Lord Beaverbrook’s Young Crusaders
Inspired by the fashion for Boy Scout groups, Lord Beaverbrook started his own patriotic youth movement in support of the Empire Free Trade Crusade.
The doors of the Queen’s Hall, London, opened at 7.15pm on 16 April 1930. The evening featured a performance from Ambrose’s band – the largest jazz band in the country, with 33 musicians – as well as ‘up to the minute’ community singing conducted by Gibson Young. The audience of 3,000 under-25s, ‘most of them well known in London society’, danced along to both. A reporter from the Daily Express reported the following day: ‘One has a sentimental attachment for the old songs and the old tunes, but, for all their lilt, and their melody, they do not move to the pace which this postwar life demands.’
This might sound like a trendy social gathering, but it was actually the launch of the Young Crusaders, an initiative attached to Lord Beaverbrook’s Empire Crusade. That the Express gave it such glowing coverage, with similar front-page articles in the run up to, and in the days following, the event, was only to be expected. The Express, alongside the Sunday Express and the Evening Standard, were owned by Beaverbrook and he used his newspapers as political weapons.
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