He has a story about what he was like at that time, which shows the kind of man he was to become. Wanting to go out to a dance—he was already an habitual skirt-chaser, something which would plague him, and others, most of his life—he asked his landlady, Mrs. Adams, to sew up a small hole in his best pair of pants. She told him she would do it for fifty cents. He did not have fifty cents, but, going into the living room, he saw fifty cents sitting on the fireplace mantel. He took it to Mrs. Adams, saying, “Here’s your fifty cents.” He did not lie. He got the job done. Was this calculated or spur-of-the-moment devilment? The second seems likely, but the fact he told the story shows how important quick thinking was to him. It would serve him well many times in the future. It would serve the world well, too—but it would also lessen him in the eyes of men, and cause much pain.
HE GOT ON
at Tweedie’s law firm as a clerk, and did run Bennett’s first foray into local politics. But Tweedie was to
say later that Max was into so many different ventures, he sometimes wondered if Aitken was working for him or he for Aitken. He also mentioned that people would come to the door seeking out Max Aitken’s various talents rather than to inquire about a legal matter. Of course this was said in hindsight, and might not have been said at all if Aitken had not become Lord Beaverbrook.
In some ways, R.B. Bennett, as father figure, was the greatest influence in Beaverbrook’s life. Max never forgot him, and never forsook him, even in the 1930s when Canada blamed Bennett, then prime minister, for the woes of the Depression. (This was reflected in the name Canadians gave the cars that, because of the price of gas, had to be hauled by horses: “Bennett Buggies.”)
But loyalty was one of Max Aitken’s admirable traits. It was a trait he always let you know he had, and a trait that would work against him at crucial moments in his life.
Another trait, exuberant but inadvisable, was the tendency to give out promises on Bennett’s behalf during the campaign. He would ride around the streets of Chatham on those quiet evenings on Bennett’s bicycle, handing out leaflets— and promising everything from new docks to new sidewalks to new jobs, if only Bennett were elected. So it was here that the notion that Max Aitken was a notorious liar got its
official start. It’s an accusation that is true in part, yet often his promises were more mischievous than manipulative, given out with a brazen, what-the-hell attitude. There is a difference between mischief and calculation, and I believe one should also have the grace to realize he was seventeen.
Though the child is father of the man. “Here’s your fifty cents” was in fact an omen of things to come—and some of them would grow darker as the years went by.
On election night, with the results in, Bennett the victor thanked his young charge profusely for such a successful campaign. The morning after, when he learned what he supposedly had promised to men he didn’t know, and to some he never liked, Bennett was furious.
“You will never handle a campaign of mine again,” declared Bennett, who always had his eyes on the greater prize.
“Well, I’ll never again give wholesale promises of that sort,” Max concurred.
Both statements, of course, were false.
THERE WERE MANY
things for him to do—go to dances, and run campaigns, and be a man-about-town at seventeen— estranged from his father and the awful stricture of church. Out in the world you had to be a very different man than in the manse. It was the difference between being a gunslinger
and a sodbuster. His life seemed to prove that he had made an early choice between them.
Having parties was better than sitting listening to a sermon. He had listened to enough of those. Playing cards was better than reading verse. Ice-boating on the river in the winter with some sweet maiden was better than studying about Gaul (he doesn’t mention one particular girl in his life at this time, so perhaps there was more than one, or perhaps, because of his looks, he was rebuffed. He had, after all, a mouth like a moccasin).
Still, life seemed idyllic for a time. His dreams at this point were probably very locally focused, for he was a clerk in the firm of his hero, Bennett. I am sure he could no more see London, England, from his office window than he could see Sheldrake Island, which was at one time a leper colony for his and my countrymen.
However, late in l897, our future prime minister, R.B. Bennett, seeking better opportunity in the West, left for Calgary. Max Aitken suddenly discovered the offices of Tweedie to be cold, cramped, and unceremoniously boring, as A.J.P. Taylor states. His dream of always being Bennett’s right-hand man, and helping this man to great success, was gone. What would he do? He needed someone to pin his sleeve to. Or did he? Maybe he could be what
Bennett was. So he simply advertised the fact that he had taken over Bennett’s position in Tweedie’s firm.
He told his family prematurely that he was to take Bennett’s chair, something for which, he believed, as office clerk and lawyer apprentice, he was in line.
“Yes,” I can hear him telling his startled Mom and Dad, “I will have my name on Tweedie’s door. I will become the barrister for the church—when it needs me!”
He desperately wanted them to be proud of him. He wanted the world to know him. He had talent, enormous talent, that they didn’t register, and it was like an unformed substance in him. He would brag about it until they understood it was there. In some ways he would do this all his life.
It was a humiliation, then, to learn that the chair would be given to a man named Mitchell, the son of a Father of Confederation from Newcastle, who had done his law training at university. It felt like a betrayal by Tweedie himself. (The firm did, as a courtesy, later on put his name on the door—as Lord Beaverbrook.)
However, his assertiveness had rankled—and in some ways frightened—Tweedie, who could not get a handle on the boy, or control his exuberance.
(This is how R.B. Bennett secretly felt about Aitken, too. There was too much of the showman, the circus act, the
juggler on one leg, and his need to prove himself was too exhausting for these older men. He would never be made welcome in pleasant society; to have him near was almost always an embarrassment. It was an embarrassment they, like many others, were later to hide from him, whenever they needed his exuberance and showmanship. To tell the truth, I am not sure he ever caught on.)
So the boy was let go.
But Aitken’s life is often an example of how bitter disappointment, supposed failure, and disaster can at times help you immensely. If he was master of his own fate, this then was a twist he had not expected, one which in the past sent him at first under the mechanics of a mower, and now to Saint John, and then to the great world beyond.
The idea that the world is your oyster comes from the fact that you haven’t found where in the world your oyster is. To have succeeded in Chatham might have put a stop to Max’s future—whereas not having succeeded in Chatham, or Saint John, meant that, having ambition, he had to push farther afield. But in addition to ambition, he must have had some sense that what he wanted to do still eluded him. If he had had his name etched upon Tweedie’s door as Max Aitken, lawyer, I can almost guarantee it would never have appeared there as Lord Beaverbrook some years later.
In retrospect, it is fortunate too that the eighteen-yearold who went to the Saint John law school, wide-eyed at all the shops and offices about King’s Square, was rejected there as well.
This is a poignant incident, though Max always made light of it. He believed that, as one of the brightest young students (though he rarely if ever actually went to class), he would be invited to the law school dance (an invitation-only
affair). He rented a tux, using safety pins for cufflinks. That day he waited and waited for the invitation that did not come. Finally, he walked past the building where the dance was being held to hear the music and see the dancers, to look at the pretty girls. It seemed to him that his world had crashed again, and again he had failed miserably. He stood in the dark listening to the orchestra and wondering why God had cast him in the role of a failure. There were certainly moments in his life over which he had no control. It must have been a lonely moment on that dark street. He put his hands in his pants pockets and walked away.
Very despondent, as he was to be many times in his life, he decided on the spur of the moment to head West, to meet up with his “friend” and father figure, Bennett, who at that time in 1898 was in another campaign for office. It is probable, as A.J.P. Taylor says, that Bennett didn’t want this young fellow near him, and had no inclination to help him. Besides, Max had made unsavoury friendships and had bought into a bowling alley. But Max, the grand enthusiast, ended up doing what Bennett once swore he would never do again: he ran Bennett’s campaign in Calgary. He went into the poorer section of the town with whisky and promises. Very likely because of this, Bennett won as a member of parliament for the North West Territory—but once again Max
had promised too much. Bennett, realizing Max would only be, as he said, “a drummer,” or salesman, slammed the door on him, and told him to go.
Max then headed north to Edmonton for one reason only: to meet James Dunn, another older New Brunswicker, and a successful financier, who would move to England in 1905 and be knighted in 1922. He was known for saying the “west must pay tribute to the east.” In a way, Dunn was startled at the brashness of this young fellow, who was now selling insurance and given to wild and exhaustive self-promotion. He still seemed something like that circus act, a con man. Dunn, wanting rid of him too, told Max to go back home, to be out of his hair. Max first tried another venture, transporting meat to the miners and prospectors in the North, but the meat went bad, and he was left with a debt he couldn’t pay.
Max returned to Saint John. Perhaps he was lonely for the Maritimes, for the company of his siblings, with whom he always remained in touch. (In fact, he was to send each of them money over the years, and provide for his father as well.) One must remember he was eighteen or nineteen years of age, selling insurance and now being a sometime correspondent for the
Montreal Gazette
.
Back in Saint John, he sold some insurance to a clothing store owner, and bought a suit costing eight dollars—which
he couldn’t pay for all at once, and attempted to pay off in instalments of fifty cents at a time. (In fact, he didn’t pay off the suit until years later, when he remembered the debt.)
So, here was young Max, trying to succeed in a world with men twice his age. An imitator, they were to say in later years, of older men. Another way to put it: you can’t be Billy the Kid without a bounty on your head. In some ways Max was just this sort of gunslinger, and would have a price on his head from here on out. And a lot of Pat Garretts, posing as friends, as well.
Many nights he must have spent alone on the streets of cities, hungry and almost broke, wondering what he was going to do to make a name for himself. Often he must have been hungry for real companionship as well. Many nights he must have thought, as a lonely, rather unattractive youngster: “What will become of me?”
HE TELLS US
he went fishing in Nova Scotia with three acquaintances when he was about to turn twenty-one. Up until now, he believed he was a loafer. How strange it is to look back at a boy of twenty, who had already run two political campaigns for a future prime minister, had sold insurance, had written for the
Montreal Gazette
, had studied law, and had travelled the country, calling himself a
loafer. But he says this is how he felt, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
At any rate, he tells us, it was on his trip to Nova Scotia that a person, whose name Max was later to forget, spoke to him around a campfire of duty and honour and dedication, and pronounced the world a better place for those who had these qualities. Max states in his memoir,
My Early Life
, that it was then he decided to change his life.
But did he change his life much at all? He said he became ambitious. But he always was. In fact, he seemed to be the most ambitious youngster ever to walk Newcastle’s King George Highway. He was a hustler; in some ways he always would be. But one should not necessarily count that as a complete failing.
The story about the fishing trip has something of a morality tale about it—one that Max himself may have believed in more and more as the years passed. He was always an embellisher of small events, making them into big ones as time went by, especially if they contained moral lessons from his youth.
“MAY YOU LIVE
in interesting times” the Chinese curse goes. Max did. A new century was coming.
Sandford Fleming’s railway crossed the country, the last spike hammered, and a boom was on. New inventions were
the bread of progress, and Max was aware of them all. There were electric lights, and telephones, and train travel, and the first motor cars were seen as strange mechanisms in the towns he visited. There was also the bond market, where you invested some money in companies and took some of the profit back at the end of the fiscal year.
Max became enthralled by this form of enterprise, and began to sell bonds door to door along the rural coasts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. To him, it seemed tantamount to making money for nothing. He would take the train to a certain station and walk into the country, a young, five-foot-five-inch, irascible bundle of promises. On those country roads of l899 and 1900, with the houses a mile apart or more, the days must have been long and tedious, at some points arduous, and seemingly hopeless, the weather unpredictable. Still, Max was persuasive enough to coax money from people who would not otherwise give it, and he had a penchant for selling. That is, he could sell bonds to people who hadn’t had the slightest idea of what a bond was before he knocked on the doors of their forlorn houses.
As time went on, he paid out his dividends faithfully and honestly, and made some money doing it. He was therefore a hustler still, even though he did not hustle in pool halls or at card games (and one wonders how much of this he ever
did, and how much of what he reported would be put down today to youthful embellishment).