HE IMMEDIATELY
set about making friends and influencing people, and he could do it, because he had boldness and audacity and money on his side. He lived for a kind of social experience and loved the dazzling and impertinent life that
the manse back home forbade. At its highest level it was the life Henry James described in novels like
The Wings of the Dove
. It was just as dazzling and every bit as sordid. It was the epitome of the life he dreamed he saw as a child from his window late at night.
He, in fact, had not changed much from the boy counting the hairs on his teacher’s moustache. What is amazing is that his rise to power was every bit as startling and as large for a time as Winston Churchill’s—or greater, since Churchill was an aristrocrat. William Manchester, in
The Last Lion
, his biography of Winston Churchill, speaking of Churchill’s genius, called it a “Zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.” It can be safe to say Max Aitken had this as well. In fact it can be safe to say that, for a good seven to ten years, he was as powerful as any man in Britain, which made him as influential as any man in Europe. And most of this occurred before he was forty.
So the wheeler-dealer comes to England, meets associates of Bonar Law, and is introduced as a Conservative financier from Canada. He buys Rolls-Royce—not a car, as one of my acquaintances thought when I told him of Max’s influence in 1910, but the company.
Cars were new, and Max loved new. (The manse had one of the first telephones in Newcastle, when Aitken was a boy; perhaps it was then that his fascination with new gadgetry took hold.) He was always seduced by the idea of invention. Perhaps he was drawn to the idea that we could control, by invention, the world itself. It is really a materialistic ideal—and Max embraced this from the first time he stepped from his door and saw an electric light.
Of course, he soon became bored and impatient with Rolls-Royce, just as he was bored and impatient with so much in his life, with the houses he bought and the women he bedded. He was a good starter, A.J.P. Taylor states about his eclectic personality, but “he was not a sticker.” And as far
as production was concerned, he had an assembly-line mentality if ever there was one. Rolls-Royce did not. It had the rather British idea that, if you wanted something made well, you must wait for it—especially if there were only a few to be sold.
He sold Rolls-Royce to an American. (We, that is the Western world, would be glad in 1940 that Max had an in with Rolls-Royce.)
One of the members of the board of Rolls-Royce was Baron (later Viscount) Northcliffe, the “Press Lord,” who owned
The Times
. He didn’t think Max would be at all interested in newspapers, but he liked to quote him in his. Aitken was always good for a quote about politics. Max was an anti-tariff bulldog, the sort of eccentric papers like, for they say outrageous things, a visionary Empire loyalist who screamed for preferential treatment between the colonies and Britain.
The country had been in the throes of this “Imperial Preference” debate (that is, Free Trade among Britain and her colonies) for a number of years, and Max wanted this desperately. This is probably how he got to know a man who was, for a time, one of his staunchest friends in Great Britain, the famous writer Rudyard Kipling, who held the same views. One was from the boonies of Canada, one was
from the boonies of India, and how they got on trying to relay to Britain the importance of her destiny.
At this time the cement fiasco was breaking news in Canada. Max, safely in England, was being vilified for betrayal and common malfeasance. I think he believed that he could succeed his way out of a bad reputation. He had the new Conservative prime minister of Canada, Robert Borden, on his side, willing to stop a parliamentary investigation. His old friend Bennett was investigating Fleming’s partner, Irvin, and discovering him to be not much more than a common thief. But as far as improving his reputation, Max, over his long career, would be only partially successful.
During this time, he was still trying to run his companies from Britain, and was doing business in Calgary with Bennett, setting up a hydroelectric plant for that city, and also creating a grain-transport facility with both Bennett and his old pal Clouston. Yet, as Gregory Marchildon indicates, over the next few years Max would be slowly forced to let go of his economic interests in the Caribbean, and even Royal Securities would be taken over and run by Izaak Walton Killam. So, whatever his feelings, Max’s future rested where he was.
He knew this. So, soon after arriving in Britain, he was giving donations to the British Tory party, and in 1911, was knighted during the coronation of King George V.
Sir Max decided he would become a politician. In doing so, he would attract accusations once again—this time of political intrigue.
MANY WILL SAY
that his friendship with Bonar Law was all political calculation on Max’s part, and as soon as a House of Commons seat was available, at Ashton-under-Lyne, he rushed to Law’s house and begged for the candidacy. As A.J.P. Taylor relates, he actually said, like a little boy, “What about me? Why can’t I run?” and was rewarded by being given the chance. Some people say he was simply at Bonar Law’s house at the most opportune time, and Bonar Law shrugged and said, “Okay. I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Be that as it may, he truly cared for Bonar Law (and was much more helpful to him than Law was to Max), and was beyond doubt the most instrumental force in Bonar Law’s political career. I also think that if Bonar Law was, as is claimed almost happily by some in Canada, the least effective British prime minister, as a leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Law’s abilities were profound. Max was the horse Bonar Law rode, and tried to rein in.
So, by 1912, Sir Max Aitken was seeking office in Britain. He ran his own campaign for Ashton-under-Lyne with his wife Gladys as beautiful decoy, spending as much money as the seat
warranted. He told a local reporter to go easy on him because he had been in politics only a week. That statement in itself is courageous, for it appeals to anyone with a sense of humour. It shows his understanding of what people wanted, and they wanted, at least for now, the bright new voice from Canada (even though they hated his Miramichi accent and the way he pronounced the names of their towns). He helped things along by having nice things written about him in Canadian papers, and then republished in local Ashton ones—a good enough ploy if one dares use it.
The trade unions went for him, even though they recognized that he made promises whether or not he had any idea of their import. Sounds like the Bennett campaign of fifteen years before. Or in fact most campaigns of today. He won the seat by 196 votes.
Now he was in, as a Tory, and immediately became friends with Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George— two radical Liberals (Churchill, of course, would later become a Conservative).
Bonar Law was jealous of these new friendships of Max’s— and suspicious of their political stripes. He felt betrayed. All his life, Max would do infuriating things like this. But Aitken liked Lloyd George and Churchill in spite of their political stripes—and besides, Churchill was Churchill, one of the
most famous names in Britain, who had chronicled his true heroics in the Boer War, and Aitken needed to meet him.
However, what is less known is that, at this point, Aitken suddenly went back home—to Newcastle, New Brunswick. He was wined and dined as a great success and was asked to run as a Conservative for Northumberland County, where Newcastle was the shire town. He thought about it but decided against it. He went back to England. What caused this trip?
This was one of three trips he would make back to Canada, hoping to settle at home. All three times he realized, like someone does with an unrequited love, that it is never to be. There is a picture of him as an old man, walking a lane in New Brunswick, with his limousine a hundred yards behind him—like a child searching for something he lost along the way.
When he got back to England, he left his house in London and bought Cherkley, an estate twenty miles outside the city in Surrey, and Gladys and Rudyard Kipling’s wife got down to the job of remodelling it. Cherkley in fact looked something like a big square manse, but it had its moments, and was to become palatial and splendid. This was perhaps Gladys Aitken’s happiest year, with true friends helping her in her new home, young children—Janet, John William (called Max), and Peter—and an exceedingly popular (for the moment) husband. There would be parties and love and laughter—for a while. Her life would never be this content again. Max liked to think—and it must have been just a whim—that he could be something of a country squire. He would leave the rat race behind, and live with his brood on the estate. It lasted a month. Then he crept back to London, returning to Cherkley only on the weekends.
THOUGH HE WAS
only a backbencher, because he was an intimate of Bonar Law he was all of a sudden a major player. People were frightened of Max Aitken, as they are of any force of nature, and many wanted to reduce his influence to remove their fear. He was also inexhaustibly bright, and curious enough about others to make friends easily. But he could be as deadly as a snake with venom if thwarted. He continued in finance, both in Canada and England, bought a bank in Britain, and had a fondness for gambling in Monte Carlo.
He stayed in London to see what was happening in the political theatre. Once again, he was not in Gladys’s life, though she struggled to make a life for them all. Now she was in a foreign land, with her children. He would come back and forth, but it was like it always was, and always would be; there was always a hotel, where he could stay away. He would dress to go out to dine at night, at the gayest spots in town, alone. There were always other women. And he did not chastise himself for this, until it was too late.
Aitken came to England and to the government in a time of real class upheaval. The world was changing. The Conservative (or, as it was also called up until the First World War, the Unionist) Party, ostensibly the party of the upper classes, the party he belonged to, was in disarray; the Irish were pressing for Home Rule; the power of the establishment,
in the guise of the fuddy-duddy House of Lords, was being challenged by people like the radical Liberal cabinet minister David Lloyd George; radicalism was sweeping the rank and file of British Labour, too. There were anarchists, nihilists, and Fenians. Women were calling for a voice in decision-making. There were marches and protests in the street. There was also a smell of war on the wind. All of this created divisions and fear and opportunity. Yes, it was the top of the world, and it spun like a top that might tumble on its side.
Max longed to be a player in the Conservative ranks in England. It was part of his nature to want to rule, or at the very least to belong with those who did. The famous picture of him walking side by side with Churchill on the HMS
Prince of Wales
in 1941 was no accident. Don’t think that, just because he wanted to be there, he was not needed by those he walked beside.
Still, not everyone was at ease with him. There was much talk about and against him by very famous British politicians, who hoped to stop him before he became too powerful. He was often the subject of gossip. His lax moral form was constantly whispered about.
There were flaws in his registry others were straining to see. They were trying to place him—somewhere where he wouldn’t be a threat. Asquith, the British Liberal prime
minister, distrusted him immensely, and told Churchill so in 1911, writing, of Max becoming a commissioner of trade, “Aitken is quite impossible, his Canadian record is of the shadiest.” He was a charlatan and an upstart. They hated the idea of his wealth, and how he waded through the scene like a bull in a china shop. He could foresee trouble, he just couldn’t pinpoint exactly where it was. He was also a bounder. A common adulterer.
Still I ask, if he had stayed at Cherkley, had dinner with Gladys, spoken to the nanny about his children, would the world have been the better for it? Could one believe his marriage would have been?
For much of Aitken’s life, he was propelled or driven to succeed on the back of failure. He was also the kind of man who liked to create division. This is why he had in some circles such a bad reputation and was so unpopular. He revelled in division, and some say he revelled in his own bad press. There were probably reasons for this that were caused as much by the forces aligned against him as by something within himself.
In 1912, Arthur Balfour, the ageing leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, found himself head of an Opposition mired in unpopularity. Balfour, another Scotsman, was an intellectual (Eton and Cambridge) and had actually made something of a name for himself with a book of philosophy,
Defense of Philosophic Doubt
, published in 1889. He was a lifelong bachelor, had come up under former prime minister the Marquis of Salisbury (a man of the nineteenth century),
and was now part of the old guard. According to Liberals like Prime Minister Asquith and David Lloyd George, he was relying on the hated aristocratic House of Lords for his main political support. The radical wing of the Liberal Party, headed by Lloyd George, was ostensibly for the common man, and wanted to weaken the power of this same muddling House of Lords once and for all.
When a bill was passed to contravene the power of the Lords, and Balfour, as Opposition leader, lost the Conservative fight against this bill, he was forced by his own party, to step down.
Aitken did not care much for the House of Lords either. Even if he was a Conservative and the House of Lords was a mainstay of Conservatism, he was still too much of a Canadian. One of the problems Max had was subtle enough. How could he be a Conservative, if he came, as he said, from poverty in Canada? That is, people constantly equate Conservatism not with values but with property, especially if they themselves are liberal or socialist, propertied or not.