Lord Beaverbrook

by David Adams Richards

  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.

  Hardly a boy in the land would be happy inside a manse when there were rough boys outside, especially with a father who was said to have had “a voice like God almighty” and who spared him little love. In some ways he must have felt he would never be able to please Reverend Aitken. And so he spent more and more time outside with older men he knew he could entertain. This pattern started very early and became one of the main pursuits of his life: acting the scallywag, the juggler of tales, entertaining others by embellishing his own story.

  In his teenaged years, he sought out rogues and adventurers. I am sure his fascination with life itself, and his zeal to understand it in all its mystery, propelled him. Here he lingered at a bakery, there at an office, down at the wharf talking with sailors from the square riggers and the schooners that came to transport timber overseas. Listening to the stories of woodsmen, of veterans from the Crimean War, of sailors who had been to Europe, who had walked the streets of London itself, he stored up information and a longing to be part of it.

  There is not much talk of sports and young Max Aitken—except for fishing. A friend of mine has a picture of Max’s older brother Traven (who died of an accidentally inflicted gunshot wound) playing football, but there are none of Max.

  He must have spent many a night alone in that bedroom on the third floor, realizing that, in some way, whatever he did, he would never please his father enough. And so he would h
ave to go. Do I think he was lonely? Yes. Do I think he felt unloved? Absolutely. But then I know how outsiders are continually forced to the outside by people who pretend to be concerned on their behalf. At Harkins, my schooling was very much like his, though he was a millionaire by twenty-four and I didn’t make ten thousand dollars until I was thirty-five. Still, we had more than a little in common, and it went beyond being born and raised a block and a half from one another.

  HIS ARGUMENTS at the house were probably fierce, and most likely continual. His big head would be seen peeking around the doors of his siblings’ rooms continuing confrontations, and his sisters and brothers were more than a little tired of him. There were six brothers and sisters, several with unusual names that their mother thought romantic, like Rahno (a sister) and his brother Traven. There was also Magnus, Arthur (who later became an American) and Allan (a lawyer in Newcastle). Not to forget Maxwell, of course.

  But from all reports, even his own, Max was the one who caused the disruptions. When he was twelve, his father said he should learn to translate the Latin phrase Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, about Gaul being divided into three parts. Max answered with the quip that he would much rather learn how to divide twenty-five cents into three parts. I know we can cringe at that—but not completely. There is an old Islamic saying that the dreams God gives you must be pursued in order not to offend him. Perhaps this is all Max was doing—in fact it is all any of us do. And he was brave enough to tell his father what his dream was: to become in a way his father’s worst nightmare, a man who looked to the things of the earth to satisfy earthly desires.

  There is a story—possibly apocryphal, as so much about Max Aitken is—about the time when, as a boy, he sold eggs from his own hens. Once, when he had an order for more eggs than he could supply, he went to his mother’s kitchen and borrowed the rest. The next afternoon the woman who ordered these eggs asked him what kind of hens he had, for half the eggs were already hard-boiled.

  “I knew the thunderstorm we had yesterday would affect my hens,” he replied.

  That sounds straight out of Tom Sawyer, but Sawyer’s and Aitken’s habits weren’t so different, and were in some ways entirely alike. One could very easily imagine Aitken convincing others to paint the fence for him on a warm summer day. And that was the problem, even for those who loved him. He was an imp and a scallywag, but his motives always came back to selfinterest. Once the ultimate winner, he could then turn about and be generous. But he wasn’t prepared to lose. I am sure that, for the rest of his life, some part of him was trying to divide the twenty-five cents into three. That he was in large part successful benefited many who found it distasteful to hear him say it.

  “I never thought he would be a success at anything,” the headmaster of Harkins said. This shows the one ingredient most principals and headmasters need: blindness to any real talent. And what is worse, they are proud to admit this tendency.

  Max must have come up against this early—must have in some ways been terribly frustrated by it, and in other perverse ways loved it. It was at Harkins where he learned that everyone had to be a mark. He told his fellow students he could count the hairs on a teacher’s moustache, and made money promoting this idea. (He couldn’t count the hairs, but he knew well enough they couldn’t either.) Asked to write something about himself, he carved his initials into his desk. The desk was there when I was a boy, and has since been misplaced. I wish I had been the one smart enough to take it. I am sure Max would have.

  They called him “Moccasin Mouth,” because of how large a mouth it was. And one boy told him that if God had made his mouth any larger he would have had to remove his ears. That is a great line, and one that I am sure Max would have loved to use himself—if the mouth had been on someone else.

  He was drawn to public life, and began to publish a paper in his own house and deliver it on the street by himself. It was filled with interesting things about the town, about local politics and industry that he had managed to observe. I’m sure he made up some very likeable lies in order to please. That was also one of his early characteristics: embellishment. Perhaps he was trying to see what he could get away with. To my mind, only two kinds of youngsters do this: one is trying to take on the world, the other is trying to please his headmaster.

  But his father did not see the worth of this paper, especially when Max wanted to print it upstairs at the manse—on a Sunday. So Max turned his attention to corresponding, not telling the newspaper—the Telegraph, in Saint John—how old he was.

  When it was reported to his father, erroneously, that Max the correspondent was writing sarcastic tributes about various people and events in town that would damage their reputations, his father reprimanded him severely with threats of hellfire. (I am sure this was a more than constant threat.) Max decided to run away to Kent County, where his father came to retrieve him, saying all was forgiven. In truth Max had not been the author of such libel, so there was nothing to forgive. (Or at least it hasn’t been proven. I am almost sure Max would have delighted in writing yarns about anyone in town if he could get a laugh and get away with it. He understood how to get under people’s skins, and loved to do it all his life.)

  Still, at fourteen, Max had noticed the world and the world was beginning to notice him. He was going to be a part of it one way or the other. He was seething with the enthusiasm of youth to do something beyond the restrictions of his parents’ house, and to do it well. He resumed his correspondent position for a dollar a column. But this was only one of the many ways he had of making money. The idea of making money was paramount with him from the time he was a boy, so there must have been lots of talk about money at the house. He must have listened to his mother and father talking about scrimping and saving, going without, and priding themselves on this ability. Though the family was not poor, it was not rich either.

  He knew he could do better. This is something else that I believe shaped his personality and his course in the world: the idea that the manse was God-driven, and the outside world—down Pleasant Street and beyond—wasn’t. Once out those doors and down the steps of that manse, he was free to be less than God-driven, because he saw how others were less than God-driven and he could match them, but his dad could not. He could outsmart and out-scallywag, and outthink any of them. He could and did and would discombobulate them—for his father’s sake. (Well, of course for his own sake, too.) Did it bother his conscience? Yes, all his life! Years later, in England, he bought a racing stable. Realizing how his father would have disapproved of such things, he renamed it Calvin House. (And too, there might have been some mischievousness in doing so.)

  About 1894, he was given a position at Lee Street’s pharmacy on the Town Square in Newcastle, also for one dollar a week. An incident here shows his almost pathological bent for trouble.

  He tended to completely ignore the doctor’s prescriptions and make up his own, trying out different remedies as he went, like a mad little concocter. One day he was caught doing this and the dollar a week was forfeited to his talent for mischief. He was sent home to his parents, and one can imagine the rumours about town.

  (It is amazing that this was the standard by which people were paid—that is, not the currency but the amount. It seems to me that all of Max’s early endeavours resulted in the tribute of one dollar per week. Never in my readings about him did he complain about this amount, so it must have been fair and standard wage. His father, however, did. Parsimony was perhaps a necessary habit for a minister, but it was awful how he showed it. Once when young Max was living in Halifax, Rev. Aitken sent him a box of books. Reluctant to spend one dollar on the shipping cost, he sent it at the much more reasonable—and slower—rate of thirty-eight cents. He instructed Max to pay the thirty-eight cents.

  IT IS LUCKY he did not die, for it’s likely there were many that wanted to kill him. I’m sure most couldn’t see him succeeding at anything. Max, however, could. He was sure of his genius and probably painfully aware that others di
d not have it—and, worse, did not recognize it in him. Perhaps they thought he would some day be a schoolteacher, a labourer, or a clerk. These were all activities that would have made him moderately successful in their eyes. Then he wouldn’t have been such a threat.

  But Max was destined for other things. His boyhood was a fermenting ground for rudimentary ideas of business and money-making. And the area was not so primitive as one might think. The Miramichi, among other things, was the birthplace of the Cunard Shipping Line (which was later sold to England’s White Star Line, which built the Titanic) and of some of the greatest lumber barons in the country. Its industries were the physical industries of lumber and the sea. These were extremely sophisticated industries for the time, and Max would have delighted in scampering about the town, discovering the promise in such things. This and playing pranks were his two main pastimes. For the rest of his life he couldn’t seem to do without either. His boyhood was a time for driving his parents and siblings to distraction. (His older sister Rahno once threw him down a flight of stairs in an attempt to kill him.) Perhaps nowadays the boy would have been put on medication. And what would have happened to his empire then?

  One cannot help but think of him as an elderly man at dinner with potentates from the Empire—ladies and lords, members of parliament—watching them with a mischievous glint in his eye, as his friend Peter Howard says, like a cat ready to pounce. The idea, if he ever had it, that once he was finished with school he wouldn’t have to deal with mundane people ever again, proved to be wishful thinking. He would have to deal all his life with those who thought inside the box, who had dutifully done their lessons, who could get high marks in everything except thinking for themselves. Often he would have to fight them alone. In fact, in the end, they were the ones who did him in. Like a cat being pecked to death by ducks.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lawyer’s Apprentice and