remarkable. Sanders left school at the age of twelve, worked as a farm hand, a mule tender, and a railway fireman. At various times he worked as a lawyer without having a law degree, delivered babies as a part-time obstetrician without having a medical degree, sold insurance door to door, sold Michelin tires, and operated a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He served home-cooked food at a small dining-room table in the back, later opened a popular restaurant and motel, sold them to pay off debts, and at the age of sixty-five became a traveling salesman once again, offering restaurant owners the "secret recipe" for his fried chicken. The first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant opened in 1952, near Salt Lake City, Utah. Lacking money to 'promote the new chain, Sanders dressed up like a Kentucky colonel, sporting a white suit and a black string tie. By the early 19605, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States, and Colonel Sanders was a household name. In his autobiography, Life As I Have Known It Has Been "Finger-lickin' Good," Sanders described his ups and downs, his decision at the age of seventy-four to be rebaptized and born again, his lifelong struggle to stop cursing. Despite his best efforts and a devout faith in Christ, Harland Sanders admitted that it was still awfully hard "not to call a no-good, lazy, incompetent, dishonest s.o.b. by anything else but his rightful name."

For every fast food idea that swept the nation, there were countless others that flourished briefly - or never had a prayer. There were chains with homey names, like Sandy's, Carrol's, Henry's, Winky's, and Mr. Fifteen's. There were chains with futuristic names, like the Satellite Hamburger System and Kelly's Jet System. Most of all, there were chains named after their main dish: Burger Chefs, Burger Queens, Burgerville USAs, Yumy Burgers, Twitty Burgers, Whataburgers, Dundee Burgers, Biff-Burgers, O.K. Big Burgers, and Burger Boy Food-O-Ramas.

Many of the new restaurants advertised an array of technological wonders. Carhops were rendered obsolete by various remote-control ordering systems, like the Fone-A-Chef, the Teletray, and the ElectroHop. The Motormat was an elaborate rail system that transported food and beverages from the kitchen to parked cars. At the Biff-Burger chain, Biff-Burgers were "roto-broiled" beneath glowing quartz tubes that worked just like a space heater. Insta-Burger-King restaurants featured a pair of "Miracle Insta Machines," one to make milk shakes, the other to cook burgers. "Both machines have been thoroughly perfected," the company assured prospective franchisees, "are of foolproof design - can be easily operated even by a moron." The InstaBurger Stove was an elaborate contraption. Twelve hamburger patties entered it in individual wire baskets: circled two electric heating elements, got cooked on both sides, and then slid down a chute into a pan of sauce, while hamburger buns toasted in a nearby slot. This Miracle Insta Machine proved overly complex, frequently malfunctioned, and was eventually abandoned by the Burger King chain.

The fast food wars in southern California - the birthplace of Jack in the Box, as well as McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Carl's Jr. - were especially fierce. One by one, most of the old drive-ins closed, unable to compete against the less expensive, self-service burger joints. But Carl kept at it, opening new restaurants up and down the state, following the new freeways. Four of these freeways - the Riverside, the Santa Ana, the Costa Mesa, and the Orange - soon. passed through Anaheim. Although Carl's Jr. was a great success, a few of Carl's other ideas should have remained on the drawing board. Carl's Whistle Stops featured employees dressed as railway workers, "Hobo Burgers," and toy electric trains that took orders to the kitchen. Three were built in 1966 and then converted to Carl's Jr. restaurants a few years later. A coffee shop chain with a Scottish theme also never found its niche. The waitresses at "Scot's" wore plaid skirts, and the dishes had unfortunate names, such as "The Clansman."

The leading fast food chains spread nationwide; between 1960 and 1973, the number of McDonald's restaurants grew from roughly 250 to 3,000. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 gave the fast food industry a bad scare, as long lines at gas stations led many to believe that America's car culture was endangered. Amid gasoline shortages, the value of McDonald's stock fell. When the crisis passed, fast food stock prices recovered, and McDonald's intensified its efforts to open urban, as well as suburban, restaurants. Wall Street invested heavily in the fast food chains, and corporate managers replaced many of the early pioneers. What had begun as a series of small, regional businesses became a fast food industry, a major component of the American economy.

Progress

IN 1976, THE NEW HEADQUARTERS of Carl Karcher Enterprises, Inc. (CKE) was built on the same land in Anaheim where the Heinz farm had once stood. The opening-night celebration was one of the high points of Carl's life. More than a thousand people gathered for a black-tie party at a tent set up in the parking lot. There was dinner and dancing on a beautiful, moonlit night. Thirty-five years after buying his first hot dog cart, Carl Karcher now controlled one of the largest privately owned fast food chains in the United States. He owned hundreds of restaurants. He considered many notable Americans to be his friends, including Governor Ronald Reagan, former president Richard Nixon, Gene Autry, Art Linkletter, Lawrence Welk, and Pat Boone. Carl's nickname was "Mr. Orange County." He was a benefactor of Catholic charities, a Knight of Malta, a strong supporter of right-to-life causes. He attended private masses at the Vatican with the Pope. And then, despite all the hard work, Carl's luck began to change.

During the 1980s CKE went public, opened Carl's Jr. restaurants in Texas, added higher-priced dinners to the menu, and for the first time began to expand by selling franchises. The new menu items and the restaurants in Texas fared poorly. The value of CKE's stock fell. In 1988, Carl and half a dozen members of his family were accused of insider trading by the Securities, and Exchange Commission (SEC). They had sold large amounts of CKE stock right before its price tumbled. Carl vehemently denied the charges and felt humiliated by the publicity surrounding the case. Nevertheless, Carl agreed to a settlement with the SEC - to avoid a long and expensive legal battle, he said - and paid more than half a million dollars in fines.

During the early 1990s, a number of Carl's real estate investments proved unwise. When new subdivisions in Anaheim and the Inland Empire went bankrupt, Carl was saddled with many of their debts. He had allowed real estate developers to use his CKE stock as collateral for their bank loans. He became embroiled in more than two dozen lawsuits. He suddenly owed more than $70 million to various banks. The falling price of CKE stock hampered his ability to repay the loans. In May of 1992, his brother Don - a trusted adviser and the president of CKE - died. The new president tried to increase sales at Carl's Jr. restaurants by purchasing food of a lower quality and cutting prices. The strategy began to drive customers away.

As the chairman of CKE, Carl searched for ways to save his company and payoff his debts. He proposed selling Mexican food at Carl's Jr. restaurants as part of a joint venture with a chain called Green Burrito. But some executives at CKE opposed the plan, arguing that it would benefit Carl much more than the company. Carl had a financial stake in the deal; upon its acceptance by the board of CKE, he would receive a $6 million personal loan from Green Burrito. Carl was outraged that his motives were being questioned and that his business was being run into the ground. CKE now felt like a much different company than the one he'd founded. The new management team had ended the longtime practice of starting every executive meeting with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi and the pledge of allegiance to the flag. Carl insisted that the Green Burrito plan would work and demanded that the board of directors vote on it. When the board rejected the plan, Carl tried to oust its members. Instead, they ousted him. On March 1, 1993, CKE's board voted five to two to fire Carl N. Karcher. Only Carl and his son Carl Leo opposed the dismissal. Carl felt deeply betrayed. He had known many of the board members for years; they were old friends; he had made them rich. In a statement released after the firing, Carl described the CKE board as "a bunch of turncoats" and called it "one of the saddest days" of his life. At the age of seventy-six, more than five decades after starting the business, Carl N. Karcher was prevented from entering his own office, and new locks were put on the doors.

The headquarters of CKE is still located on the property where the Heinz family once grew oranges. Today there's no smell of citrus in the air, no orange groves in sight. In a town that once had endless rows of orange and lemon trees, stretching far as the eye could see, there's not an acre of them left, not a single acre devoted to commercial citrus growing. Anaheim's population is now about three hundred thousand, roughly thirty times what it was when Carl first arrived. On the comer where Carl's Drive-In Barbeque once stood, there's a strip mall. Near the CKE headquarters on Harbor Boulevard, there's an Exxon station, a discount mattress store, a Shoe City, a Las Vegas Auto Sales store, and an off-ramp of the Riverside Freeway. The CKE building has a modern, Spanish design, with white columns, red brick arches, and dark plate-glass. windows. When I visited recently, it was cool and quiet inside. After passing a life-size wooden statue of St. Francis of Assisi on a stairway landing, I was greeted at the top of the stairs by Carl N. Karcher.

Carl looked like a stylish figure from the big-band era, wearing a brown checked jacket, a white shirt, a brown tie, and jaunty two-tone shoes. He was tall and strong, and seemed in remarkably good shape. The walls of his office were covered with plaques and mementos, with photographs of Carl beside presidents, famous ballplayers, former employees, grandchildren, priests, cardinals, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Pope. Carl proudly removed a framed object from the wall and handed it to me. It was the original receipt for $326, confirming the purchase of his first hot dog cart.

Eight weeks after being locked out of his office in 1993, Carl engineered a takeover of the company. Through a complex series of transactions, a partnership headed by financier William P. Foley II assumed some of Carl's debts, received much of his stock in return, and took control of CKE. Foley became the new chairman of the board. Carl was named chairman emeritus and got his old office back. Almost all of the executives and directors who had opposed him subsequently left the company. The Green Burrito plan was adopted and proved a success. The new management at CKE seemed to have turned the company around, raising the value of its stock. In July of 1997, CKE purchased Hardee's for $327 million, thereby becoming the fourth-largest hamburger chain in the United States, joining· McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's at the top. And signs bearing the Carl's Jr. smiling little star started going up across the United States.

Carl seemed amazed by his own life story as he told it. He'd been married to Margaret for sixty years. He'd lived in the same Anaheim house for almost fifty years. He had twenty granddaughters and twenty grandsons. For a man of eighty, he had an impressive memory, quickly rattling off names, dates, and addresses from half a century ago. He exuded the genial optimism and good humor of his old friend Ronald Reagan. "My whole philosophy is - never give up," Carl told me. "The word 'can't' should not exist ... Have a great attitude ... Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves ... Life is beautiful, life is fantastic, and that is how I feel about every day of my life." Despite CKE's expansion, Carl remained millions of dollars in debt. He'd secured new loans to payoff the old ones. During the worst of his financial troubles, advisers pleaded with him to declare bankruptcy. Carl refused; he'd borrowed more than $8 million from family members and friends, and he would not walk away from his obligations. Every weekday he was attending Mass at six o'clock in the morning and getting to the office by seven. "My goal in the next two years," he said, "is to payoff all my debts."

1 looked out the window and asked how he felt driving through Anaheim today, with its fast food restaurants, subdivisions, and strip malls. "Well, to be frank about it." he said, "I couldn't be happier." Thinking that he'd misunderstood the question, 1 rephrased it, asking if he ever missed the old Anaheim, the ranches and citrus groves.

"No," he answered. "I believe in Progress."

Carl grew up on a farm without running water or electricity. He'd escaped a hard rural life. The view outside his office window was not disturbing to him, I realized. It was a mark of success.

"'When I first met my wife." Carl said, "this road here was gravel ... and now it's blacktop."

Chapter 2: Your Trusted Friends

BEFORE ENTERING the Ray A. Kroc Museum, you have to walk through McStore. Both sit on the ground floor of McDonald's corporate headquarters, located at One McDonald's Plaza in Oak Brook, Illinois. The headquarters building has oval windows and a gray concrete facade - a look that must have seemed space-age when the building opened three decades ago. Now it seems stolid and drab, an architectural relic of the Nixon era. It resembles the American embassy compounds that always used to attract antiwar protesters, student demonstrators, flag burners. The eighty-acre campus of Hamburger University, McDonald's managerial training center, is a short drive from headquarter~. Shuttle buses constantly go back and forth between the campus and McDonald's Plaza, ferrying clean-cut young men and women in khakis who've come to study for their "Degree in Hamburgerology." The course lasts two weeks and trains a few thousand managers, executives, and franchisees each year. Students from out of town stay at the Hyatt on the McDonald's campus. Most of the classes are devoted to personnel issues, teaching lessons in teamwork and employee motivation, promoting "a common McDonald's language" and "a common McDonald's culture." Three flagpoles stand in front of McDonald's Plaza, the heart of the hamburger empire. One flies the Stars and Stripes, another flies the Illinois state flag, and the third flies a bright red flag with golden arches.

You can buy bean-bag McBurglar dolls at McStore, telephones shaped like french fries, ties, clocks, key chains, golf bags and duffel bags, jewelry, baby clothes, lunch boxes, mouse pads, leather jackets, postcards, toy trucks, and much more, all of it bearing the stamp of McDonald's. You can buy T-shirts decorated with a new version of the American flag. The fifty white stars have been replaced by a pair of golden arches.

At the back of McStore, past the footsteps of Ronald McDonald stenciled on the floor, past the shelves of dishes and glassware, a bronze bust of Ray Kroc marks the entrance to his museum. Kroc was the founder of the McDonald's Corporation, and his philosophy of QSC and V - Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value - still guide it. The man immortalized in ,bronze is balding and middle-aged, with smooth cheeks and an intense look in his eyes. A glass display case nearby holds plaques, awards, and letters of praise. "One of the highlights of my sixty-first birthday celebration." President Richard Nixon wrote in 1974, "was when Tricia suggested we needed a 'break' on our drive to Palm Springs, and we turned in at McDonald's. I had heard for years from our girls that the 'Big Mac' was really something special, and while I've often credited Mrs. Nixon with making the best hamburgers in the world, we -are both convinced that McDonald's runs a close second ... The next time the cook has a night off we will know where to go for fast service, cheerful hospitality - and probably one of the best food buys in America." Other glass cases contain artifacts of Kroc's life, mementos of his long years of struggle and his twilight as a billionaire. The museum is small and dimly lit, displaying each object with reverence. The day I visited, the place was empty and still. It didn't feel like a traditional museum, where objects are coolly numbered, catalogued, and described. It felt more like a shrine.

Many of the exhibits at the Ray A. Kroc Museum incorporate neat technological tricks. Dioramas appear and then disappear when certain buttons are pushed. The voices of Kroc's friends and coworkers - one of them identified as a McDonald's "vice president of individuality" - boom from speakers at the appropriate cue. Darkened glass cases are suddenly illuminated from within, revealing their contents. An artwork on the wall, when viewed from the left, displays an image of Ray Kroc. Viewed from the right, it shows the letters QSC and V. The museum does not have a life-size, Audio-Animatronic version of McDonald's founder telling jokes and anecdotes. But one wouldn't be out of place. An interactive exhibit called "Talk to Ray" shows video clips of Kroc appearing on the Phil Donahue Show, being interviewed by Tom Snyder, and chatting with Reverend Robert Schuller at the altar of Orange County's Crystal Cathedral. "Talk to Ray" permits the viewer to ask Kroc as many as thirty-six predetermined questions about various subjects; old videos of Kroc supply the answers. The exhibit wasn't working properly the day of my visit. Ray wouldn't take my questions, and so I just listened to him repeating the same speeches.

The Disneyesque tone of the museum reflects, among other things, many of the similarities between the McDonald's Corporation and the Walt Disney Company. It also reflects the similar paths of the two men who founded these corporate giants. Ray Kroc and Walt Disney were both from Illinois; they were born a year apart, Disney in 1901, Kroc in 1902; they knew each other as young men, serving together in the same World War I ambulance corps; and they both fled the Midwest and settled in southern California, where they played central roles in the creation of new American industries. The film critic Richard Schickel has described Disney's powerful inner need "to order, control, and keep clean any environment he inhabited." The same could easily be said about Ray Kroc, whose obsession with cleanliness and control became one of the hallmarks of his restaurant chain. Kroc cleaned the holes in his mop wringer with a toothbrush.

Kroc and Disney both dropped out of high school and later added the trappings of formal education to their companies. The training school for Disney's theme-park employees was named Disneyland University. More importantly, the two men shared the same vision of America, the same optimistic faith in technology, the same conservative political views. They were charismatic figures who provided an overall corporate vision and grasped the public mood, relying on others to handle the creative and financial details. Walt Disney neither wrote, nor drew the animated classics that bore his name. Ray Kroc's attempts to add new dishes to McDonald's menu - such as Kolacky, a Bohemian pastry, and the Hulaburger, a sandwich featuring grilled pineapple and cheese - were unsuccessful. Both men, however, knew how to find and motivate the right talent. While Disney was much more famous and achieved success sooner, Kroc may have been more influential. His company inspired more imitators, wielded more power over the American economy - and spawned a mascot even more famous than Mickey Mouse.

Despite all their success as businessmen and entrepreneurs, as cultural figures and advocates for a particular brand of Americanism, perhaps the most significant achievement of these two men lay elsewhere. Walt Disney and Ray Kroc were masterful salesmen. They perfected the art of selling things to children. And their success led many others to aim marketing efforts at kids, turning America's youngest consumers into a demographic group that is now avidly studied, analyzed, and targeted by the world's largest corporations.


Walt and Ray

RAY KROC TOOK THE McDonald brothers' Speedee Service System and spread it nationwide, creating a fast food empire. Although he founded a company that came to symbolize corporate America, Kroc was never a buttoned-down corporate type. He was a former jazz musician who'd played at speakeasies - and at a bordello, on at least one occasion - during Prohibition. He was a charming, funny, and indefatigable traveling salesman who endured many years of disappointment, a Willy Loman who finally managed to hit it big in his early sixties. Kroc grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from Chicago. His father worked for Western Union. As a high school freshman, Ray Kroc discovered the joys of selling while employed at his uncle's soda fountain. "That was where I learned you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm." Kroc recalled in his autobiography, Grinding It Out, "and sell them a sundae when what they'd come for was a cup of coffee."

Over the years, Kroc sold coffee beans, sheet music, paper cups, Florida real estate, powdered instant beverages called "Malt-a-Plenty" and "Shake-a-Plenty," a gadget that could dispense whipped cream or shaving lather, square ice cream scoops, and a collapsible table-and-bench combination called "Fold-a-Nook" that retreated into the wall like a Murphy bed. The main problem with square scoops of ice cream, he found, was that they slid off the plate when you tried to eat them. Kroc used the same basic technique to sell all these things: he tailored his pitch to fit the buyer's tastes. Despite one setback after another, he kept at it, always convinced that success was just around the corner. "If you believe in it, and you believe in it hard." Kroc later told audiences, "it's impossible to fail. I don't care what it is - you can get it!"

Ray Kroc was selling milk-shake mixers in 1954 when he first visited the new McDonald's Self-Service Restaurant in San Bernardino. The McDonald brothers were two of his best customers. The Multi~ mixer unit that Kroc sold could make five milk shakes at once. He wondered why the McDonald brothers needed eight of the machines. Kroc had visited a lot of restaurant kitchens, out on the road, demonstrating the Multimixer - and had never seen anything like the McDonald's Speedee Service System. "When I saw it." he later wrote, "I felt like some latter-day Newton who'd just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull." He looked at the restaurant "through the eyes of a salesman" and envisioned putting a McDonald's at busy intersections all across the land.

Richard and "Mac" McDonald were less ambitious. They were clearing $100,000 a year in profits from the restaurant, a huge sum in those days. They already owned a big house and three Cadillacs. They didn't like to travel. They'd recently refused an offer from the Carnation Milk Company, which thought that opening more McDonald's would increase the sales of milk shakes. Nevertheless, Kroc convinced the brothers to sell him the right to franchise McDonald's nationwide. The two could stay at home, while Kroc traveled the country, making them even richer. A deal was signed. Years later Richard McDonald described his first memory of Kroc, a moment that would soon lead to the birth of the world's biggest restaurant chain: "This little fellow comes in, with a high voice, and says, 'hi.'"

After finalizing the agreement with the McDonald brothers, Kroc sent a letter to Walt Disney. In 1917 the two men had both lied about their ages to join the Red Cross and see battle in Europe. A long time had clearly passed since their last conversation. "Dear Walt," the letter said. "I feel somewhat presumptuous addressing you in this way yet I feel sure you would not want me to address you any other way. My name is Ray A. Kroc ... I look over the Company A picture we had taken at Sound Beach, Conn., many times and recall a lot of pleasant memories." After the warm-up came the pitch: "I have very recently taken over the national franchise of the McDonald's system. I would like to inquire if there may be an opportunity for a McDonald's in your Disneyland Development."

Walt Disney sent Kroc a cordial reply and forwarded his proposal to an executive in charge of the theme park's concessions. Disneyland was still under construction, its opening was eagerly awaited by millions of American children, and Kroc may have had high hopes. According to one account, Disney's company asked Kroc to raise the price of McDonald's french fries from ten cents to fifteen cents; Disney would keep the extra nickel as payment for granting the concession; and the story ends with Ray Kroc refusing to gouge his loyal customers. The account seems highly unlikely, a belated effort by someone at McDonald's to put the best spin on a sales pitch that went nowhere. When Disneyland opened in July of 1955 - an event that Ronald Reagan cohosted for ABC - it had food stands run by Welch's, Stouffer's, and Aunt Jemima's, but no McDonald's. Kroc was not yet in their league. His recollection of Walt Disney as a young man, briefly mentioned in Grinding It Out, is not entirely flattering. "He was regarded as a strange duck," Kroc wrote of Disney, "because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures."

Whatever feelings existed between the two men, Walt Disney proved in many respects to be a role model for Ray Kroc. Disney's success had come much more quickly. At the age of twenty-one he'd left the Midwest and opened his own movie studio in Los Angeles. He was famous before turning thirty. In The Magic Kingdom (1997) Steven Watts describes Walt Disney's efforts to apply the techniques of mass production to Hollywood moviemaking. He greatly admired Henry Ford and introduced an assembly line and a rigorous division of labor at the Disney Studio, which was soon depicted as a "fun factory." Instead of drawing entire scenes, artists were given narrowly defined tasks, meticulously sketching and inking Disney characters while supervisors watched them and timed how long it took them to complete each cel. During the 1930s the production system at the studio was organized to function like that of an automobile plant. "Hundreds of young people were being trained and fitted," Disney explained, "into a machine for the manufacture of entertainment."

The working conditions at Disney's factory, however, were not always fun. In 1941 hundreds of Disney animators went on strike, expressing support for the Screen Cartoonists Guild. The other major cartoon studios in Hollywood had already signed agreements with the union. Disney's father was an ardent socialist, and Disney's films had long expressed a populist celebration of the common man. But Walt's response to the strike betrayed a different political sensibility. He fired employees who were sympathetic to the union, allowed private guards to rough up workers on the picket line, tried to impose a phony company union, brought in an organized crime figure from Chicago to rig a settlement, and placed a full-page ad in Variety that accused leaders of the Screen Cartoonists Guild of being Communists. The strike finally ended when Disney acceded to the union's demands. The experience left him feeling embittered. Convinced that Communist agents had been responsible for his troubles, Disney subsequently appeared as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, served as a secret informer for the FBI, and strongly supported the Hollywood blacklist. During the height of labor tension at his studio, Disney had made a speech to a group of employees, arguing that the solution to their problems rested not with a labor union, but with a good day's work. "Don't forget this," Disney told them, "it's the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don't give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that."


Decades later, Ray Kroc used similar language to outline his own political philosophy. Kroc's years on the road as a traveling salesman - carrying his own order forms and sample books, knocking on doors, facing each new customer alone, and having countless doors slammed in his face - no doubt influenced his view of humanity. "Look, it is ridiculous to call this an industry," Kroc told a reporter in 1972, dismissing any high-minded analysis of the fast food business. "This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest."

While Disney backed right-wing groups and produced campaign ads for the Republican Party, Kroc remained aloof from electoral politics - with one notable exception. In 1972, Kroc gave $250,000 to President Nixon's reelection campaign, breaking the gift into smaller donations, funneling the money through various state and local Republican committees. Nixon had every reason to like McDonald's, long before tasting one of its hamburgers. Kroc had never met the president; the gift did not stem from any personal friendship or fondness. That year the fast food industry was lobbying Congress and the White House to pass new legislation - known as the "McDonald's bill" - that would allow employers to pay sixteen- and seventeen- year-old kids wages 20 percent lower than the minimum wage. Around the time of Kroc's $250,000 donation, McDonald's crew members earned about $1.60 an hour. The subminimum wage proposal would reduce some wages to $1.28 an hour.

The Nixon administration supported the McDonald's bill and permitted McDonald's to raise the price of its Quarter Pounders, despite the mandatory wage and price controls restricting other fast food chains. The size and the timing of Kroc's political contribution sparked Democratic accusations of influence peddling. Outraged by the charges, Kroc later called his critics "sons of bitches." The uproar left him wary of backing political candidates. Nevertheless, Kroc retained a soft spot for Calvin Coolidge, whose thoughts on hard work and self-reliance were prominently displayed at McDonald's corporate headquarters.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Sep 16, 2019 11:26 am

Part 2 of 2

Better Living

DESPITE A PASSIONATE OPPOSITION to socialism and to any government meddling with free enterprise, Walt Disney relied on federal funds in the 1940s to keep his business afloat. The animators' strike had left the Disney Studio in a precarious financial condition. Disney began to seek government contracts - and those contracts were soon responsible for 90 percent of his studio's output. During World War II, Walt Disney produced scores of military training and propaganda films, including Food Will Win the War, High-Level Precision Bombing, and A Few Quick Facts About Venereal Disease. After the war, Disney continued to work closely with top military officials and military contractors, becoming America's most popular exponent of Cold War science. For audiences living in fear of nuclear annihilation, Walt Disney became a source of reassurance, making the latest technical advances seem marvelous and exciting. His faith in the goodness of American technology was succinctly expressed by the title of a film that the Disney Studio produced for Westinghouse Electric: The Dawn of Better Living.

Disney's passion for science found expression in "Tomorrowland." the name given to a section of his theme park and to segments of his weekly television show. Tomorrowland encompassed everything from space travel to the household appliances of the future, depicting progress as a relentless march toward greater convenience for consumers. And yet, from the very beginning, there was a dark side to this Tomorrowland. It celebrated technology without moral qualms. Some of the science it espoused later proved to be not so benign - and some of the scientists it promoted were unusual role models for the nation's children.

In the mid-1950s Wernher von Braun cohosted and helped produce a series of Disney television shows on space exploration. "Man in Space" and the other Tomorrowland episodes on the topic were enormously popular and fueled public support for an American space program. At the time, von Braun was the U.S. Army's leading rocket scientist. He had served in the same capacity for the German army during World War II. He had been an early and enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, as well as a major in the SS. At least 20,000 slave laborers, many of them Allied prisoners of war, died at Dora-Nordhausen, the factory where von Braun's rockets were built. Less than ten years after the liberation of Dora-Nordhausen, von Braun was giving orders to Disney animators and designing a ride at Disneyland called Rocket to the Moon. Heinz Haber, another key Tomorrowland adviser - and eventually the chief scientific consultant to Walt Disney Productions - spent much of World War II conducting research on high-speed, high-altitude flight for the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine. In order to assess the risks faced by German air force pilots, the institute performed experiments on hundreds of inmates at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. The inmates who survived these experiments were usually killed and then dissected. Haber left Germany after the war and shared his knowledge of aviation medicine with the U.S. Army Air Force. He later cohosted Disney's "Man in Space" with von Braun. When the Eisenhower administration asked Walt Disney to produce a show championing the civilian use of nuclear power, Heinz Haber was given the assignment. He hosted the Disney broadcast called "Our Friend the Atom" and wrote a popular children's book with the same title, both of which made nuclear fission seem fun, instead of terrifying. "Our Friend the Atom" was sponsored by General Dynamics, a manufacturer of nuclear reactors. The company also financed the atomic submarine ride at Disneyland's Tomorrowland.

The future heralded at Disneyland was one in which every aspect of American life had a corporate sponsor. Walt Disney was the most beloved children's entertainer in the country. He had unrivaled access to impressionable young minds - and other corporations, with other agendas to sell, were eager to come along for the ride. Monsanto built Disneyland's House of the Future, which was made of plastic. General Electric backed the Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic housewife, standing in her futuristic kitchen, singing about "a great big beautiful tomorrow." Richfield Oil offered utopian fantasies about cars and a ride aptly named Autopia. "Here you leave Today," said the plaque at the entrance to Disneyland, "and enter the world of Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Fantasy."


At first, Disneyland offered visitors an extraordinary feeling of escape; people had never seen anything like it. The great irony, of course, is that Disney's suburban, corporate world of Tomorrow would soon become the Anaheim of Today. Within a decade of its opening, Disneyland was no longer set amid a rural idyll of orange groves, it was stuck in the middle of cheap motels, traffic jams on the Santa Ana freeway, fast food joints, and industrial parks. Walt Disney frequently slept at his small apartment above the firehouse in Disneyland's Main Street, USA. By the early 1960s, the hard realities of Today were more and more difficult to ignore, and Disney began dreaming of bigger things, of Disney World, a place even farther removed from the forces he'd helped to unleash, a fantasy that could be even more thoroughly controlled.

Among other cultural innovations, Walt Disney pioneered the marketing strategy now known as "synergy." During the 1930s, he signed licensing agreements with dozens of firms, granting them the right to use Mickey Mouse on their products and in their ads. In 1938 Snow White proved a turning point in film marketing: Disney had signed seventy licensing deals prior to the film's release. Snow White toys, books, clothes, snacks, and records were already for sale when the film opened. Disney later used television to achieve a degree of synergy beyond anything that anyone had previously dared. His first television broadcast, One Hour in Wonderland (1950), culminated in a promotion for the upcoming Disney film Alice in Wonderland. His first television series, Disneyland (1954), provided weekly updates on the construction work at his theme park. ABC, which broadcast the show, owned a large financial stake in the Anaheim venture. Disneyland's other major investor, Western Printing and Lithography, printed Disney books such as The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom. In the guise of televised entertainment, episodes of Disneyland were often thinly disguised infomercials, promoting films, books, toys, an amusement park - and, most of all, Disney himself, the living, breathing incarnation of a brand, the man who neatly tied all the other commodities together into one cheerful, friendly, patriotic idea.


Ray Kroc could only dream, during McDonald's tough early years, of having such marketing tools at his disposal. He was forced to rely instead on his wits, his charisma, and his instinct for promotion. Kroc believed completely in whatever he sold and pitched McDonald's franchises with an almost religious fervor. He also knew a few things about publicity, having auditioned talent for a Chicago radio station in the 1920s and performed in nightclubs for years. Kroc hired a publicity firm led by a gag writer and a former MGM road manager to get McDonald's into the news. Children would be the new restaurant chain's target customers. The McDonald brothers had aimed for a family crowd, and now Kroc improved and refined their marketing strategy. He'd picked the right moment. America was in the middle of a baby boom; the number of children had soared in the decade after World War II. Kroc wanted to create a safe, clean, all-American place for kids. The McDonald's franchise agreement required every new restaurant to fly the Stars and Stripes. Kroc understood that how he sold food was just as important as how the food tasted. He liked to tell people that he was really in show business, not the restaurant business. Promoting McDonald's to children was a clever, pragmatic decision. "A child who loves our TV commercials," Kroc explained, "and brings her grandparents to a McDonald's gives us two more customers."

The McDonald's Corporation's first mascot was Speedee, a winking little chef with a hamburger for a head. The character was later renamed Archie McDonald. Speedy was the name of Alka-Seltzer's mascot, and it seemed unwise to imply any connection between the two brands. In 1960, Oscar Goldstein, a McDonald's franchisee in Washington, D.C., decided to sponsor Bozo's Circus, a local children's television show. Bozo's appearance at a McDonald's restaurant drew large crowds. When the local NBC station canceled Bozo's Circus in 1963, Goldstein hired its star - Willard Scott, later the weatherman on NBC's Today show - to invent a new clown who could make restaurant appearances. An ad agency designed the outfit, Scott came up with the name Ronald McDonald, and a star was born. Two years later the McDonald's Corporation introduced Ronald McDonald to the rest of the United States through a major ad campaign. But Willard Scott no longer played the part. He was deemed too overweight; McDonald's wanted someone thinner to sell its burgers, shakes, and fries.

The late-1960s expansion of the McDonald's restaurant chain coincided with declining fortunes at the Walt Disney Company. Disney was no longer alive, and his vision of America embodied just about everything that kids of the sixties were rebelling against. Although McDonald's was hardly a promoter of whole foods and psychedelia, it had the great advantage of seeming new - and there was something trippy about Ronald McDonald, his clothes, and his friends. As McDonald's mascot began to rival Mickey Mouse in name recognition, Kroc made plans to create his own Disneyland. He was a highly competitive man who liked, whenever possible, to settle the score. "If they were drowning to death," Kroc once said about his business rivals, "I would put a hose in their mouth." He planned to buy 1,500 acres of land northeast of Los Angeles and build a new amusement park there. The park, tentatively called Western World, would have a cowboy theme. Other McDonald's executives opposed the idea, worried that Western World would divert funds from the restaurant business and lose millions. Kroc offered to option the land with his own money, but finally listened to his close advisers and scrapped the plan. The McDonald's Corporation later considered buying Astro World in Houston. Instead of investing in a large theme park, the company pursued a more decentralized approach. It built small Playlands and McDonaldlands all over the United States.

The fantasy world of McDonaldland borrowed a good deal from Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom. Don Ament, who gave McDonaldland its distinctive look, was a former Disney set designer. Richard and Robert Sherman - who had written and composed, among other things, all the songs in Disney's Mary Poppins, Disneyland's "It's a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow" and "It's a Small World, After All" - were enlisted for the first McDonaldland commercials. Ronald McDonald, Mayor McCheese, and the other characters in the ads made McDonald's seem like more than just another place to eat. McDonaldland - with its hamburger patch, apple pie trees, and Filet- O-Fish fountain - had one crucial thing in common with Disneyland. Almost everything in it was for sale. McDonald's soon loomed large in the imagination of toddlers, the intended audience for the ads. The restaurant chain evoked a series of pleasing images in a youngster's mind: bright colors, a playground, a toy, a clown, a drink with a straw, little pieces of food wrapped up like a present. Kroc had succeeded, like his old Red Cross comrade, at selling something intangible to children, along with their fries.

Kid Kustomers

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, only a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children - Disney, McDonald's, candy makers, toy makers, manufacturers of breakfast cereal. Today children are being targeted by phone companies, oil companies, and automobile companies, as well as clothing stores and restaurant chains. The explosion in children's advertising occurred during the 1980s. Many working parents, feeling guilty about spending less time with their kids, started spending more money on them; One marketing expert has called the 1980s "the decade of the child consumer." After largely ignoring children for years, Madison Avenue began to scrutinize and pursue them. Major ad agencies now have children's divisions, and a variety of marketing firms focus solely on kids. These groups tend to have sweet-sounding names: Small Talk, Kid Connection, Kid2Kid, the Gepetto Group, Just Kids, Inc. At least three industry publications - Youth Market Alert, Selling to Kids, and Marketing to Kids Report -- cover the latest ad campaigns and market research. The growth in children's advertising has been driven by efforts to increase not just current, but also future, consumption. Hoping that nostalgic childhood memories of a brand will lead to a lifetime of purchases, companies now plan "cradle-to-grave" advertising strategies. They have come to believe what Ray Kroc and Walt Disney realized long ago - a person's "brand loyalty" may begin as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.

The discontinued Joe Camel ad campaign, which used a hip cartoon character to sell cigarettes, showed how easily children can be influenced by the right corporate mascot. A 1991 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly all of America's six-year-olds could identify Joe Camel, who was just as familiar to them as Mickey Mouse. Another study found that one-third of the cigarettes illegally sold to minors were Camels. More recently, a marketing firm conducted a survey in shopping malls across the country, asking children to describe their favorite TV ads. According to the CME KidCom Ad Traction Study II, released at the 1999 Kids' Marketing Conference in San Antonio, Texas, the Taco Bell commercials featuring a talking chihuahua were the most popular fast food ads. The kids in the survey also liked Pepsi and Nike commercials, but their favorite television ad was for Budweiser.

The bulk of the advertising directed at children today has all immediate goal. "It's not just getting kids to whine," one marketer explained in Selling to Kids, "it's giving them a specific reason to ask for the product." Years ago sociologist Vance Packard described children as "surrogate salesmen" who had to persuade other people, usually their parents, to buy what they wanted. Marketers now use different terms to explain the intended response to their ads - such as "leverage," "the nudge factor," "pester power." The aim of most children's advertising is straightforward: get kids to nag their parents and nag them well.

James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, is considered America's leading authority on marketing to children. In his book Kids As Customers (1992), McNeal provides marketers with a thorough analysis of "children's requesting styles and appeals." He classifies juvenile nagging tactics into seven major categories. A pleading nag is one accompanied by repetitions of words like "please" or "mom, mom, mom." A persistent nag involves constant requests for the coveted product and may include the phrase ''I'm gonna ask just one more time." Forceful nags are extremely pushy and may include subtle threats, like "Well, then, I'll go and ask Dad." Demonstrative nags are the most high-risk, often characterized by full-blown tantrums in public places, breath-holding, tears, a refusal to leave the store. Sugar-coated nags promise affection in return for a purchase and may rely on seemingly heartfelt declarations like "You're the best dad in the world." Threatening nags are youthful forms of blackmail, vows of eternal hatred and of running away if something isn't bought. Pity nags claim the child will be heartbroken, teased, or socially stunted if the parent refuses to buy a certain item. "All of these appeals and styles may be used in combination." McNeal's research has discovered, "but kids tend to stick to one or two of each that prove most effective ... for their own parents."

McNeal never advocates turning children into screaming, breath-holding monsters. He has been studying "Kid Kustomers" for more than thirty years and believes in a more traditional marketing approach. "The key is getting children to see a firm ... in much the same way as [they see 1 mom or dad, grandma or grandpa." McNeal argues. "Likewise, if a company can ally itself with universal values such as patriotism, national defense, and good health, it is likely to nurture belief in it among children."

Before trying to affect children's behavior, advertisers have to learn about their tastes. Today's market researchers not only conduct surveys of children in shopping malls, they also organize focus groups for kids as young as two or ·three. They analyze children's artwork, hire children to run focus groups, stage slumber parties and then question children into the night. They send cultural anthropologists into homes, stores, fast food restaurants, and other places where kids like to gather, quietly and surreptitiously observing the behavior of prospective customers. They study the academic literature on child development, seeking insights from the work of theorists such as Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget. They study the fantasy lives of young children, then apply the findings in advertisements and product designs.

Dan S. Acuff - the president of Youth Market System Consulting and the author of What Kids Buy and Why (1997) - stresses the importance of dream research. Studies suggest that until the age of six, roughly 80 percent of children's dreams are about animals. Rounded, soft creatures like Barney, Disney's animated characters; and the Teletubbies therefore have an obvious appeal to young children. The Character Lab, a division of Youth Market System Consulting, uses a proprietary technique called Character Appeal Quadrant Analysis to help companies develop new mascots. The technique purports to create imaginary characters who perfectly fit the targeted age group's level of cognitive and neurological, development.

Children's clubs have for years been considered an effective means of targeting ads and collecting demographic information; the clubs appeal to a child's fundamental need for status and belonging. Disney's Mickey Mouse Club, formed in 1930, was one of the trailblazers. During the 1980s and 1990s, children's dubs proliferated, as corporations used them to solicit the names, addresses, zip codes, and personal comments of young customers. "Marketing messages sent through a dub not only can be personalized," James McNeal advises, "they can be tailored for a certain age or geographical group." A well~ designed and well-run children's dub can be extremely good for business. According to one Burger King executive, the creation of a Burger King Kids Club in 1991 increased the sales of children's meals as much as 300 percent.

The Internet has become another powerful tool for assembling data about children. In 1998 a federal investigation of Web sites aimed at children found that 89 percent requested personal information from kids; only 1 percent required that children obtain parental approval before supplying the .information. A character on the McDonald's Web site told children that Ronald McDonald was "the ultimate authority in everything." The site encouraged kids to send Ronald an email revealing their favorite menu item at McDonald's, their favorite book, their favorite sports team - and their name. Fast food Web sites no longer ask children to provide personal information without first gaining parental approval; to do so is now a violation of federal law, thanks to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which took effect in April of 2000.

Despite the growing importance of the Internet, television remains the primary medium for children's advertising. The effects of these TV ads have long been a subject of controversy. In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) tried to ban all television ads directed at children seven years old or younger. Many studies had found that young children often could not tell the difference between television programming and television advertising. They also could not comprehend the real purpose of commercials and trusted that advertising claims were true. Michael Pertschuk, the head of the FTC, argued that children need to be shielded from advertising that preys upon their immaturity. "They cannot protect themselves." he said, "against adults who exploit their present-mindedness."

The FTC's proposed ban was supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the Consumers Union, and the Child Welfare League, among others. But it was attacked by the National Association of Broadcasters, the Toy Manufacturers of America, and the Association of National Advertisers. The industry groups lobbied Congress to prevent any restrictions on children's ads and sued in federal court to block Pertschuk from participating in future FTC meetings on the subject. In April of 1981, three months after the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, an FTC staff report argued that a ban on ads aimed at children would be impractical, effectively killing the proposal. "We are delighted by the FTC's reasonable recommendation." said the head of the National Association of Broadcasters.

The Saturday-morning children's ads that caused angry debates twenty years ago now seem almost quaint. Far from being banned, TV advertising aimed at kids is now broadcast twenty-four hours a day, closed-captioned and in stereo. Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, the Cartoon Network, and the other children's cable networks are now responsible for about 80 percent of all television viewing by kids. None of these networks existed before 1979. The typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television -- roughly one and a half months of TV every year. That does not include the time children spend in front of a screen watching videos, playing video games, or using the computer. Outside of school, the typical American child spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping. During the course of a year, he or she watches more than thirty thousand TV commercials. Even the nation's youngest children are watching a great deal of television. About one-quarter of American children between the ages of two and five have a TV in their room.

Perfect Synergy

ALTHOUGH THE FAST FOOD chains annually spend about $3 billion on television advertising, their marketing efforts directed at children extend far beyond such conventional ads. The McDonald's Corporation now operates more than eight thousand playgrounds at its restaurants in the United States. Burger King has more than two thousand. A manufacturer of "playlands" explains why fast food operators build these largely plastic structures: "Playlands bring in children; who bring in parents, who bring in money." As American cities and towns spend less money on children's recreation, fast food restaurants have become gathering spaces for families with young children. Every month about 90 percent of American children between the ages of three and nine visit a McDonald's. The seesaws, slides, and pits full of plastic balls have proven to be an effective lure. "But when it gets down to brass tacks," a Brandweek article on fast food notes, "the key to attracting kids is toys, toys, toys."

The fast food industry has forged promotional links with the nation's leading toy manufacturers, giving away simple toys with children's meals and selling more elaborate ones at a discount. The major toy crazes of recent years - including Pokemon cards, Cabbage Patch Kids, and Tamogotchis - have been abetted by fast food promotions. A successful promotion easily doubles or triples the weekly sales volume of children's meals. The chains often distribute numerous versions of a toy, encouraging repeat visits by small children and adult collectors who hope to obtain complete sets. In 1999 McDonald's distributed eighty different types of Furby. According to a publication called Tomart's Price Guide to McDonald's Happy Meal Collectibles, some fast food giveaways are now worth hundreds of dollars.

Rod Taylor, a Brandweek columnist, called McDonald's 1997 Teenie Beanie Baby giveaway one of the most successful promotions in the history of American advertising. At the time McDonald's sold about 10 million Happy Meals in a typical week. Over the course of ten days in April of 1997, by including a Teenie Beanie Baby with each purchase, McDonald's sold about 100 million Happy Meals. Rarely has a marketing effort achieved such an extraordinary rate of sales among its intended consumers. Happy Meals are marketed to children between the ages of three and nine; within ten days about four Teenie Beanie Baby Happy Meals were sold for every American child in that age group. Not all of those Happy Meals were purchased for children. Many adult collectors bought Teenie Beanie Baby Happy Meals, kept the dolls, and threw away the food.

The competition for young customers has led the fast food chains to form marketing alliances not just with toy companies, but with sports leagues and Hollywood studios. McDonald's has staged promotions with the National Basketball Association and the Olympics. Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC signed a three-year deal with the NCAA. Wendy's has linked with the National Hockey League. Burger King and Nickelodeon, Denny's and Major League Baseball, McDonald's and the Fox Kids Network have all formed partnerships that mix advertisements for fast food with children's entertainment. Burger King has sold chicken nuggets shaped like Teletubbies. McDonald's now has its own line of children's videos starring Ronald McDonald. The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald is being produced by Klasky-Csupo, the company that makes Rugrats and The Simpsons. The videos feature the McDonaldland characters and sell for $3.49. "We see this as a great opportunity." a McDonald's executive said in a press release, "to create a more meaningful relationship between Ronald and kids."

All of these cross-promotions have strengthened the ties between Hollywood and the fast food industry. In the past few years, the major studios have started to recruit fast food executives. Susan Frank, a former director of national marketing for McDonald's, later became a marketing executive at the Fox Kids Network. She now runs a new family-oriented cable network jointly owned by Hallmark Entertainment and the Jim Henson Company, creator of the Muppets. Ken Snelgrove, who for many years worked as a marketer for Burger King and McDonald's, now works at MGM. Brad Ball, a former senior vice president of marketing at McDonald's, is now the head of marketing for Warner Brothers. Not long after being hired, Ball told the Hollywood Reporter that there was little difference between selling films and selling hamburgers. John Cywinski, the former head of marketing at Burger King, became the head of marketing for Walt Disney's film division in 1996, then left the job to work for McDonald's. Forty years after Bozo's first promotional appearance at a McDonald's, amid all the marketing deals, giveaways, and executive swaps, America's fast food culture has become indistinguishable from the popular culture of its children.

In May of 1996, the Walt Disney Company signed a ten-year global marketing agreement with the McDonald's Corporation. By linking with a fast food company, a Hollywood studio typically gains anywhere from $25 million to $45 million in additional advertising for a film, often doubling its ad budget. These licensing deals are usually negotiated on a per-film basis; the 1996 agreement with Disney gave McDonald's exclusive rights to that studio's output of films and videos. Some industry observers thought Disney benefited more from the deal, gaining a steady source of marketing funds. According to the terms of the agreement, Disney characters could never be depicted sitting in a McDonald's restaurant or eating any of the chain's food. In the early 1980s, the McDonald's Corporation had turned away offers to buy Disney; a decade later, McDonald's executives sounded a bit defensive about having given Disney greater control over how their joint promotions would be run. "A lot of people can't get used to the fact that two big global brands with this kind of credibility can forge this kind of working relationship," a McDonald's executive told a reporter. "It's about their theme parks, their next movie, their characters, their videos ... It's bigger than a hamburger. It's about the integration of our two brands, long-term."

The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect, synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.


The Brand Essence

THE BEST INSIGHT INTO the thinking of fast food marketers comes from their own words. Confidential documents from a recent McDonald's advertising campaign give a clear sense of how the restaurant chain views its customers. The McDonald's Corporation was facing a long list of problems. "Sales are decreasing," one memo noted. "People are telling us Burger King and Wendy's are doing a better job of giving ... better food at the best price," another warned. Consumer research indicated that future sales in some key areas were at risk. "More customers are telling us," an executive wrote, "that McDonald's is a big company that just wants to sell ... sell as much as it can." An emotional connection to McDonald's that customers had formed "as toddlers" was now eroding. The new radio. and television advertising had to make people feel that McDonald's still cared about them. It had to link the McDonald's of today to the one people loved in the past: "The challenge of the campaign," wrote Ray Bergold, the chain's top marketing executive, "is to make customers believe that McDonald's is their 'Trusted Friend.'"

According to these documents, the marketing alliances with other brands were intended to create positive feelings about McDonald's,  making consumers associate one thing they liked with another. Ads would link the company's french fries "to the excitement and fanaticism people feel about the NBA." The feelings of pride inspired by the Olympics would be used in ads to help launch a new hamburger with more meat than the Big Mac. The link with the Walt Disney Company was considered by far the most important, designed to "enhance perceptions of Brand McDonald's." A memo sought to explain the underlying psychology behind many visits to McDonald's: parents took their children to McDonald's because they "want the kids to love them ... it makes them feel like a good parent." Purchasing something from Disney was the "ultimate' way to make kids happy, but it was too expensive to do every day. The advertising needed to capitalize on these feelings, letting parents know that "ONLY MCDONALD'S MAKES IT EASY TO GET A BIT OF DISNEY MAGIC." The ads aimed at "minivan parents" would carry an unspoken message about taking your children to McDonald's: "It's an easy way to feel like a good parent."

The fundamental goal of the "My McDonald's" campaign that stemmed from these proposals was to make a customer feel that McDonald's "cares about me" and "knows about me." A corporate memo introducing the campaign explained: "The essence McDonald's is embracing is 'Trusted Friend' ... 'Trusted Friend' captures all the goodwill and the unique emotional connection customers have with the McDonald's experience ... [Our goal is to make] customers believe McDonald's is their 'Trusted Friend: Note: this should be done without using the words 'Trusted Friend' ... Every commercial [should be] honest ... Every message will be in good taste and feel like it comes from a trusted friend." The words "trusted friend" were never to be mentioned in the ads because doing so might prematurely "wear out a brand essence" that could prove valuable in the future for use among different national, ethnic, and age groups. Despite McDonald's faith in its trusted friends, the opening page of this memo said in bold red letters: "ANY UNAUTHORIZED USE OR COPYING OF THIS MATERIAL MAY LEAD TO CIVIL OR CRIMINAL PROSECUTION."

McTeachers and Coke Dudes

NOT SATISFIED WITH MARKETING to children through playgrounds, toys, cartoons, movies, videos, charities, and amusement parks, through contests, sweepstakes, games, and clubs, via television, radio, magazines, and the Internet, fast food chains are now gaining access to the last advertising-free outposts of American life. In 1993 District 11 in Colorado Springs started a nationwide trend, becoming the first public school district in the United States to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of its school buses. Like other school systems in Colorado, District 11 faced revenue shortfalls, thanks to growing enrollments and voter hostility to tax increases for education. The initial Burger King and King Sooper ad contracts were a disappointment for the district, gaining it just $37,500 a year - little more than $1 per student. In 1996, school administrators decided to seek negotiating help from a professional, hiring Dan DeRose, president of DD Marketing, Inc., of Pueblo, Colorado. DeRose assembled special advertising packages for corporate sponsors. For $12,000, a company got five school-bus ads, hallway ads in all fifty-two of the district's schools, ads in their school newspapers, a stadium banner, ads over the stadium's public-address system during games, and free tickets to high school sporting events.

Within a year, DeRose had nearly tripled District 11's ad revenues. But his greatest success was still to come. In August of 1997, DeRose brokered a ten-year deal that made Coca-Cola the district's exclusive beverage supplier, bringing the schools up to $11 million during the life of the contract (minus DD Marketing's fee). The deal also provided free use of a 1998 Chevy Cavalier to a District 11 high school senior, chosen by lottery, who had good grades and a perfect attendance record.

District 11's marketing efforts were soon imitated by other school districts in Colorado, by districts in Pueblo, Fort Collins, Denver, and Cherry Creek. Administrators in Colorado Springs did not come up with the idea of using corporate sponsorship to cover shortfalls in a school district's budget. But they took it to a whole new level, packaging it, systematizing it, leading the way. Hundreds of public school districts across the United States are now adopting or considering similar arrangements. Children spend about seven hours a day, one hundred and fifty days a year, in school. Those hours have in the past been largely free of advertising, promotion, and market research - a source of frustration to many companies. Today the nation's fast food chains are marketing their products in public schools through conventional ad campaigns, classroom teaching materials, and lunchroom franchises, as well as a number of unorthodox means.

The proponents of advertising in the schools argue that it is necessary to prevent further cutbacks; opponents contend that schoolchildren are becoming a captive audience for marketers, compelled by law to attend school and then forced to look at ads as a means of paying for their own education. America's schools now loom as a potential gold mine for companies in search of young customers ... "Discover your own river of revenue at the schoolhouse gates," urged a brochure at the 1997 Kids Power Marketing Conference. "Whether it's first-graders learning to read or teenagers shopping for their first car, we ·can guarantee an introduction of your product and your company to these students in the traditional setting of the classroom."

DD Marketing, with offices in Colorado Springs and Pueblo, has emerged as perhaps the nation's foremost negotiator of ad contracts for schools. Dan DeRose began his career as the founder of the Minor League Football System, serving in the late 1980s as both a team owner and a player. In 1991, he became athletic director at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo. During his first year, he raised $250,000 from corporate sponsors for the school's teams. Before long he was raising millions of dollars to build campus sports facilities. He was good at getting money out of big corporations, and formed DD Marketing to use this skill on behalf of schools and nonprofits. Beverage companies and athletic shoe companies had long supported college sports programs, and, during the 1980s began to put up the money for new high school scoreboards. Dan DeRose saw marketing opportunities that were still untapped. After negotiating his first Colorado Springs package deal in 1996, he went to work for the Grapevine- Colleyville School District in Texas. The district would never have sought advertising, its deputy superintendent told the Houston Chronicle, "if it weren't for the acute need for funds." DeRose started to solicit ads not only for the district's hallways, stadiums, and buses, but also for its rooftops - so that passengers flying in or out of the nearby Dallas-Forth Worth airport could see them - and for its voice-mail systems. "You've reached Grapevine-Colleyville school district, proud partner of Dr Pepper," was a message that DeRose proposed. Although some people in the district were skeptical about the wild ideas of this marketer from Colorado, DeRose negotiated a $3.4 million dollar exclusive deal between the Grapevine-Colleyville School District and Dr Pepper in June of 1997. And Dr Pepper ads soon appeared on school rooftops.

Dan DeRose tells reporters that his work brings money to school districts that badly need it. By pitting one beverage company against another in bidding wars for exclusive deals, he's raised the prices being offered to schools. "In Kansas City they were getting 67 cents a kid before," he told one reporter, "and now they're getting $27." The major beverage companies do not like DeRose and prefer not to deal with him. He views their hostility as a mark of success. He doesn't think that advertising in the schools will corrupt the nation's children and has little tolerance for critics of the trend. "There are critics to penicillin," he told the Fresno Bee. In the three years following his groundbreaking contract for School District 11 in Colorado Springs, Dan DeRose negotiated agreements for seventeen universities and sixty public school systems across the United States, everywhere from Greenville, North Carolina, to Newark, New Jersey. His 1997 deal with a school district in Derby, Kansas, included the commitment to open a Pepsi GeneratioNext Resource Center at an elementary school. Thus far, DeRose has been responsible for school and university beverage deals worth more than $200 million. He typically accepts no money up front, then charges Schools a commission that takes between 25 and 35 percent of the deal's total revenues.

The nation's three major beverage manufacturers are now spending large sums to increase the amount of soda that American children consume. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Cadbury-Schweppes (the maker of Dr Pepper) control 90.3 percent of the U.S. market, but have been hurt by declining sales in Asia. Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person - that's nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person. Coca-Cola has set itself the goal of raising consumption of its products in the United States by at least 25 percent a year. The adult market is stagnant; selling more soda to kids has become one of the easiest ways to meet sales projections. "Influencing elementary school students is very important to soft drink marketers," an article in the January 1999 issue of Beverage Industry explained, "because children are still establishing their tastes and habits." Eight-year-olds are considered ideal customers; they have about sixty-five years of purchasing in front of them. "Entering the schools makes perfect sense," the trade journal concluded.

The fast food chains also benefit enormously when children drink more soda. The chicken nuggets, hamburgers, and other main courses sold at fast food restaurants usually have the lowest profit margins. Soda has by far the highest. "We at McDonald's are thankful," a top executive once told the New York Times, "that people like drinks with their sandwiches." Today McDonald's sells more Coca-Cola than anyone else in the world. The fast food chains purchase Coca-Cola syrup for about $4.25 a gallon. A medium Coke that sells for $1.29 contains roughly 9 cents' worth of syrup. Buying a large Coke for $1.49 instead, as the cute girl behind the counter always suggests, will add another 3 cents' worth of syrup - and another 17 cents in pure profit for McDonald's.

"Liquid Candy," a 1999 study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, describes who is not benefiting from the beverage industry's latest marketing efforts: the nation's children. In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenaged girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper also contain caffeine. These sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutritious beverages in the American diet. Excessive soda· consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fractures. Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk. Soft-drink consumption has also become commonplace among American toddlers. About one-fifth of the nation's one- and two-year-olds now drink soda. "In one of the most despicable marketing gambits," Michael Jacobson, the author of "Liquid Candy" reports, "Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Seven-Up encourage feeding soft drinks to babies by licensing their logos to a major maker of baby bottles, Munchkin Bottling, Inc." A 1997 study published in the Journal of Dentistry for Children found that many infants were indeed being fed soda in those bottles.

The school marketing efforts of the large soda companies have not gone entirely unopposed. Administrators in San Francisco and Seattle have refused to allow any advertising in their schools. "It's our responsibility to make it clear that schools are here to serve children, not commercial interests." declared a member of the San Francisco Board of Education. Individual protests have occurred as well. In March of 1998,1,200 students at Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, assembled in the school parking lot, many of them wearing red and white clothing, to spell out the word "Coke." It was Coke in Education Day at the school, and a dozen Coca-Cola executives had come for the occasion. Greenbrier High was hoping for a $500 prize, which had been offered to the local high school that came up with the best marketing plan for Coca-Cola discount cards. As part of the festivities, Coke executives had lectured the students on economics and helped them bake a Coca-Cola cake. A photographer was hoisted above the parking lot by a crane, ready to record the human C-O-K-E for posterity. When the photographer started to take pictures, Mike Cameron - a Greenbrier senior, standing amid the letter C - suddenly revealed a T-shirt that said "Pepsi." His act of defiance soon received nation-wide publicity, as did the fact that he was immediately suspended from school. The principal said Cameron could have been suspended for a week for the prank, but removed him from classes for just a day. "I don't consider this a prank," Mike Cameron told the Washington Post. "I like to be an individual. That's the way I am."

Most school advertising campaigns are more subtle than Greenbrier High's Coke in Education Day. The spiraling cost of textbooks has led thousands of American school districts to use corporate-sponsored teaching materials. A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumers Union found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor's products and views. Procter & Gamble's Decision Earth program taught that clear-cut logging was actually good for the environment; teaching aids distributed by the Exxon Education Foundation said that fossil fuels created few environmental problems and that alternative sources of energy were too expensive; a study guide sponsored by the American Coal Foundation dismissed fears of a greenhouse effect, claiming that "the earth could benefit rather than be harmed from increased carbon dioxide." The Consumers Union found Pizza Hut's Book It! Program - which awards a free Personal Pan Pizza to children who reach targeted reading levels - to be "highly commercial." About twenty million elementary school students participated in Book It! during the 1999-2000 school year; Pizza Hut recently expanded the program to include a million preschoolers.

Lifetime Learning Systems is the nation's largest marketer and producer of corporate-sponsored teaching aids. The group claims that its publications are used by more than 60 million students every year. "Now you can enter the classroom through custom-made learning materials created with your specific marketing objectives in mind." Lifetime Learning said in one of its pitches to Corporate sponsors. "Through these materials, your product or point of view becomes the focus of discussions in the classroom." it said in another, " ... the centerpiece in a dynamic process that generates long-term awareness and lasting attitudinal change." The tax cuts that are hampering America's schools have proved to be a marketing bonanza for companies like Exxon, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's. The money that these corporations spend on their "educational" materials is fully tax-deductible.

The fast food chains run ads on Channel One, the commercial television network whose programming is now shown in classrooms, almost every school day, to eight million of the nation's middle, junior, and high school students - a teen audience fifty times larger than that of MTV. The fast food chains place ads with Star Broadcasting, a Minnesota company that pipes Top 40 radio into school hallways, lounges, and cafeterias. And the chains now promote their food by selling school lunches, accepting a lower profit margin in order to create brand loyalty. At least twenty school districts in the United States have their own Subway franchises; an additional fifteen hundred districts have Subway delivery contracts; and nine operate Subway sandwich carts. Taco Bell products are sold in about forty-five hundred school cafeterias. Pizza Hut, Domino's, and McDonald's are now selling food in the nation's schools. The American School Food Service Association estimates that about 30 percent of the public high schools in the United States offer branded fast food. Elementary schools in Fort Collins, Colorado, now serve food from Pizza Hut, McDonald's, and Subway on special lunch days. "We try to be more like the fast food places where these kids are hanging out." a Colorado school administrator told the Denver Post. "We want kids to think school lunch is a cool thing, the cafeteria a cool place, that we're 'with it: that we're not institutional ... "

The new corporate partnerships often put school officials in an awkward position. The Coca-Cola deal that DD Marketing negotiated for Colorado Springs School District 11 was not as lucrative as it first seemed. The contract specified annual sales quotas. School District 11 was obligated to sell at least seventy thousand cases of Coca-Cola products a year, within the first three years of the contract, or it would face reduced payments by Coke. During the 1997-98 school year, the district's elementary, middle, and high schools sold only twenty-one thousand cases of Coca-Cola products. Cara DeGette, the news editor of the Colorado Springs Independent, a weekly newspaper, obtained a memorandum sent to school principals by John Bushey, a District 11 administrator. On September 28, 1998, at the start of the new school year, Bushey warned the principals that beverage sales were falling short of projections and that as a result school revenues might be affected. Allow students to bring Coke products into the classrooms, he suggested; move Coke machines to places where they would be accessible to students all day. "Research shows that vendor purchases are closely linked to availability," Bushey wrote. "Location, location, location is the key." If the principals felt uncomfortable allowing kids to drink Coca-Cola during class, he recommended letting them drink the fruit juices, teas, and bottled waters also sold in the Coke machines. At the end of the memo, John Bushey signed his name and then identified himself as "the Coke dude."

Bushey left Colorado Springs in 2000 and moved to Florida. He is now the principal of the high school in Celebration, a planned community run by The Celebration Company, a subsidiary of Disney.  
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Sep 16, 2019 12:09 pm

Part 1 of 2

Wernher von Braun
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/16/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
Wernher von Braun
Von Braun in 1960
Born Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
March 23, 1912
Wirsitz, Posen Province, German Empire
(now Wyrzysk, Poland)
Died June 16, 1977 (aged 65)
Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.
Burial place Ivy Hill Cemetery (Alexandria, Virginia)[1]
Citizenship Germany, United States (after 1955)
Alma mater Technical University of Berlin
Occupation Rocket engineer and designer, aerospace project manager
Known for NASA engineering program manager; chief architect of the Apollo Saturn V rocket
Spouse(s) Maria Luise von Quistorp (m. 1947–1977)
Children
Iris Careen (1948–)
Margrit Cécile (1952–)
Peter Constantine (1960–)
Parent(s)
Magnus von Braun (1878–1972)
Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959)
Awards
Elliott Cresson Medal (1962)
Wilhelm Exner Medal (1969)[2]
National Medal of Science (1975)
Military career
Allegiance
Nazi Germany
United States
Service/branch
SS
United States Army
Years of service
1937–1945 Germany
1945–1960 US
Rank SS-Sturmbannführer collar.svg SS-Sturmbannführer (major)
Awards
Knights Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords (1944)
War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords (1943)

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was a German and later American aerospace engineer[3] and space architect. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany and a pioneer of rocket technology and space science in the United States.[4]

While in his twenties and early thirties, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He helped design and develop the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II. Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip.[5] He worked for the United States Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the United States' first space satellite Explorer 1.

His group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.[6][7] In 1967, von Braun was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science. He advocated a human mission to Mars.

Early life and education

Wernher von Braun was born on March 23, 1912, in the small town of Wirsitz in the Posen Province, then the German Empire. He was the second of three sons of a noble Lutheran family. From birth he held the title of Freiherr (equivalent to Baron). The German nobility's legal privileges were abolished in 1919, although noble titles could still be used as part of the family name.

His father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1878–1972), was a civil servant and conservative politician; he served as Minister of Agriculture in the federal government during the Weimar Republic. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959), traced her ancestry through both parents to medieval European royalty and was a descendant of Philip III of France, Valdemar I of Denmark, Robert III of Scotland, and Edward III of England.[8][9] Wernher had an older brother, the West German diplomat Sigismund von Braun, who served as Secretary of State in the Foreign Office in the 1970s, and a younger brother, also named Magnus von Braun, who was a rocket scientist and later a senior executive with Chrysler.[10]

After Wernher's Confirmation, his mother gave him a telescope, and he developed a passion for astronomy. The family moved to Berlin in 1915, where his father worked at the Ministry of the Interior.[11] Here in 1924, the 12-year-old Wernher, inspired by speed records established by Max Valier and Fritz von Opel in rocket-propelled cars,[12] caused a major disruption in a crowded street by detonating a toy wagon to which he had attached fireworks. He was taken into custody by the local police until his father came to get him.

Wernher learned to play both the cello and the piano at an early age and at one time wanted to become a composer. He took lessons from the composer Paul Hindemith. The few pieces of Wernher's youthful compositions that exist are reminiscent of Hindemith's style.[13]:11 He could play piano pieces of Beethoven and Bach from memory.

Beginning in 1925, Wernher attended a boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar, where he did not do well in physics and mathematics. There he acquired a copy of By Rocket into Planetary Space (Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, 1923)[14] by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. In 1928, his parents moved him to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat (also a residential school) on the East Frisian North Sea island of Spiekeroog. Space travel had always fascinated Wernher, and from then on he applied himself to physics and mathematics to pursue his interest in rocket engineering.

In 1930, von Braun attended the Technische Hochschule Berlin, where he joined the Spaceflight Society (Verein für Raumschiffahrt or "VfR") and assisted Willy Ley in his liquid-fueled rocket motor tests in conjunction with Hermann Oberth.[15] In spring 1932, he graduated with a diploma in mechanical engineering.[16] His early exposure to rocketry convinced him that the exploration of space would require far more than applications of the current engineering technology. Wanting to learn more about physics, chemistry, and astronomy, von Braun entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin for post-graduate studies and graduated with a doctorate in physics in 1934.[17] He also studied at ETH Zürich for a term from June to October 1931.[18] Although he worked mainly on military rockets in his later years there, space travel remained his primary interest.

In 1930, von Braun attended a presentation given by Auguste Piccard. After the talk, the young student approached the famous pioneer of high-altitude balloon flight, and stated to him: "You know, I plan on traveling to the Moon at some time." Piccard is said to have responded with encouraging words.[19]

Von Braun was greatly influenced by Oberth, of whom he said:

Hermann Oberth was the first who, when thinking about the possibility of spaceships, grabbed a slide-rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs ... I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding-star of my life, but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel. A place of honor should be reserved in the history of science and technology for his ground-breaking contributions in the field of astronautics.[20]


Career in Germany

According to historian Norman Davies, von Braun was able to pursue a career as a rocket scientist in Germany due to a "curious oversight" in the Treaty of Versailles which did not include rocketry in its list of weapons forbidden to Germany.[21]

Involvement with the Nazi regime

Image
Von Braun with Fritz Todt, who utilized forced labor for major works across occupied Europe
Party membership


Von Braun had an ambivalent and complex relationship with the Nazi Third Reich.[5] He applied for membership of the Nazi Party on November 12, 1937, and was issued membership number 5,738,692.[22]:96

Michael J. Neufeld, an author of aerospace history and chief of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, wrote that ten years after von Braun obtained his Nazi Party membership, he signed an affidavit for the U.S. Army misrepresenting the year of his membership, saying incorrectly:[22]:96

In 1939, I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time I was already Technical Director at the Army Rocket Center at Peenemünde (Baltic Sea). The technical work carried out there had, in the meantime, attracted more and more attention in higher levels. Thus, my refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore, I decided to join. My membership in the party did not involve any political activity.


It has not been ascertained whether von Braun's error with regard to the year was deliberate or a simple mistake.[22]:96 Neufeld further wrote:

Von Braun, like other Peenemünders, was assigned to the local group in Karlshagen; there is no evidence that he did more than send in his monthly dues. But he is seen in some photographs with the party's swastika pin in his lapel – it was politically useful to demonstrate his membership.[22]:96


Von Braun's later attitude toward the National Socialist regime of the late 1930s and early 1940s was complex. He said that he had been so influenced by the early Nazi promise of release from the post–World War I economic effects, that his patriotic feelings had increased.[citation needed] In a 1952 memoir article he admitted that, at that time, he "fared relatively rather well under totalitarianism".[22]:96–97 Yet, he also wrote that "to us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache"[23] and that he perceived him as "another Napoleon" who was "wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god".[24]

Membership in the Allgemeine SS

Von Braun joined the SS horseback riding school on 1 November 1933 as an SS-Anwärter. He left the following year.[citation needed]:63 In 1940, he joined the SS[25]:47[26] and was given the rank of Untersturmführer in the Allgemeine SS and issued membership number 185,068.[citation needed]:121 In 1947, he gave the U.S. War Department this explanation:

In spring 1940, one SS-Standartenfuehrer (SS-colonel) Mueller from Greifswald, a bigger town in the vicinity of Peenemünde, looked me up in my office ... and told me that Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler had sent him with the order to urge me to join the SS. I told him I was so busy with my rocket work that I had no time to spare for any political activity. He then told me, that ... the SS would cost me no time at all. I would be awarded the rank of a[n] "Untersturmfuehrer" (lieutenant) and it were [sic] a very definite desire of Himmler that I attend his invitation to join.

I asked Mueller to give me some time for reflection. He agreed.

Realizing that the matter was of highly political significance for the relation between the SS and the Army, I called immediately on my military superior, Dr. Dornberger. He informed me that the SS had for a long time been trying to get their "finger in the pie" of the rocket work. I asked him what to do. He replied on the spot that if I wanted to continue our mutual work, I had no alternative but to join.


When shown a picture of himself standing behind Himmler, von Braun claimed to have worn the SS uniform only that one time,[27] but in 2002 a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform to official meetings. He began as an Untersturmführer (Second lieutenant) and was promoted three times by Himmler, the last time in June 1943 to SS-Sturmbannführer (Major). Von Braun later claimed that these were simply technical promotions received each year regularly by mail.[28]

Work under Nazi regime

Image
First rank, from left to right, General Dr Walter Dornberger (partially hidden), General Friedrich Olbricht (with Knight's Cross), Major Heinz Brandt, and Wernher von Braun (in civilian dress) at Peenemünde, in March 1941.

In 1933, von Braun was working on his creative doctorate when the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) came to power in a coalition government in Germany; rocketry was almost immediately moved onto the national agenda. An artillery captain, Walter Dornberger, arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for von Braun, who then worked next to Dornberger's existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf.

Von Braun was awarded a doctorate in physics[29] (aerospace engineering) on July 27, 1934, from the University of Berlin for a thesis entitled "About Combustion Tests"; his doctoral supervisor was Erich Schumann.[22]:61 However, this thesis was only the public part of von Braun's work. His actual full thesis, Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket (dated April 16, 1934) was kept classified by the German army, and was not published until 1960.[30] By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two liquid fuel rockets that rose to heights of 2.2 and 3.5 km (2 mi).

At the time, Germany was highly interested in American physicist Robert H. Goddard's research. Before 1939, German scientists occasionally contacted Goddard directly with technical questions. Von Braun used Goddard's plans from various journals and incorporated them into the building of the Aggregat (A) series of rockets. The A-4 rocket would become well known as the V-2.[31] In 1963, von Braun reflected on the history of rocketry, and said of Goddard's work: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles."[12]

Goddard confirmed his work was used by von Braun in 1944, shortly before the Nazis began firing V-2s at England. A V-2 crashed in Sweden and some parts were sent to an Annapolis lab where Goddard was doing research for the Navy. If this was the so-called Bäckebo Bomb, it had been procured by the British in exchange for Spitfires; Annapolis would have received some parts from them. Goddard is reported to have recognized components he had invented, and inferred that his brainchild had been turned into a weapon.[32] Later, von Braun would comment: "I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides ... A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war."[33]

In response to Goddard's claims, von Braun said "at no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent". This was independently confirmed.[34] He wrote that claims about him lifting Goddard's work were the furthest from the truth, noting that Goddard's paper "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes", which was studied by von Braun and Oberth, lacked the specificity of liquid-fuel experimentation with rockets.[34] It was also confirmed that he was responsible for an estimated 20 patentable innovations related to rocketry during the Volksverhetzung era, as well as receiving U.S. patents after the war concerning the advancement of rocketry.[34] Documented accounts also stated he provided solutions to a host of aerospace engineering problems in the 1950s and 60s.[34]

There were no German rocket societies after the collapse of the VfR, and civilian rocket tests were forbidden by the new Nazi regime. Only military development was allowed, and to this end, a larger facility was erected at the village of Peenemünde in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Dornberger became the military commander at Peenemünde, with von Braun as technical director. In collaboration with the Luftwaffe, the Peenemünde group developed liquid-fuel rocket engines for aircraft and jet-assisted takeoffs. They also developed the long-range A-4 ballistic missile and the supersonic Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile.

Image
Schematic of the A4/V2

On December 22, 1942, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon", and the Peenemünde group developed it to target London. Following von Braun's July 7, 1943 presentation of a color movie showing an A-4 taking off, Hitler was so enthusiastic that he personally made von Braun a professor shortly thereafter.[35] In Germany at this time, this was an exceptional promotion for an engineer who was only 31 years old.

By that time, the British and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the rocket program and von Braun's team at Peenemünde, based on the intelligence provided by the Polish underground Home Army. Over the nights of August 17–18, 1943, RAF Bomber Command's Operation Hydra dispatched raids on the Peenemünde camp consisting of 596 aircraft, and dropped 1,800 tons of explosives.[36] The facility was salvaged and most of the engineering team remained unharmed; however, the raids killed von Braun's engine designer Walter Thiel and Chief Engineer Walther, and the rocket program was delayed.[37][38]

See also: Bombing of Peenemünde in World War II

The first combat A-4, renamed the V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2 "Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2") for propaganda purposes, was launched toward England on September 7, 1944, only 21 months after the project had been officially commissioned. Von Braun's interest in rockets was specifically for the application of space travel, not for killing people.[39] After hearing the news from London, he said that "the rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet." Satirist Mort Sahl has been credited with mocking von Braun by saying "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."[40] That line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biopic of von Braun.

Experiments with rocket aircraft

During 1936, von Braun's rocketry team working at Kummersdorf investigated installing liquid-fuelled rockets in aircraft. Ernst Heinkel enthusiastically supported their efforts, supplying a He-72 and later two He-112s for the experiments. Later in 1936, Erich Warsitz was seconded by the RLM to von Braun and Heinkel, because he had been recognized as one of the most experienced test pilots of the time, and because he also had an extraordinary fund of technical knowledge.[41]:30 After he familiarized Warsitz with a test-stand run, showing him the corresponding apparatus in the aircraft, he asked: "Are you with us and will you test the rocket in the air? Then, Warsitz, you will be a famous man. And later we will fly to the Moon – with you at the helm!"[41]:35

Image
A regular He 112

In June 1937, at Neuhardenberg (a large field about 70 km (43 mi) east of Berlin, listed as a reserve airfield in the event of war), one of these latter aircraft was flown with its piston engine shut down during flight by Warsitz, at which time it was propelled by von Braun's rocket power alone. Despite a wheels-up landing and the fuselage having been on fire, it proved to official circles that an aircraft could be flown satisfactorily with a back-thrust system through the rear.[41]:51

At the same time, Hellmuth Walter's experiments into hydrogen peroxide based rockets were leading towards light and simple rockets that appeared well-suited for aircraft installation. Also the firm of Hellmuth Walter at Kiel had been commissioned by the RLM to build a rocket engine for the He 112, so there were two different new rocket motor designs at Neuhardenberg: whereas von Braun's engines were powered by alcohol and liquid oxygen, Walter engines had hydrogen peroxide and calcium permanganate as a catalyst. Von Braun's engines used direct combustion and created fire, the Walter devices used hot vapors from a chemical reaction, but both created thrust and provided high speed.[41]:41 The subsequent flights with the He-112 used the Walter-rocket instead of von Braun's; it was more reliable, simpler to operate, and safer for the test pilot, Warsitz.[41]:55

Slave labor

SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the rocket program. Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the V-2 rocket factory at Peenemünde, endorsed this idea in April 1943 when a labor shortage developed. More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon.[42] Von Braun admitted visiting the plant at Mittelwerk on many occasions[5], and called conditions at the plant "repulsive", but claimed never to have witnessed any deaths or beatings, although it had become clear to him by 1944 that deaths had occurred.[43] He denied ever having visited the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp itself, where 20,000 died from illness, beatings, hangings, and intolerable working conditions.[44]

Some prisoners claim von Braun engaged in brutal treatment or approved of it. Guy Morand, a French resistance fighter who was a prisoner in Dora, testified in 1995 that after an apparent sabotage attempt, von Braun ordered a prisoner to be flogged,[45] while Robert Cazabonne, another French prisoner, claimed von Braun stood by as prisoners were hanged by chains suspended by cranes.[45]:123–124 However, these accounts may have been a case of mistaken identity.[46] Former Buchenwald inmate Adam Cabala claims that von Braun went to the concentration camp to pick slave laborers:

... also the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun were aware of everything daily. As they went along the corridors, they saw the exhaustion of the inmates, their arduous work and their pain. Not one single time did Prof. Wernher von Braun protest against this cruelty during his frequent stays at Dora. Even the aspect of corpses did not touch him: On a small area near the ambulance shed, inmates tortured to death by slave labor and the terror of the overseers were piling up daily. But, Prof. Wernher von Braun passed them so close that he was almost touching the corpses.[47]


Von Braun later claimed that he was aware of the treatment of prisoners, but felt helpless to change the situation.[48]

Arrest and release by the Nazi regime

According to André Sellier, a French historian and survivor of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, Heinrich Himmler had von Braun come to his Feldkommandostelle Hochwald HQ in East Prussia in February 1944.[49] To increase his power-base within the Nazi regime, Himmler was conspiring to use Kammler to gain control of all German armament programs, including the V-2 program at Peenemünde.[13]:38–40 He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2. Von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.

Von Braun had been under SD surveillance since October 1943. A report stated that he and his colleagues Riedel and Gröttrup were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship[5] and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude. A young female dentist who was an SS spy reported their comments.[13]:38–40 Combined with Himmler's false charges that von Braun was a communist sympathizer and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, and considering that von Braun regularly piloted his government-provided airplane that might allow him to escape to England, this led to his arrest by the Gestapo.[13]:38–40

The unsuspecting von Braun was detained on March 14 (or March 15),[50] 1944, and was taken to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland),[13]:38–40 where he was held for two weeks without knowing the charges against him.

Through the Abwehr in Berlin, Dornberger obtained von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, persuaded Hitler to reinstate von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue[5][13]:38–40 or turn into a "V-4 program" which in their view would be impossible without von Braun's leadership.[51] In his memoirs, Speer states Hitler had finally conceded that von Braun was to be "protected from all prosecution as long as he is indispensable, difficult though the general consequences arising from the situation."[52]

Surrender to the Americans

Image
Von Braun, with his arm in a cast due to a car accident, surrendered to the Americans just before this May 3, 1945 photo.

The Soviet Army was about 160 km (100 mi) from Peenemünde in early 1945 when von Braun assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide how and to whom they should surrender. Unwilling to go to the Soviets, von Braun and his staff decided to try to surrender to the Americans. Kammler had ordered relocation of his team to central Germany; however, a conflicting order from an army chief ordered them to join the army and fight. Deciding that Kammler's order was their best bet to defect to the Americans, von Braun fabricated documents and transported 500 of his affiliates to the area around Mittelwerk, where they resumed their work. For fear of their documents being destroyed by the SS, von Braun ordered the blueprints to be hidden in an abandoned mine shaft in the Harz mountain range.[53]

While on an official trip in March, von Braun suffered a complicated fracture of his left arm and shoulder in a car accident after his driver fell asleep at the wheel. His injuries were serious, but he insisted that his arm be set in a cast so he could leave the hospital. Due to this neglect of the injury he had to be hospitalized again a month later where his bones had to be rebroken and realigned.[53]

In April, as the Allied forces advanced deeper into Germany, Kammler ordered the engineering team to be moved by train into the town of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps, where they were closely guarded by the SS with orders to execute the team if they were about to fall into enemy hands. However, von Braun managed to convince SS Major Kummer to order the dispersal of the group into nearby villages so that they would not be an easy target for U.S. bombers.[53]

Von Braun and a large number of the engineering team subsequently made it to Austria.[54] On May 2, 1945, upon finding an American private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division, von Braun's brother and fellow rocket engineer, Magnus, approached the soldier on a bicycle, calling out in broken English: "My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender."[10][55] After the surrender, Wernher von Braun spoke to the press:

We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.[56]


The American high command was well aware of how important their catch was: von Braun had been at the top of the Black List, the code name for the list of German scientists and engineers targeted for immediate interrogation by U.S. military experts. On June 9, 1945, two days before the scheduled handover of the Nordhausen area to the Soviets, U.S. Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in London, and Lt Col R. L. Williams took von Braun and his department chiefs by Jeep from Garmisch to Munich, from where they were flown to Nordhausen; on the next day, the group was evacuated 40 miles (64 km) southwest to Witzenhausen, a small town in the American Zone.[57]

Von Braun was briefly detained at the "Dustbin" interrogation center at Kransberg Castle, where the elite of the Third Reich's economic, scientific and technological sectors were debriefed by U.S. and British intelligence officials.[58] Initially, he was recruited to the U.S. under a program called Operation Overcast, subsequently known as Operation Paperclip. There is evidence, however, that British intelligence and scientists were the first to interview him in depth, eager to gain information that they knew U.S. officials would deny them. The team included the young L.S. Snell, then the leading British rocket engineer, later chief designer of Rolls-Royce Limited and inventor of the Concorde's engines. The specific information the British gleaned remained top secret, both from the Americans and other allies.[citation needed]

American career

U.S. Army career


Image
Wernher von Braun at a meeting of NACA's Special Committee on Space Technology, 1958

On June 20, 1945, the U.S. Secretary of State approved the transfer of von Braun and his specialists to the United States; however, this was not announced to the public until October 1, 1945.[59] Von Braun was among those scientists for whom the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) arguably falsified employment histories and expunged NSDAP memberships.[citation needed]

The first seven technicians arrived in the United States at New Castle Army Air Field, just south of Wilmington, Delaware, on September 20, 1945. They were then flown to Boston and taken by boat to the Army Intelligence Service post at Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Later, with the exception of von Braun, the men were transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to sort out the Peenemünde documents, enabling the scientists to continue their rocketry experiments.[citation needed]

Finally, von Braun and his remaining Peenemünde staff (see List of German rocket scientists in the United States) were transferred to their new home at Fort Bliss, a large Army installation just north of El Paso. Von Braun would later write he found it hard to develop a "genuine emotional attachment" to his new surroundings.[60] His chief design engineer Walther Reidel became the subject of a December 1946 article "German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken", exposing the presence of von Braun's team in the country and drawing criticism from Albert Einstein and John Dingell.[60] Requests to improve their living conditions such as laying linoleum over their cracked wood flooring were rejected.[60] Von Braun remarked, "at Peenemünde we had been coddled, here you were counting pennies".[60] Whereas von Braun had thousands of engineers who answered to him at Peenemünde, he was now subordinate to "pimply" 26-year-old Jim Hamill, an Army major who possessed only an undergraduate degree in engineering.[60] His loyal Germans still addressed him as "Herr Professor," but Hamill addressed him as "Wernher" and never responded to von Braun's request for more materials. Every proposal for new rocket ideas was dismissed.[60]

Image
Von Braun's badge at ABMA (1957)

While at Fort Bliss, they trained military, industrial, and university personnel in the intricacies of rockets and guided missiles. As part of the Hermes project, they helped refurbish, assemble, and launch a number of V-2s that had been shipped from Germany to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They also continued to study the future potential of rockets for military and research applications. Since they were not permitted to leave Fort Bliss without military escort, von Braun and his colleagues began to refer to themselves only half-jokingly as "PoPs" – "Prisoners of Peace".[61]

In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, von Braun and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, his home for the next 20 years. Between 1952 and 1956,[62] von Braun led the Army's rocket development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States. He personally witnessed this historic launch and detonation.[63] Work on the Redstone led to development of the first high-precision inertial guidance system on the Redstone rocket.[64]

As director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, von Braun, with his team, then developed the Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket.[65] The Jupiter-C successfully launched the West's first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. This event signaled the birth of America's space program.

Despite the work on the Redstone rocket, the 12 years from 1945 to 1957 were probably some of the most frustrating for von Braun and his colleagues. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev and his team of scientists and engineers plowed ahead with several new rocket designs and the Sputnik program, while the American government was not very interested in von Braun's work or views and embarked only on a very modest rocket-building program. In the meantime, the press tended to dwell on von Braun's past as a member of the SS and the slave labor used to build his V-2 rockets.[citation needed]

Popular concepts for a human presence in space

Repeating the pattern he had established during his earlier career in Germany, von Braun – while directing military rocket development in the real world – continued to entertain his engineer-scientist's dream of a future in which rockets would be used for space exploration. However, he was no longer at risk of being sacked – as American public opinion of Germans began to recover, von Braun found himself increasingly in a position to popularize his ideas. The May 14, 1950, headline of The Huntsville Times ("Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon") might have marked the beginning of these efforts. Von Braun's ideas rode a publicity wave that was created by science fiction movies and stories.

Image
Von Braun with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960

In 1952, von Braun first published his concept of a crewed space station in a Collier's Weekly magazine series of articles titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!". These articles were illustrated by the space artist Chesley Bonestell and were influential in spreading his ideas. Frequently, von Braun worked with fellow German-born space advocate and science writer Willy Ley to publish his concepts, which, unsurprisingly, were heavy on the engineering side and anticipated many technical aspects of space flight that later became reality.

The space station (to be constructed using rockets with recoverable and reusable ascent stages) would be a toroid structure, with a diameter of 250 feet (76 m); this built on the concept of a rotating wheel-shaped station introduced in 1929 by Herman Potočnik in his book The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor. The space station would spin around a central docking nave to provide artificial gravity, and would be assembled in a 1,075-mile (1,730 km) two-hour, high-inclination Earth orbit allowing observation of essentially every point on Earth on at least a daily basis. The ultimate purpose of the space station would be to provide an assembly platform for crewed lunar expeditions. More than a decade later, the movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would draw heavily on the design concept in its visualization of an orbital space station.

Von Braun envisioned these expeditions as very large-scale undertakings, with a total of 50 astronauts traveling in three huge spacecraft (two for crew, one primarily for cargo), each 49 m (160.76 ft) long and 33 m (108.27 ft) in diameter and driven by a rectangular array of 30 rocket propulsion engines.[66] Upon arrival, astronauts would establish a permanent lunar base in the Sinus Roris region by using the emptied cargo holds of their craft as shelters, and would explore their surroundings for eight weeks. This would include a 400 km (249 mi) expedition in pressurized rovers to the crater Harpalus and the Mare Imbrium foothills.

Image
Walt Disney and von Braun, seen in 1954 holding a model of his passenger ship, collaborated on a series of three educational films.

At this time, von Braun also worked out preliminary concepts for a human mission to Mars that used the space station as a staging point. His initial plans, published in The Mars Project (1952), had envisaged a fleet of 10 spacecraft (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tonnes), three of them uncrewed and each carrying one 200-tonne winged lander[66] in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts. Gigantic as this mission plan was, its engineering and astronautical parameters were thoroughly calculated. A later project was much more modest, using only one purely orbital cargo ship and one crewed craft. In each case, the expedition would use minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits for its trips to Mars and back to Earth.

Before technically formalizing his thoughts on human spaceflight to Mars, von Braun had written a science fiction novel on the subject, set in the year 1980. However, the manuscript was rejected by no fewer than 18 publishers.[67] Von Braun later published small portions of this opus in magazines, to illustrate selected aspects of his Mars project popularizations. The complete manuscript, titled Project MARS: A Technical Tale, did not appear as a printed book until December 2006.[68]

In the hope that its involvement would bring about greater public interest in the future of the space program, von Braun also began working with Walt Disney and the Disney studios as a technical director, initially for three television films about space exploration. The initial broadcast devoted to space exploration was Man in Space, which first went on air on March 9, 1955, drawing 40 million viewers.[60][69][70]

Later (in 1959) von Braun published a short booklet, condensed from episodes that had appeared in This Week Magazine before—describing his updated concept of the first crewed lunar landing.[71] The scenario included only a single and relatively small spacecraft—a winged lander with a crew of only two experienced pilots who had already circumnavigated the Moon on an earlier mission. The brute-force direct ascent flight schedule used a rocket design with five sequential stages, loosely based on the Nova designs that were under discussion at this time. After a night launch from a Pacific island, the first three stages would bring the spacecraft (with the two remaining upper stages attached) to terrestrial escape velocity, with each burn creating an acceleration of 8–9 times standard gravity. Residual propellant in the third stage would be used for the deceleration intended to commence only a few hundred kilometers above the landing site in a crater near the lunar north pole. The fourth stage provided acceleration to lunar escape velocity, while the fifth stage would be responsible for a deceleration during return to the Earth to a residual speed that allows aerocapture of the spacecraft ending in a runway landing, much in the way of the Space Shuttle. One remarkable feature of this technical tale is that the engineer von Braun anticipated a medical phenomenon that would become apparent only years later: being a veteran astronaut with no history of serious adverse reactions to weightlessness offers no protection against becoming unexpectedly and violently spacesick.

Religious conversion

In the first half of his life, von Braun was a nonpracticing, "perfunctory" Lutheran, whose affiliation was nominal and not taken seriously.[72] As described by Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway III: "Throughout his younger years, von Braun did not show signs of religious devotion, or even an interest in things related to the church or to biblical teachings. In fact, he was known to his friends as a 'merry heathen' (fröhlicher Heide)."[73] Nevertheless, in 1945 he explained his decision to surrender to the Western Allies, rather than Russians, as being influenced by a desire to share rocket technology with people who followed the Bible. In 1946,[74]:469 he attended church in El Paso, Texas, and underwent a religious conversion to evangelical Christianity.[75] In an unnamed religious magazine he stated:

One day in Fort Bliss, a neighbor called and asked if I would like to go to church with him. I accepted, because I wanted to see if the American church was just a country club as I'd been led to expect. Instead, I found a small, white frame building ... in the hot Texas sun on a browned-grass lot ... Together, these people make a live, vibrant community. This was the first time I really understood that religion was not a cathedral inherited from the past, or a quick prayer at the last minute. To be effective, a religion has to be backed up by discipline and effort.

— von Braun[74]:229–230


On the motives behind this conversion, Michael J. Neufeld is of the opinion that he turned to religion "to pacify his own conscience",[76] whereas University of Southampton scholar Kendrick Oliver said that von Braun was presumably moved "by a desire to find a new direction for his life after the moral chaos of his service for the Third Reich".[77] Having "concluded one bad bargain with the Devil, perhaps now he felt a need to have God securely at his side".[78]

Later in life, he joined an Episcopal congregation,[75] and became increasingly religious.[79] He publicly spoke and wrote about the complementarity of science and religion, the afterlife of the soul, and his belief in God.[80][81] He stated, "Through science man strives to learn more of the mysteries of creation. Through religion he seeks to know the Creator."[82] He was interviewed by the Assemblies of God pastor C. M. Ward, as stating, "The farther we probe into space, the greater my faith."[83] In addition, he met privately with evangelist Billy Graham and with the pacifist leader Martin Luther King Jr..[84]

Image
Von Braun with President Kennedy at Redstone Arsenal in 1963

Image
Von Braun with the F-1 engines of the Saturn V first stage at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center

Image
Still with his rocket models, von Braun is pictured in his new office at NASA headquarters in 1970

Concepts for orbital warfare

Von Braun developed and published his space station concept during the "coldest" time of the Cold War, when the U.S. government for which he worked put the containment of the Soviet Union above everything else. The fact that his space station – if armed with missiles that could be easily adapted from those already available at this time – would give the United States space superiority in both orbital and orbit-to-ground warfare did not escape him. In his popular writings, von Braun elaborated on them in several of his books and articles, but he took care to qualify such military applications as "particularly dreadful". This much-less-peaceful aspect of von Braun's "drive for space" has been reviewed by Michael J. Neufeld from the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.[85]
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Articles & Essays

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests