One of the Commonwealth's best-known publishers, politicians and philanthropists, William Maxwell Aitken was born in Maple. The son of the Reverend William Aitken, a Presbyterian minister, he was educated in Newcastle, New Brunswick to which his family moved in 1880. After a highly successful career in Canada as financier he entered the British House of Commons in 1910 as a strong advocate of Imperial Preference and was raised to the peerage in 1917 as Lord Beaverbrook. He later became the principal British publisher of mass-circulation newspapers. During the Second World War Lord Beaverbrook was a member of the British War Cabinet and is best remembered as the Minister of Aircraft Production who organized the production of the fighter aircraft which won the Battle of Britain.