Ian Robert Maxwell (10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak-born British-French media proprietor and politician.
Of Jewish descent, he escaped the Nazi occupation of his native Czechoslovakia and joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile during the Second World War. He was decorated after active service in the British Army. In subsequent years he worked in publishing, building up Pergamon Press to a major academic publisher. After serving as a Labour member of Parliament from 1964 to 1970, Maxwell again put all his energy into business, successively buying the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) and Macmillan Inc., among other publishing companies.
Maxwell led a flamboyant life, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, or sailed on his luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter Ghislaine. He was litigious and often embroiled in controversy. In 1989 he had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. In 1991 his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, near the Canary Islands, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in a high-profile funeral attended by members of the Israeli political establishment, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, President Chaim Herzog, and dignitaries like Natan Sharansky.
Maxwell's death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans. His sons briefly attempted to keep the business together, but failed as the news emerged that the elder Maxwell had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies' pension funds. The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992. After Maxwell's death, large discrepancies in his companies' finances were revealed, including his fraudulent misappropriation of the Mirror Group pension fund. His daughter Ghislaine was convicted in 2021 for trafficking young girls to the financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Robert Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch on 10 June 1923 in the small town of Slatinské Doly on the border with Romania, in the region of Carpathian Ruthenia in Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno, Ukraine). His parents were poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews, growing up as the third of their seven children; another brother and sister died in infancy. At birth, Maxwell's father, Mechel Hoch, gave his son the first names Abraham Lajbi but during registration at the town hall, the attending clerk insisted that the name had to be Czech, so he instead chose the names Ján Ludvík. For most of his early life, Maxwell went by Ludvík, though often still called Lajbi by his family, rendering his name as "Jan Ludwig" during World War II.
Like the rest of the then-newly formed Czechoslovakia, the area of Maxwell's birth and upbringing had been part of Austria-Hungary until early November 1918. During this time until just before his birth (1919), the family name had been not Ludvik but Hoch, as per Austro-Hungarian census and registration. The area would later be annexed by Hungary during World War II before being part of the Soviet Union in 1945.
Maxwell's family originated from Maramureș. Maxwell's authorised biography states that he was also a distant relative of Elie Wiesel, but The Dispatch claimed they could find nothing to substantiate such a claim.
Maxwell described his parents as peasant farm labourers, with his father reportedly also serving as a shochet, also working as woodcutter and cattle wholesaler to tanners and butchers. Maxwell's maternal grandfather, Yaacov Schlomovitch, was a merchant who taught his grandson about trading, also using the family home to smuggle alcohol. At the suggestion of his mother, as the eldest son, Maxwell underwent schooling at a yeshiva, learning to read Yiddish, Hebrew, and Czech, with plans for him to become a rabbi. Afterwards, he attended school for three years between the ages of eight and eleven, learning to speak Czech and Russian in classes, as well as German from Carpathian German schoolmates.
In 1938, at age 15, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Maxwell's parents had him quit his job as a salesman and sent him to Budapest. Some biographers claim that Maxwell walked the 443 kilometres (275 mi) on foot while others state that he travelled by train. After briefly living with friends, he disappeared without notice, with Maxwell giving several conflicting accounts, such as that he became a courier for the Czech resistance, which Tom Bower stated had no presence in the city at the time. In May 1940, he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille. Most of Maxwell's relatives were deported to Auschwitz and perished there after Hungary's occupation by Nazi Germany in 1944. Years earlier, Maxwell had escaped to France, with only him and two sisters surviving the Holocaust.
After the fall of France and the British retreat to Britain, Maxwell (using the name "Ivan du Maurier", or "Leslie du Maurier", the surname taken from the cigarette brand Du Maurier) took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak Army, and with 500 other soldiers he was transferred to the British Army, initially to the Royal Pioneer Corps and later to the North Staffordshire Regiment in 1943. He was then involved in action across Europe, from the Normandy beaches to Berlin, and achieved the rank of sergeant. Maxwell gained a commission in 1945 and was promoted to the rank of captain.
In January 1945, Maxwell's heroism in "storming a German machine-gun nest" won him the Military Cross (MC), presented by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. Attached to the Foreign Office, he worked in Berlin during the next two years in the press section. Maxwell naturalised as a British subject on 19 June 1946 and changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell by deed of change of name on 30 June 1948.
In 1945, Maxwell married Elisabeth "Betty" Meynard, a French Protestant, and the couple had nine children over the next sixteen years: Michael, Philip, Ann, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin, and Ghislaine. In a 1995 interview, Elisabeth talked of how they were recreating Maxwell's childhood family who did not survive the Holocaust. Five of his children—Christine, Isabel, Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine—were later employed within his companies. Karine died of leukaemia at age three, while Michael was severely injured in a car crash in 1961, at age 15, when his driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed headlong into another vehicle. Michael never regained consciousness and died seven years later.
After the war, Maxwell used contacts in the Allied-occupation authorities to go into business, becoming the British and US distributor for Springer Verlag, a publisher of scientific books. In 1951, he bought three-quarters of Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher; the remaining quarter was held by the experienced scientific editor Paul Rosbaud. They changed the name of the company to Pergamon Press and rapidly built it into a major academic publishing house. After a disagreement with Maxwell, Rosbaud left in 1956.
In the 1964 general election, representing the Labour Party, Maxwell was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham and re-elected in 1966. He gave an interview to The Times in 1968 in which he said the House of Commons provided him with a problem. "I can't get on with men", he commented. "I tried having male assistants at first. But it didn't work. They tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss." Maxwell lost his seat in 1970 to Conservative challenger William Benyon. He contested Buckingham again in both 1974 general elections, but without success.
At the beginning of 1969, it emerged that Maxwell's attempt to buy the tabloid newspaper News of the World had failed. The Carr family, which owned the newspaper, was incensed at the thought of a Czechoslovak immigrant with socialist views gaining ownership. The board voted against Maxwell's bid without any dissent. The News of the World's editor, Stafford Somerfield, opposed Maxwell's bid in an October 1968 front-page opinion piece in which he referred to Maxwell's Czechoslovak origins and used his birth name. He wrote, "This is a British paper, run by British people ... as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding ... Let us keep it that way". The paper was later purchased by the Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who later that year acquired The Sun, which had also previously interested Maxwell.