Bedaux was friends with British royalty and Nazis alike, and was a management consultant, big game hunter and explorer.

His father worked for the French railroad system, and though his two brothers Daniel and Gaston became engineers, Charles became a school dropout.

Charles worked a series of menial jobs before befriending Henri Ledoux, a successful pimp from the infamous Pigalle district.

[8][9] Building on their work, he introduced the concept of rating assessment, which led to improvements in the comparability of employee and departmental efficiency.

[20] Major Bedaux clients included DuPont,[21] Imperial Chemical Industries,[14] Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP),[22] Fiat,[23] and Campbell's.

[24] 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.

[28][29] Additionally, in 1934 the introduction of the Bedaux System at Richard Johnson and Nephew in Manchester precipitated a strike which lasted for months.

[9][23] These management interventions were later publicized by the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks analyzed the ramifications of Taylorism at the plant.

[2][10][11] Here, the Bedaux Unit was so successful that it was copied by industrial firms such as Rowntree's of York (a corporate member of the Taylor Society), Mander Brothers of Wolverhampton, and influential consultancies including Urwick, Orr & Partners.

The expedition started at Edmonton, Alberta on 6 July 1934, and their goal was to travel 1500 miles to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia.

[40] The party failed to reach their destination, and the original movie was never made, but in 1995, Canadian director, George Ungar,[41] produced a television biography of Bedaux incorporating Crosby's footage of the expedition, The Champagne Safari (1995).

[44] On 3 June 1937, Charles and Fern Bedaux hosted the wedding of Wallis Simpson and Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor at the château.

[2] Arriving in Berlin that October, the couple were greeted by an SS band playing God Save The King while crowds chanted: We want the Duchess!

Parties and receptions followed, and the Duchess, who had felt snubbed in England, noted with satisfaction that all the leading Nazis bowed or curtsied to her.

The Windsors toured factories, coal mines, and the training school of the elite Death's Head Division of the SS.

[45] The next stage of the trip, the United States, was cancelled due to labor union, press, and public outrage at Bedaux's involvement.

In October 1941 he was designated by the sabotage branch of the Abwehr (Abwehr II) to command a covert mission to Persia (Iran) 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.

[9][51] In December, 1942, shortly after the Allied military landings in North Africa in Operation Torch, Bedaux was in Algeria promoting the construction of water and peanut oil pipelines between West Africa and the Mediterranean coast for the benefit of Allied forces (he had been in contact with various U.S. consular officials about this for some time, hence the U.S. had a thick file on him).

[2] Bedaux was eventually flown to the US, and, awaiting charges of trading with the enemy and treason, killed himself by taking an overdose of barbiturates while in FBI custody in the Dade County Prison in Miami, Florida.

[58][59][60] The Château de Candé is open to public visitors, and the main theme of the tour is the Duke and Duchess' wedding there in 1937.

[63] Bedaux also appears as a thwarted efficiency expert, Monsieur Bedou of Ratio Ltd., in Pierre Boulle's Sacrilege in Malaya (1951).

According to Edwin A. Lahey:"Bedaux submitted a list of names of people who he said would testify favorably as to his character, his integrity and his complete loyalty to the United States.

[72]One editorial, which was titled Dead Men Don't Blab, explicitly suggested this:"It will be too bad if the late Charles E. Bedaux is allowed to sink into limbo without causing more than a one-day ripple in the headlines.

"[73]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 forged documents which had been placed in the UK National Archives.

As part of the police investigation into the presence of the documents, Allen denied knowledge of the forgeries and 'suggested he was the victim of a conspiracy'.