In so, so many ways, Max Aitken’s success came from his failure to do what he wanted to do.
He was born in Ontario and moved with his family to Newcastle, New Brunswick, when he was one year old. He started his own paper when he was eleven, tried law and political campaigning at seventeen, sold bonds when he was twenty, became a millionaire at twenty-five, went to England, was knighted at thirty, and became a Lord of the Realm at thirty-eight. He was instrumental in helping one of the great politicians of the era, Liberal David Lloyd George (a man who would betray him soon after), become prime minister of Britain in 1916. He did the same for his friend and fellow New Brunswicker Conservative Bonar Law in 1922, had a decades-long feud with Conservative British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and was a lifelong friend of Sir Winston Churchill. (At times the only friend Churchill had.) He was courted by and counselled kings and statesmen, bedded scores of women, was influential in helping
artists create modern Canadian art, and was the greatest newspaperman in the world by the age of forty. He was by far the most influential and important Canadian of the twentieth century and, arguably, could be credited with almost single-handedly saving Western civilization.
Yet he was reviled in his adopted country of England, looked upon as a colonial, and hated by the aristocracy as an upstart. He was snubbed by those he most wanted to impress, and betrayed by those he trusted and helped. The heroic and historic role he played on the world stage from 1910 to 1945 is almost forgotten in Canada (like so much else about our history). And of all the things he hoped for, the one he most wanted, the thing for which he, as a financial genius, would have given up everything else—an Empire Free Trade agreement between Britain and her Commonwealth of Nations (much like the Free Trade agreement in place now between Canada and the United States)—never came to be.
The people he knew in Canada and Europe were the Who’s Who of the political, financial, and artistic world for three generations. Even if their voices are now receding into history, make no mistake about this. When I mention David Lloyd George or Stanley Baldwin or Bonar Law or First Sea Lord Fisher, I am naming some of the most influential men
in a Britain that still maintained its Empire. This was a British Empire still at its height (if we consider its height from Waterloo to the Somme), and in a way it was Max Aitken’s as much as anyone’s.
There were three great moments in his life, intersected by others almost as momentous.
The first was the Canada Cement fiasco of 1910, which made him a multimillionaire.
The second was the part he played, as a sitting member of the Conservative Party in the British House of Commons, in the ascendancy of Machiavellian Liberal radical David Lloyd George to the position of prime minister in a war-weary England of 1916.
The third was his being called to cabinet by Winston Churchill as minister of aircraft production, and then as minister of war production and supply from 1940 to 1942.
Among these significant events were many others: buying and selling Rolls-Royce and being knighted in 1910; being elected to the British parliament in 1912; buying the
Daily Express
in 1916; being granted a lordship in 1917; becoming minister of propaganda (or minister of information) in the First World War coalition cabinet of David Lloyd George; bedding various glamorous women; and failing in his Empire Free Trade campaign, on which all his hopes rested.
He had a face that, even into late middle age, suggested an exuberant imp, an arrogant scallywag. In a way he never escaped his habit of insolence and a feeling of being able to slingshot over others to get what he wanted. Nor did he ever escape his fascination with his own ability, and a tendency to dogged self-promotion. At times it didn’t even matter who his audience was—as long as he had one. He was a vaudevillian, always on stage.
In his memoir,
My Early Life
, he mentions Sir Winston Churchill watching him writing one day, and asking him what he was doing:
“Writing,” Beaverbrook said.
“Writing—about what?”
“Me.”
“A good subject,” Churchill responded. “I have been writing about me for fifty years, and with excellent results.”
The son of a Presbyterian minister, William Aitken, Max Aitken was born in Maple, Ontario, in May l879, and arrived
at the newly built manse in Newcastle, New Brunswick, with his family in l880. This was the Newcastle he loved and romanticized in stories he told to people like Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It was in Newcastle that all his formative learning took place. This was where he started out as a newspaper owner at the age of eleven, and, at seventeen, ran the first political campaign of R.B. Bennett, future prime minister of Canada. Beaverbrook—the name he would later take for himself— was first the name of the stream he, and most everyone else from the town (including me), fished in as a child.
He donated much to this town of Newcastle, and to its twin town of Chatham. There was the town hall. There was the Sinclair Rink, where I played hockey, named in honour of a Mr. Sinclair who first loaned him money to travel to a university he never cared for. There was the Beaverbrook Rink in Chatham, and the Old Manse Library, established in his former home. It boasted signed first editions of books by H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling—men he knew, but whose books he never read (too wordy for him)—which I found in the second-floor reading rooms when I was a boy. (His own room, a little alcove of a place up on the third floor, had been turned into the French section of the library. That was where I first found Montaigne and Villon—and
where I hid during school hours. Just as Max ran from the house into the street to escape the harshness of his lessons, so I often ran from the school to his room to do exactly the same thing.)
When he was born, Edison was introducing the light bulb, and Hitler was not yet a glimmer in a Bavarian’s eye. Hitler would be born in l889. Winston Churchill had been born five years before Aitken, in 1874, at Blenheim Palace. Joseph Stalin, destined to become the supreme dictator of the Soviet Union, was born six months after Beaverbrook, in December 1879. I mention these three men in conjunction with Beaverbrook, not because he played as great a part in twentieth-century history as they did, but because he played an indelible part in their achieving—or not achieving— certain of their aims. Of course he was closest to Sir Winston Churchill, a fact pointed to by anyone who admires Beaverbrook for his political savvy and his ability to survive the storm-tossed politics of the age. (Of course, one must admire Churchill for this to be the case, and I admire Churchill a good deal.)
When it comes to growing up far from the centre of the world, and overcoming this obstacle to become instrumental in it, he had most in common with Comrade Stalin of the Soviet Union. Beaverbrook came from the same kind
of backwater stock as Stalin, which would alienate him from many of those in the polished circles he would attain. (He would always be set apart, first as a Maritimer and then as a Canadian.) Both were disliked for their accents as much as their demeanour. Both were small, both were tough, both were despised by their own children, both were feared—though here, Joseph Stalin, as one of the greatest malevolent presences of the twentieth century, takes the lead.
Of course, Churchill and Beaverbrook, flaws aside, helped to hold the world together in 1940, when Hitler and Stalin had traded ambassadors. There is a moment here when a reader might say Beaverbrook does not belong in this company; there is a moment when, as financier of the Spitfire aircraft and ferry campaign for bombers, one may not only think but be grateful that he does. For a while Beaverbrook held the same position in Britain as Albert Speer did for Hitler after 1943 (without the slave labour) or that Malenkov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and others did for Stalin during the same period (without all the terrible internecine spilling of blood).
BECAUSE HIS FATHER
was distant and austere (one Aitken sibling remembers that the word
love
was never mentioned
in the house), Max Aitken would look for a father figure most of his life. In fact this was one of his main quests: to prove himself worthy to an ideal father. And in some ways it was his undoing.
His small bedroom on the third floor of the Old Manse Library (which is now the Beaverbrook Museum) looks down the hill toward Pleasant Street, to the town’s financial district, where shipbuilders and bank owners lived. Night after night, long after his parents thought him asleep, he must have stared out that small window toward the great town below, wondering about all the lively events taking place. He must have heard the trains in the distance, coming and going from Montreal to Halifax and back. Like most boys, he must have longed to be outside when he was in.
Newcastle (now the City of Miramichi) was—and, in some ways still is—a great town with a grand tradition, and a mixture of Empire Loyalists, Irish, Scots, and French. There were very rich men here, and also a streak of poverty born of class and lack of education. Houses that guarded the finer streets; and others without heat in winter.
How many men and women in Newcastle would Max have known? Judging by his later gift for making acquaintances, I would bet that, by the age of nine, he knew them all—from grand lumber barons who attended his father’s
church to my own poor Irish relatives who lived in Injun Town five blocks away!
As the son of the minister, he served as pallbearer at the funerals of young boys and girls, and was given white gloves to carry the casket. This task filled him with nightmares, until he decided to burn his gloves after each internment. This dispensed with his fear, and showed a resilient and inventive temperament at an early age.
He would leave the house early, and stay outside as much as he could. Every day he walked along Pleasant Street, or through the town square (where a bust of him now sits, and his ashes are interred). He would stop to chat with older men—having his picture taken with a few of them one winter afternoon near Howard Williston’s Jewellery shop, an old wooden building that was still there when I was young. In the picture he stands on the far right side, gazing out at us all, smiling, a boy of seven.
He would spend his days far away from the manse. Then he would walk home along the King George Highway at night, knowing he was in trouble with his parents, and try to sneak in the door. I can picture him there in the small foyer, in direct view of anyone sitting in the front room.
He said of himself that he was a “cat who travelled alone,” but often he must have been a lonely kitten. From the age of
twelve on, he seems to have been so much on his own that it makes me sad when I think of it—and, except for one picture of him on the steps of Harkins Academy, all the pictures taken of him are with adults. (Only when he is an old man are there pictures of him with children.) He never seems to have mentioned a real childhood friend. Perhaps he looked upon children as children—and perhaps he never saw himself as one of them. By the time he was twelve, the games they played were not his games.
AITKEN ALWAYS BELIEVED
he was a master of his fate. In fact he wrote about it in his book
My Early Life
, and specifically mentioned it often enough to his friends.
Yet it is strange for Max to say this, when at the same time he claimed that an accident with a mowing machine when he was a child caused the brilliance that propelled him to such heights.
If we believe him, and I have no reason not to, he was an ordinary boy, until one day, as he was running alongside a hay mower that was being pulled by a team of quarter-horses, he got his sleeve caught in its mechanism (probably the small thresher that ran perpendicularly just behind the horses) and fell beneath it, hitting his head on one of the studded iron wheels. He was taken to bed, and, when he awoke, he claims
he was a very different boy in one respect: he could think and understand things much more clearly. After this accident, he had an uncanny ability to comprehend why and how money was made and used. It was as if, from the time he was twelve, he was always three or four moves ahead of everyone else.
I believe there is only one of two ways to think of this event with the mowing machine. Either the accident was simply that, an accident, or Divine Providence caused it. Though Max Aitken said he never trusted to luck or chance, the idea of predestination is a Presbyterian article of faith, and Max used to argue for this as a young man, especially with R.B. Bennett. How much faith he had in predestination has always been open to speculation. Nor in the end are we privy to his private beliefs. (Late in life he still remembered the inspirational songs sung at church, and he mentioned Calvin as one of his heroes.)
But there can be no other way to think of this enormous event in his life—either accident, and the world is random, or Providence, and it was a miracle decided by forces over which he himself had no control, for a purpose of which he had at best limited understanding (as Tolstoy mentions about the entire human condition at the very end of
War and Peace
).
If God or Providence had suddenly decided to make him brilliant, he still had to use that brilliance. As we will see, he
did not always morally succeed in this. But still and all, his life is a miraculous and continuous catalogue of events which, not destroying him, made him stronger.
I suppose he would have become a target of even greater scorn in some circles if he had dared say it was Divine Providence! (We must never forget how small the sense of Divinity is among our educated middle classes.)
There might be one sign however. As a child he picked potato bugs from gardens and gathered wood for a Mr. Manny to earn a few cents. Yet, after that injury, Max became a newspaper boy, a correspondent, and an efficient calculator and transactor of money matters. He also became even more of a rogue. But is that surprising? The son of the manse, he must have found the stricture unbearable, the hours for study and worship tedious and restricting. The manse was a wonderful old house to visit, but to live there with a stern father who demanded decorum and a pedestrian outlook was another thing entirely.