Charles Bedaux


Charles Eugène Bedaux was a French-American millionaire who made his fortune developing and implementing the work measurement aspect of scientific management, notably the Bedaux System. Considered one of the most eccentric millionaires of the early twentieth century, Bedaux was friends with British royalty and Nazis alike, and was a management consultant, big game hunter and explorer.

Early years

Charles Bedaux was born in the Charenton-le-Pont commune of Paris, France. Little is known about his early life but his brother Gaston later recorded that in 1903, Charles dropped out of Lycée Jean-Baptiste-Say in Paris where he had been studying engineering.
Charles worked a series of menial jobs before befriending Henri Ledoux, a successful pimp from the infamous Pigalle district. The mysterious Ledoux apparently taught Bedaux lessons on proper dress, confidence and street-fighting, but was murdered in 1906.
What is verified is that in 1906, Charles moved to the United States, where he became a United States citizen, married, and had a son, Charles Emile Bedaux. He would later claim in interviews to have worked as a restaurant bottle-washer, a sandhog, and at the New Jersey Worsted Mills in Hoboken.

The Bedaux B

Bedaux was one of the leading contributors in the field of work measurement or labor measurement, one strand of the scientific management movement's influence. In this, he was strongly influenced by F. W. Taylor's book Shop Management, particularly Taylor's time study practices, and Charles E. Knoeppel's writings on industrial layout and routing.
Building on these authors, Bedaux introduced the concept of rating assessment, which led to improvements in the comparability of employee and departmental efficiency. He named this the "Bedaux System of Human Power Measurement". The distinguishing feature of the Bedaux System, which advanced it beyond these earlier scientific management practitioners, was in its use of the Bedaux Unit or B, a universal measure for all manual work.
Bedaux also mimicked Frank Gilbreth by introducing a motion study Kodascope package which he propagated with an early Bedaux client, Kodak.

Management consultancy

Bedaux became associated with one of Taylor's circle, Harrington Emerson, whose consultancy, Emerson Consulting, Bedaux emulated in sectors additional to engineering. In 1916 he established a consulting firm in Cleveland, the Chas. E. Bedaux Company.
Early U.S. clients were in the furniture assembly and rubber sectors of Grand Rapids, Michigan. His consultancy's slogan was Bedaux Measures Labor and its logo incorporated an egg timer motif.
The Bedaux consultancy was one of the first of its kind and within a decade its success allowed for the creation of a string of consultancy firms across the United States, Europe, and eventually throughout Africa, India, Australia and the Orient administered by the parent company, Bedaux Internationale.
Major Bedaux clients included DuPont, Imperial Chemical Industries, Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Fiat, and Campbell's.

Labor resistance

The Bedaux system was introduced at Campbell's in 1927, where B standards were 'the cause of the majority of the shop floor battles between management and labor' for years. In 1929, the Taylor Society supported Southern textile workers in their strike against the Bedaux System, which textile workers believed was 'even worse than the old "Taylor Stop-Watch System"'. There was also a long series of labor disputes in relation to Bedaux and the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen in the U.S. Northwest lumber industry from 1931-5.
Bedaux Britain had several labor issues: in 1929, there was a strike over the Bedaux System at the Rover plant in Coventry. In winter 1931-2, women workers struck over the introduction of the Bedaux System at Wolsey in Leicester. Additionally, in 1934 the introduction of the Bedaux System at Richard Johnson and Nephew in Manchester precipitated a strike which lasted for months. In this case, the wiredrawers' union took their employers to court over the Bedaux System but eventually lost their case.
One of Bedaux's principal engagements in Italy was at the iconic Fiat plant in Turin, whose founder Giovanni Agnelli was also head of the Società Italiana Bedaux. These management interventions were later made famous by the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks analyzed the ramifications of Taylorism at the plant. The Bedaux System also met with resistance at the Pertusola mines in Sardinia.

Bedaux Britain Ltd.

Of Bedaux's business empire, Bedaux Britain was particularly lucrative. Here, the Bedaux Unit was so successful that it was copied by industrial firms such as Rowntree's of York, Mander Brothers of Wolverhampton, and influential consultancies including Urwick, Orr & Partners.
Indeed, Bedaux Britain formed the basis for all four of the 'Big Four' European consultancies in the postwar period: Associated Industrial Consultants, Urwick, Orr & Partners, Production-Engineering and PA Consulting.
In focusing on factory floor and office efficiency issues, the 'Big Four' Bedauxist consultancies were successful across Western Europe until the 1960s, when they were largely overtaken by U.S. consultancies such as McKinsey & Company, whose efforts were in higher-value activities such as strategy and restructuring.

The Bedaux Canadian Sub-Arctic Expedition

The Bedaux Canadian Sub-Arctic Expedition was the grand title Bedaux gave to the expedition he formed to cross the wilderness of Northern British Columbia, Canada in 1934. Mostly, the expedition was a publicity stunt, but it was also formed to test out the new Citroën half-track cars that were being developed by Bedaux's friend André Citroën.
Key points in the trip were filmed by Academy Award winning cinematographer from Hollywood, Floyd Crosby, who would later be praised for his work on High Noon. Also along for the trip were several dozen Alberta cowboys and a large film crew. To map the route of the expedition, the Canadian government sent along two geographers, Frank Swannell and Ernest Lemarque. The expedition started off at Edmonton, Alberta on 6 July 1934 and their goal was to travel 1500 miles to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia. Much of the trip would have to be made through regions that were relatively uncharted and had no trails.
The party failed to reach their destination and the original movie was never made, but in 1995, Canadian director, George Ungar, produced a television biography of Bedaux incorporating Crosby's footage of the expedition, The Champagne Safari.
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The Duke and Duchess of Windsor

Bedaux purchased the sixteenth-century Château de Candé, in France, and lived there with his American second wife, the former Fern Lombard, a daughter of lawyer James Lombard of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The couple purchased the château in 1927 and renovated it, completing work in 1930.
On 3 June 1937, Charles and Fern Bedaux hosted the wedding of Wallis Warfield and Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor at the château. Bedaux later arranged the couple's visit to the Third Reich, where they publicly met the Führer, Adolf Hitler.

The Duke and Duchess's U.S.A. tour

The next stage of the trip, the United States, was called off due to labor union, press and public outrage at Bedaux's involvement. He was quickly demonized in the media around the globe. Specifically, the Baltimore Federation of Labor publicly attacked the 'emissaries of dictatorships or uniformed sentimentalists' and called the Bedaux System a 'vicious adaptation of the Taylor System'.
From then on, commentators conceptually linked Bedaux and his B system with fascism, and Taylor's remaining supporters, particularly those in the Taylor Society, distanced themselves from Bedaux.
The fiasco prompted many employers using the Bedaux System, and those derived from it, to change its terminology to more neutral and administrative language. This goes some way to explain why historical research into the enduring influence of the Bedaux System and its Bedaux Unit has been reported as difficult to undertake.

Second World War activity

When Paris was occupied by the Germans during World War II, Bedaux became acquainted with leading Nazi and Vichy figures. After the fall of France in 1940, he was appointed as an economic advisor to Vichy and the Reich.
Bedaux's wife, Fern, and her sister, Eve Duez, were interned briefly in Paris during the war but were soon released through their connections to the German government in France.
In 1941, Bedaux experimented with a political-economic system of his own invention, Equivalism, in Roquefort, Vichy France. Recent research has shown that the experiments amounted to tinkering which locals hardly noticed.
Also in 1941, in France, there was a violent coal strike over the Bedaux System in the Nord and Pas de Calais in May and June.
Bedaux's German connections were not restricted to Occupied France. In October 1941 he was designated by the sabotage branch of the Abwehr to command a covert mission to Persia to capture the refinery at Abadan from his former client, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and protect it from Allied bombardment prior to a planned German military invasion of Iraq and Persia. By the end of 1942, however, strategic events had rendered the operation unworkable, and Bedaux was dropped by Berlin. The countersabotage plan then became obsolete, though it looked suspicious when Bedaux was later investigated by the FBI and MI5.
Despite Bedaux's cultivation of relationships with various Abwehr and Nazi Party officials, declassified National Archives and Records Administration records indicate that Bedaux did not have dealings with the upper echelons of the Party or with officials of the Sicherheitsdienst.

Bedaux's arrest and suicide

On 13 January 1943 Bedaux was in Algeria allegedly supervising the construction of a German pipeline when he and his son were arrested by the Americans. He was kept in custody without charge for a year. Bedaux was eventually flown to the US, and, awaiting charges of trading with the enemy and treason, committed suicide using an overdose of barbiturates while in FBI custody in Miami, Florida. His death featured prominently in the contemporary media, particularly an influential New Yorker biographical trilogy by Janet Flanner. Here, Flanner attacked the Bedaux System and Bedaux Unit as, despite Bedaux's verbose claims to originality, she argued that they did not differ 'much from the old Frederick Winslow Taylor shop-management system of the nineties'.

Posthumous reputation

The circumstances of Bedaux's death and his posthumous influence remain subjects of research inquiry. Despite his contemporary prominence in the media, and in business and consultancy circles, Bedaux did not feature alongside such figures as F.W. Taylor, Hans Renold and Charles Myers in the Making of Scientific Management trilogy by Lyndall Urwick and E.F.L. Brech. He was also not present in Urwick's comprehensive management prosopography The Golden Book of Management. It remains controversial as to why.
It has also been suggested that, in an attempt to restore Bedaux's reputation, the French government awarded Bedaux a posthumous Légion d'honneur on the grounds that he had actually hampered the Germans and guarded Jewish property. More recent research has been unable to prove the existence of this award.
A street in Tours, the Avenue Charles Bedaux, was named after Bedaux from 1966-2018.
The Château de Candé is open to public visitors and is themed around the Duke and Duchess's 1937 wedding. Many of Bedaux's possessions are on display there.

Bedaux in popular culture

Bedaux's most famous depiction in interwar culture was as a crackpot inventor in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times who presents a 'Beddoes' or 'Billowes' 'Feeding Machine' to Chaplin's employer. The malfunctioning contraption was then demonstrated on a restrained and tormented Chaplin.
In addition, the 'Bedaux belt' featured in George Orwell's Inside the Whale, alongside other items and people, such as Hitler and Stalin, which Orwell saw as indicative of the dark side of the period.
Following his death in 1944, Bedaux features by name in Upton Sinclair's 1945 novel Dragon Harvest.
Bedaux also appears as a thwarted efficiency expert, Monsieur Bedou of Ratio Ltd., in Pierre Boulle's Sacrilege in Malaya.

Conspiracy theories

Several conspiracy theories surround Bedaux's life and death. They usually situate Bedaux as a conduit between the Nazi and British elites, who facilitated important events in World War Two such as the fall of France and the alleged murder of Heinrich Himmler by British intelligence operatives. These stories stem both from contemporary sensationalist media stories following Bedaux's well-publicised suicide and in publications which followed the FBI's release of the Bedaux files in the early 1980s. These claims have been subject to recent investigation.
Between 2005 and 2008 this issue was compounded by the discovery that key elements of Martin Allen's Hidden Agenda trilogy were based on twenty-nine forgeries located in the UK National Archives. These forged papers explicitly implicated Bedaux high in the elite echelons of the Third Reich. As part of the police investigation into the case, Allen denied knowledge of the forgeries and 'suggested he was the victim of a conspiracy'.