The Globe was a British newspaper that ran from 1803 to 1921. It was founded by Christopher Blackett, the coal mining entrepreneur from Wylam, Northumberland, who had commissioned the first commercially useful adhesion steam locomotives in the world. It merged with the Pall Mall Gazette in 1921. Under the ownership of Robert Torrens during the 1820s it supported radical politics, and was regarded as closely associated with Jeremy Bentham. By the 1840s it was more mainstream and received briefings from within the Whig administration. In 1871 it was owned by a Tory group headed by George Cubitt, who brought in George Armstrong as editor. It was controlled by Max Aitken shortly before World War I.

William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, generally known as Lord Beaverbrook, was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century. His base of power was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the Daily Express, which appealed to the conservative working class with intensely patriotic news and editorials. During the Second World War, he played a major role in mobilising industrial resources as Winston Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production.