Publishers: Larger Than Death

He spoke with neither resignation nor despair. But there was pride in a long lifetime of accomplishment, and his voice rang with the dauntless curiosity of an old man facing the diminishing future. "This is my final word," said William Maxwell Aitken, the first Baron Beaverbrook, at his 85th birthday party (TIME, June 5). It was, indeed, his valedictory. Last week at Cherkley, his gloomy Victorian estate in Surrey, the Beaver's heart, which had endured so long despite bouts with asthma, sciatica and gout, finally failed.

From longtime admirers and antagonists tributes flowed in for the man who put a unique and inexpungeable stamp on British history. "I am deeply grieved at the loss of my oldest and closest friend," said Winston Churchill. "The Daily Telegraph," said that paper, "found itself on the opposite side of almost every major argument in which he and his newspapers engaged. But there was never any disputing the deep impact which he had upon his times." Wrote the Times: "He was that increasingly rare phenomenon in a standardized age, a personality quite uncramped by convention or inhibition."

Dragooning a Voice. "Journalism is the most fascinating of all professions," Beaverbrook once wrote, "and if I had my time over again, I would give my whole life to it." But nearly half his life lay behind him when he bought the London Daily Express in 1916, not to turn journalist but to dragoon a public voice for his political ambitions. The self-made Canadian multimillionaire aspired to nothing less for himself than a tenancy at No. 10 Downing Street, nothing less for England than perpetuation of the British Empire. Both dreams went glimmering. He could take a strong hand in changing British governments, and did three times, but he never headed one himself. He could thunder the cause of Empire in the pages of the Express, but the cause was doomed.

There were compensating rewards. The Express, a pale failure when Beaverbrook bought it, grew under his kinetic stewardship into a popular giant of 4,300,000 circulation; its pages provided all Fleet Street with daily lessons in the craft of journalism. When World War II began, Britain's Finest Hour was also his; as Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production, he put up the cloud of Spitfires that saved the day. These and other accomplishments invested him with the quality of living legend. "Positive, bee," wrote a columnist in a Canadian paper, "comparative, Beaver; superlative, Beaverbrook." Sir Beverley Baxter, M.P. and once an Express managing editor, called him a cross "between a magician and an avalanche."

No Cease-Fire. Neither praise nor censure concerned the Beaver much.

"Fire and be damned! That's what I believe," he told a recent visitor. It was an article of his faith, one that he carried like a battle pennant every foot of the way that led from the Presbyterian minister's manse in Newcastle, New Brunswick, where he spent his youth. Conscious of his place in Britain's history, he wrote a dozen reminiscent books as an obligation to posterity, and had two more in progress when he died. "I belong to the past," he had said recently.