Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook as his Minister of Aircraft Production from May 1940. Churchill and others later praised his Ministerial contributions. 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". 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. Aitken was born in Maple, Ontario, Canada, in 1879, one of the ten children of William Cuthbert Aitken, a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister
Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook Gazette". In 1907 he founded the Montreal Engineering Company. 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. In 1910–1911 Aitken acquired a number of small regional cement plants in Canada, including 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