THERE WAS A WAR ON
, and Max was still in the thick of government. He was a propagandist for Canadian efforts (as mentioned, his title was Canadian War Representative) to such a degree that he was acting almost as High Commissioner for Canada—though Canada already had one. Besides entertaining in his Hyde Park Hotel chambers, he had time to write a three-volume collection called
Canada in Flanders
, and more than any of his Canadian detractors (ever), he made sure that Canadian stories and contributions to the war effort were known and published in British papers. If he embellished, good for him. So little about us had ever been embellished before, or was after.
The Canadian government had put him in charge of creating the Canadian War Records Office in London in 1915. He wisely used some of the funds he was allotted to
commission paintings of battles fought by Canadian troops—like Vimy Ridge and Ypres—by painters like Augustus John (who today is famous for painting portraits of poets like Yeats and Dylan Thomas) and Wyndham Lewis (a man who had connections with, and spent time in, Canada). These paintings, which are some of the first to show the real face of war, are startling in their depiction of what battle actually looked like, and it is a great credit to Beaverbrook that some say this effort helped develop modern Canadian art. This is something for which he gets very little or no credit now, and which no one at the time, besides him, thought of doing.
Toward the end of the war, Lloyd George’s government made him minister of propaganda, which Max renamed subtly enough minister of information. He was offered this position, in my mind, because Lloyd George feared Max’s paper and its influence if it turned against him.
But let us ask this. Why was he made minister of propaganda? Because it was an unsavoury position—think of Hitler’s minister of propaganda. It allowed others, who had already heard he was unsavoury, to believe he fit the image they wanted to give him. Did Max know this? Well, he did change the name to minister of information.
Max did this job with zeal, but of course he did not have the free hand he had had when dealing with Canadian
command. And, after Max brought Lord Northcliffe of
The Times
on board, some in the House of Commons roared foul that two newspaper barons with ties to the government were allowed to embellish the progress of the war. Lord Salisbury (the son of the former prime minister) stated that Max Aitken was a very wicked man.
Asked to prove it, he simply said: “Oh, just ask anyone in Canada.”
“Lord Salisbury is a vile landowner—ask any one of his tenants,” Max quipped.
But this is the kind of admonition he had to face, and he began to fight back as ruthlessly as he could. And, I might add, why shouldn’t he?
THERE ARE PICTURES
of him at spas with his children, Peter and Max, and later on, looking out over seacoast resorts by himself or attended by butlers or advisers. Now and again there is a picture of him with a woman of interest, like his lover Jean Norton. As he grew older, he wore those large sunhats that made him seem a comic little fellow, half-hidden, with a playful smile. At times the smile seems to be a plea, maybe for understanding or a truce of some kind.
As much as he was part of the great world, he is seldom pictured in groups of people. Usually there are only one or
two others, unless he is trying to stump for some cause like Empire Free Trade. This does not imply he was not happy with things. He was an original, oddity, and outcast, all at the same time. An outcast tends to become used to it. Max learned to delight in it. He irritated the mighty and confused the poor, so that both saw him as a peculiarity. As he said of his sons, they would have been much better off going to Harkins Academy, in Newcastle, than to Eton, where three-quarters of his enemies had gone. So, although he took his children to resorts, he must have seen in them the faces of those who were trying to hold him back. And he bullied them because of it.
In certain respects, though, he must have been very lonely. From the time he was twelve, he prosecuted his life from no vantage point but self-will. Lonely? One just has to look over the wreckage of his life, his marriage, and his career.
There is a story of him, one night at a dinner, making fun of many of those titled men who had stabbed him in the back, using quips and barbs they could not answer, in order to entertain a young actress who was sitting beside him. They had titles and no money, he claimed, and they hated his money and begrudged him his title. They were men who, as Peter Howard said, had lost their fortunes, or their fathers’
fortunes, and had no ability to make another, so they cursed the man who made his own, and came to them from across the sea (from that land of wolves and primitive Redmen).
The young actress said nothing to him as he used his scathing wit against them. Not for the longest time. Then she turned her pretty little head, and said:
“My dear sir, you are making fun of who you paid to belong to.”
He wasn’t behaving like a Brit, he was behaving like an American, and they hated him for that too. Or, I should say, to give credit where it is due, he was in a way behaving like a Canadian. It was like the old joke: A Scotsman was asked during the war how he could tell a Brit from an American from a Canadian. The Scot replied that a Brit walked into a bar as if he’d like to own it. An American walked into a bar as if he owned it. A Canadian walked into a bar—he didn’t give a fuck who owned it. There was that about Canadians—back then.
Cold, dreary, foggy London in the war. The great monuments are shrouded; there are dirigibles in the sky. It must have been in the back of little Max’s mind when he looked out the window of his London hideaway—like a spectre in the fog itself: David Lloyd George’s handsome face with its drooping moustache, and his radical posturing. (That was it—the radical posture! As Churchill said of Gandhi, so Max Aitken must have thought of Lloyd George—another con man).
He must have also thought of his good wife, Gladys— perhaps a better wife than people like either Beaver or I deserve—preparing to campaign for him, and then him having to tell her to let it go and step aside, for he had been stabbed in the back by the crème de la crème of British society. No sir, you could never close the drapes on that!
So, after a time, Prime Minister Lloyd George was no longer pleased with our little Max Aitken from far-off Newcastle,
New Brunswick, on the Miramichi. Soon enough Prime Minister David Lloyd George was complaining about him. Complaining about him taking his own view of things, independent of the government. And there was something else. That damned paper, the
Daily Express
, and Max’s wish to rupture the cozy alliance between Liberal Lloyd George and Conservative Bonar Law, the one man Lloyd George feared. (He feared Law so much that he often asked Beaver to go to Law’s house to break bad news, such as the reinstating of the much-hated Winston Churchill into the wartime cabinet.)
Ah, but wasn’t that cozy alliance one that Max helped form?
Aitken stayed at his apartment in grimy old London and waited. And watched. And plotted. Now, he didn’t plot directly. No, like a street fighter, he was a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy. A bottle over the head at the right time.
Besides, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t try to bring down this coalition while there was a war.
But the war—as awful as it was, and as long as it did last, and as many empires as it did manage to destroy—did not last for ever. It was over in November 1918, and Max had his papers—and as anyone who ever read anything by him could tell you, one knew when he wrote something, or, even worse, had something written.
As early as August 1918, Max was allowing certain editorials to be printed in the
Express
that would cause the coalition government embarrassment and discomfort.
In one such incident, Lloyd George sent Churchill (now back in cabinet, and Beaverbrook’s one remaining Liberal friend) to ask for an explanation about an editorial that was as cutting as it was truthful. The editorial stated that the tottering Liberals were saved from defeat only by the outbreak of world war in 1914 and certain people’s (i.e., Lord Beaverbrook’s) gracious help. And this in an editorial in a paper owned by a man who was still minister of information for the sitting coalition government.
Beaverbrook would not retract or condemn the editorial, nor would he disclaim credit for it. This is how tough the little bastard was—staring down both Churchill and David Lloyd George at the same time.
As far as Churchill was concerned, as is suggested by Peter Howard and others, this was “a blatant form of political rebellion,” and he cautioned Max that he would be sorry to have to deliver this news to the prime minister. Still Max would not draw back. And any Miramicher can understand why. A year and a half before, he had been in a better position in politics than Winston, and had in fact advised him on how to save his career. Now
Churchill was once again in power. No, Max could not draw back!
When the news was delivered, it was reported that Lloyd George decided to let it go. He had enough fights on his hands without taking on Aitken, and he knew he needed the paper’s support—or at least its indifference to his political aims. Max knew, in his petulant way, that he had ruffled the feathers of the bird he wanted to bring down. But it would take more than one shot.
MAX AITKEN RESIGNED
from office as minister of information in October 1918, due to ill health. Everyone thought he was faking, but he was very ill and, through to the end of the war in November, was in serious jeopardy of losing his life to an abscessed tooth. His resignation, though, also meant that he could turn his full attention to the flaws of a government of which he, up until that time, had been a member.
“Beaverbrook now seemed not merely independent of the Government, but hostile to it, and it was hard to believe that he had once been the intimate friends of Cabinet Ministers,” A.J.P. Taylor writes about this period. But men in both parties—those “intimate friends” had dealt him a terrible blow, had kept him on the outside, ridiculed his Empire Free Trade platform and his paper, and
for almost ten years had besmirched his name and his faroff Canada. Now they blamed him for having the audacity to fight back.
Max used his paper as a weapon. In fact, why publish a paper that disagreed with your own opinions? No newspaper baron in his right mind would do so. Simply put, he felt an intrusive wartime coalition government was one thing—but a government should not be interfering with an average citizenry after the war, nor should it send more British and Canadian troops in to fight alongside the White Russians in their war against the Bolsheviks. (They were sent.) It was bad for business and bad for everything else, and his was not the only newspaper that wrote this. His was simply the loudest.
There is an aside here: Max and Russia. Max was secretly fascinated with Bolshevism, and even at times applauded it. Perhaps he was not as enthusiastic as Bernard Shaw or other artists (who did not seem to realize that, if they lived in Soviet Russia, they would be the first to disappear), but it seems he did look upon it as a legitimate ideology. He was always hesitant to oppose it. There is, however, the great quip he made in Glasgow, while stumping for Free Trade a few years later. When a Communist shouted him down, saying, “Beaver, have you been to
Russia? There is no unemployment in Russia,” Max said, “Yes, I have, and you are right—there is no unemployment in Russia.” He paused, and then added, “I’ve been to the Glasgow jail, and there is no unemployment there either.”
I think this was part of his general perversity—to argue any side that rankled those he was arguing with at the time.
Unfortunately for Max, in 1922, just when it seemed that Bonar Law, who had now led the Conservative Party since 1912, might be able to break free of the coalition and lead the Conservative Party to victory, poor health made Law step aside. That left in the running those whom Max distrusted.
Austin Chamberlain, Max’s enemy from the party leadership race of 1912, became leader of the Conservative Party within the House of Commons in 1922, and Chamberlain was inclined, as Peter Howard said, to support the coalition. And of course he hated Max Aitken for keeping him from the leadership. But as Max upped his editorial displeasure with the coalition, Chamberlain, in order to embarrass the press baron, suggested that the government was unsuitable to Beaverbrook only because he had businesses and oil interests in the East of which England disapproved. Max had no Eastern oil interests. This was a lie, and one that seriously discredited Max Aitken’s motives.
The slander angered Max enough so that, as Peter Howard states, he went to visit Bonar Law. Citing the disrespect he had for Chamberlain, “a yes man” for Lloyd George, he convinced Bonar Law to come out of retirement to be the saviour of the Conservative Party.
Ill and elderly, Bonar Law came back in June 1922 and opposed Chamberlain in a leadership runoff over the very fact of the coalition. The coalition finally fell. In the next general election, the Liberals went down to defeat.
It was a horrendous election. William Manchester writes that Churchill’s wife, Clementine, campaigning for her Liberal husband in Ireland, was spit upon. The noble local Irish paper made a point of mentioning that she carried “her un-baptized baby in her arms.” Churchill himself was under threat of death, and had armed guards at his door. Beaverbrook of course did not wish this. But he spent money to help the Tory candidates wherever he could. So, in the election of 1922, Bonar Law became what Max had wanted him to be since 1912, prime minister of Great Britain.
Winston’s son, Randolph Churchill, stated in his book
Lord Derby, “King of Lancashire”
that “the prime mover and principal agent in the plan to bring down the coalition Government” was Lord Beaverbrook.
Max would become known forever as what Jenkins liked to call, in his biography of Churchill, “a bounder” and a deeply distrusted press baron. And this is much how he is perceived today, even by many in our hometown.