Beverley Baxter

Beverley Baxter
Member of Parliament
In office 1950–1964
Constituency	Southgate
Member of Parliament
In office 1935–1950
Constituency	Wood Green
Personal details
Born	Arthur Beverley Baxter (1891-01-08)8 January 1891 Yorkshire, England
Died	26 April 1964(1964-04-26) (aged 73) London, England
Political party	Conservative
Spouse	Edith Letson ​ (m. 1924)​
Occupation	Journalist, politician

Sir Arthur Beverley Baxter, FRSL (8 January 1891 – 26 April 1964) was a Canadian-born journalist and politician. In the United Kingdom he worked for the Daily Express and as a theatre critic for the London Evening Standard, and was a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Conservative Party from 1935 until his death.

Early life

He was the son of James Bennett Baxter, a Yorkshire-born Methodist who had emigrated to Canada, and his wife Meribah Elizabeth Lawson, born in Toronto. He left Harbord Collegiate Institute at age 15. He worked for the Nordheimer Piano and Music Company selling pianos, and became a sales manager.

In 1915 Baxter enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force of World War I, becoming a signals lieutenant in the 122nd (Muskoka) Battalion, CEF in France. In 1917 he was posted for a time to England. In March 1918 he was again on the Western Front, but contracted influenza and was invalid out back to England again.

Newspaper man

After the war, Baxter settled in London. In 1919 he met fellow Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express. He went to work at the Express, with some reluctance since he had ambitions to be an author, as a leader writer and reporter. Editor R. D. Blumenfeld put Baxter in charge of page 4 of the paper, with the editorial, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor.

Beaverbrook sought to match the circulation of Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail. In 1922 Baxter was appointed the managing editor of the Sunday Express, launched after the war. Under Baxter, the paper became livelier and its features were remarked upon. After two years, he was moved to the same position on the Daily Express, acting as deputy to Blumenfeld. Baxter, nicknamed "Bax" in the office, got on well with both Blumenfeld and Beaverbrook.

In early January 1923, Baxter made a last-minute effort to save the life of Edith Thompson, who had been sentenced to death for murder. Like many others, he was convinced Thompson had been unjustly found guilty in the Bywaters-Thompson trial. In his memoirs, he provides an account of the events, concluding that "on an appointed day we shall rub our eyes and believe that it could only have been in a nightmare that judicial killing was ever countenanced by a supposedly civilised people".

In 1929, when offered a considerable increase in salary to work for the Daily Chronicle group (Inveresk publications), Baxter made the move; however, within months Blumenfeld retired and he was persuaded back to follow him as editor-in-chief of the Daily Express. Baxter increased circulation, which for the first time it exceeded 1,000,000 under his stewardship; in 1933 it topped 2,000,000.

New directions

Baxter left the Beaverbrook stable in 1933, to work as Public Relations counsel for the Gaumont British Picture Corporation Ltd. He was recruited by Allied Newspapers to be an Editorial Adviser in 1935 by Lord Camrose; in 1937 he moved across to Kemsley Newspapers controlled by Lord Kemsley, Camrose's brother. In 1936 he began the "London Letter" series for Maclean's Magazine, reporting on British politics and life to Canadians: it ran to 1960.

In politics

Baxter was selected as Conservative Party candidate for Wood Green in London in 1935. The 1935 general election was called while he was touring in Canada, but he won the seat with a majority of over 21,000. While a Member of Parliament Baxter wrote occasional newspaper articles, particularly for the Daily Sketch, and he became known as a government supporter.

Reviewing Norman Thompson's 2013 book Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream based on Baxter's "London Letters", Daniel Gorman commented in Histoire sociale / Social History that

In his politics, Baxter was a journalistic weathervane. Always a conservative, he variously supported and opposed the successive grandees of the British Conservative party [...]

He noted also that, until the Suez crisis of 1956, Baxter consistently championed the British Empire and Canada's part in it, his views being in line with Beaverbrook's. His maiden speech in December 1935 argued that the problems of depressed areas in Britain could be alleviated by encouraging emigration to the other countries of the British Empire, and he returned to this theme in several later speeches.

During the debates about foreign policy in the late 1930s, Baxter was an advocate of appeasement of Germany. In a debate in July 1938 he called for the United Kingdom to go to Germany helpfully, and not to block Germany wherever she tried to expand. He drew a parallel between Germans and Britons, saying that the two had the same human ambitions and sense of destiny.

World War II

In the early days of the war, Baxter obtained a pledge from the government that there would be no repeat of an incident when the police went to newspaper offices to check on the contents of the next days' papers.

In the spring of 1940, Baxter was an advocate for the internment of aliens, writing in the Sunday Chronicle "I'd Intern My German Friends". Later that year, when internments under Defence Regulation 18B had become numerous, he wrote in the Daily Sketch that Friedelind Wagner had been poorly treated. She had been writing anti-German articles for the Sketch, in which he had been involved.

Baxter supported Neville Chamberlain in the Norway debate of May 1940, and the next morning protested vigorously about the attacks on Chamberlain's character, urging him not to regard the vote as one of censure but to show the courage of David Lloyd George. Chamberlain, however, resigned that day.

The Churchill government then appointed Baxter to an unofficial post with the Ministry of Aircraft Production, where he was responsible for maintaining production of aero-engines. He became a Churchill loyalist; when Sir John Wardlaw-Milne put down a motion of no confidence after the loss of Libya in June 1942, Baxter put down an amendment assuring Churchill of "unqualified support in the introduction of any measures .. for the intensified prosecution of the war". In April 1941 Baxter was in the minority, but with the government, in opposing a motion to keep theatres and cinemas closed on Sundays.

Writing under the pseudonym of Cassius, Michael Foot published an anti-Tory work Brendan and Beverley in 1944, singling out Baxter and Brendan Bracken. It meant he had to give up his position as editor of the Evening Standard, owned by Lord Beaverbrook.

Post-war

Baxter retained his seat at the 1945 general election with a majority reduced to under 6,000. He was mentioned as a potential future Conservative Party leader by Sir Hartley Shawcross in July 1946.

Baxter was part of the large Conservative rebellion against the Anglo-American loan in December 1945. He opposed European integration, and in 1948 was one of eight Conservatives to vote against Marshall Aid (with Max Aitken, Eric Gandar Dower, Harry Legge-Bourke, Anthony Marlowe, Arthur Marsden and Sir John Mellor). He supported the suspension of capital punishment.

Southgate

At the 1950 general election, Baxter moved constituencies to stand for the newly created Southgate constituency. He was always returned with more than 60% of the votes cast. After Churchill returned to power in 1951, Baxter condemned the Foreign Office under the previous Labour government for having been "like a branch of the State Department".

Baxter was given a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours list of 1954. He continued to support the abolition of capital punishment and acted as a sponsor of Bills to that effect brought in by the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, and spent a great deal of the late 1950s campaigning for a reduction in theatre tax. In 1959 he signed a motion deploring the call by some Labour MPs for televising the proceedings of the House of Commons.

London theatre critic

In a foreword to Beverley Baxter's collection of theatre reviews, published in 1949, he writes that he "first did dramatic criticism for the Daily Express 25 years earlier", and was the author of a failed play, It Happened in September, "which made the round of the provinces and arrived in the blackout at St James's Theatre in December 1942. The critics said that I was a bad playwright and I replied with an article in the Evening Standard in which I declared that they were bad critics." Four months later he was appointed by Lord Beaverbrook as theatre critic for the Standard, a post which he held for the next 8 years, combining it with his duties as a Conservative MP for the Wood Green constituency.

Milton Shulman, then the paper's film critic, would fill in whenever Baxter was on holiday or his political commitments made him miss a first night. And as Shulman reports in his 1998 memoirs, he eventually found that "Baxter's ability to attend first nights was becoming somewhat erratic." In fact Shulman was instrumental in Baxter's 1951 downfall. Gavin Lambert had written "a sardonic knifing of all of Fleet Street's working theatre critics but was particularly derisive about the 'merciless volubility' of Beverley Baxter". It was published in an undergraduate magazine Panorama edited by Kenneth Tynan, and Shulman mischievously showed the article to Charles Curran, the features editor, who passed it to Baxter who "was not amused."

About a year later, Baxter was presented with a golden opportunity to get his own back, when he reviewed Tynan's performance as the Player King in Alec Guinness's 1951 production of Hamlet at the New Theatre in London, writing: "I am a man of a kindly nature, who takes no joy in hurting those who are without defence, but Mr Ken Tynan would not get a chance in a village hall unless he was related to the vicar. His performance was quite dreadful"

Tynan responded with an open letter to the Standard, published 22 May 1951, declaring that his performance was "not 'quite dreadful'; it is, in fact, only slightly less than mediocre." This intrigued the Standard's editor Percy Elland who gave Tynan freelance work for the Standard and in July 1951 Beaverbrook appointed him as replacement for Baxter as the paper's theatre critic, a post Tynan held until August 1953.

Last years

In 1961 Baxter broke the whip to support a Conservative backbench amendment to restore corporal punishment for young offenders. He was very concerned at the Macmillan government's application to join the European Communities lest it damage ties with the Commonwealth, and abstained rather than support the government when it was put to the vote in August 1961.

In poor health, Baxter announced that that Parliament was to be his last. He was criticised in January 1963 by the television programme That Was The Week That Was for having made no speeches since the 1959 general election. Baxter died in London before Parliament was dissolved, but no byelection to replace him was held due to the imminence of the general election.

Works

In a profile in The Bookman in 1921, Baxter was quoted as saying that as a "fictionist", his ambition was "to write in such a way as to illuminate ordinary, commonplace life".

• The Blower of Bubbles (1920), stories
• Strange Street (1935), autobiography dealing with Fleet Street rivalries
• First Nights and Noises Off (undated c.1949), collected theatre reviews, portraits by Grant Macdonald.
• First Nights and Footlights (1955), collected theatre reviews, illustrated with 18 production photographs.

Family

In 1924 Baxter married Edith Christina Letson from Vancouver, sister of Harry Letson. They had a son and a daughter. Clive Baxter, the son, was a journalist with the Financial Post, married to Cynthia Molson, sister of Eric Molson.

References

• The Times, especially the Obituary of 28 April 1964
• "Who Was Who", A&C Black
• "War in Fleet Street" (Time archive, Monday, 25 September 1933, page 2)
• The Life of Kenneth Tynan by Kathleen Tynan, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1987) ISBN 0-297-79082-X
• Kenneth Tynan: Letters edited by Kathleen Tynan, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1994) ISBN 0-297-81076-6
• Marilyn, Hitler and Me: The Memoirs of Milton Shulman, Andre Deutsch (1998) ISBN 0-233-99408-4

External links

• Works by Beverley Baxter at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Beverley Baxter at Internet Archive