personal disputes. Foot said they included Sir Thomas Beecham, Paul Robeson, Haile Selassie and Noël Coward. Beaverbrook himself gave evidence before the inquiry and vehemently denied the allegations; Express Newspapers general manager E. J. Robertson denied that Robeson had been blacklisted, but did admit that Coward had been "boycotted" because he had enraged Beaverbrook with his film In Which We Serve, for in the opening sequence Coward included an ironic shot showing a copy of the Daily Express floating in the dockside rubbish bearing the headline "No War This Year". In the late 1930s, Beaverbrook used his newspapers to promote the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government. The slogan 'There will be no war' was used by the Daily Express. At the time of the Sudetenland crisis, Beaverbrook wrote in a leader: "... do not get caught up in quarrels over foreign boundaries that do not concern you." Beaverbrook was strongly opposed the famous "guarantee" of Poland offered by Chamberlain in the House of Commons on 31 March 1939 under his usual grounds that Britain had no interests in Poland, and no reason to go to war for Poland. Beaverbrook told Maisky: "I want the empire to remain intact, but I don’t understand why for the sake of this we must wage a three-year war to crush “Hitlerism”...Poland, Czechoslovakia? What are they to do with us? Cursed be the day when Chamberlain gave our guarantees to Poland!" On 4 August 1939, a leader in The Daily Express questioned the need for British commitments to Poland as it was declared: "while there are some reasons in favor of an alliance with France...our alliances in Eastern Europe are another matter"." On 7 August 1939, the Daily Express ran a banner headline saying "No War This Year" as it predicated the Danzig crisis would be settled peacefully. In a memo dated 3 March 1943, Beaverbrook was unapologetic about the "no war" headlines as he wrote: "The prophecy proved wrong. The policy, had it been pursued more vigorously might had proved it right". The British historian Daniel Hucker wrote that Beaverbrook was out of touch with the readers of his newspapers in the summer of 1939. Second World War Though Beaverbrook did not welcome the British declaration of war on the Reich on 3 September 1939, he had newspapers take an ultra-patriotic line in supporting the war effort, not least because he knew the