For whatever reason, he decided to sell his business interests, which allowed him to stay very wealthy during the Depression, when many of his friends sank. Churchill himself came close to bankruptcy then. But Max still kept a keen eye on all his financial affairs. A.J.P. Taylor relates one story about a piano tuner, who was paid for four visits a year and Max thought he had made only three. Max was ready to demand a refund, until he found out the tuner had come the fourth time when he was away.
He gave his affairs in Canada over to his brother Allan, and then bothered him daily. Yet, in these affairs, he made other investors a good deal of money none of them would have made without him. And at times they would be surprised to see huge cheques come to their door. A Mr. Davidson of Newcastle is one example. He wrote to Max complaining that he never had any idea where his money was until a cheque arrived. He was wondering, if the money wasn’t forthcoming, would an explanation be?
Whatever he did, he couldn’t seem to help it. And though he now hated public affairs, on the public front, some of his greatest battles were just starting.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Free Trade and
Stanley Baldwin,
I Presume
Initially Beaverbrook and Prime Minister Baldwin were friendly. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons in 1918, he defended and spoke kindly about Max Aitken as minister of information. Perhaps that was the only time he did. Of course, this was a completely political move. He was, in 1918, an unknown wet-behind-the-ears politico, and wanted not to be. Beaver, then being skewered in the House for his propaganda, was the one to champion in a perverse way. Who wouldn’t be able to figure that one out? Besides, they had been introduced years before by Baldwin’s cousin Rudyard Kipling; and both Aitken and Baldwin revered Bonar Law.
Kipling said that Baldwin was a secret socialist. (He did want the rich to pay down the war debt, and since most of them caused it, I see no real fault in that.) But if Baldwin was a socialist, he was a socialist of comfort. His views assuaged the guilt of privilege. I’ve always felt that holding views of soft socialism supports the privileged. He had been a history major at Cambridge, and was sensitive about what history would say about him.
He later wondered, for instance, if, given his appeasement attitude of “safety first” in the face of German militarism, from the late twenties right to the brink of the Second World War, history would treat him and Neville Chamberlain unkindly. History has.
The initial rift with Beaverbrook might have come because Baldwin always insisted, and did so publicly, that he was the one who brought Bonar Law back in 1922 and brought Lloyd George down. This did not sit well with Aitken. Baldwin, during his first and second terms, gave half-hearted support to Free Trade, but never enough to commit himself to it. Baldwin hated Max’s lax morals. But, as we came to see in his vacillation in the years leading up to the Second World War, there is more than one way to be immoral.
DID AITKEN REALLY KNOW what Free Trade involved, or was it pie in the sky? It seems when he started his campaign in 1929, he had no party support and was rash enough to take on the task, thinking he could single-handedly change the nature of British export. But the problem lay at the top. For Max had no set plan of what he wanted, and not many were patient enough to help him iron it out.
His campaigning stalled, and he took the summer of 1930 off to go sightseeing in Russia. Max had not received the support he felt he deserved from Prime Minister Bennett in Canada, while the support he sought from the government of Stanley Baldwin never came, and Baldwin went down to defeat to Labour, in part because of the animosity of Max Aitken’s papers.
Peter Howard reveals that, about this time, Max made a prediction, which was destined to come true—though not as soon as he believed it would; he said that Baldwin, who was very bad for the Conservative Party, would be overthrown. He declared that Churchill, now a Conservative, should lead, but since he wasn’t much trusted by anyone, perhaps Neville Chamberlain would take the reins.
“He is as bad as Baldwin,” Beaverbrook stated, with some measure of understatement. The truth is that Beaverbrook was very loyal. He backed Churchill almost always—to the annoyance of Clementine. Even when he was angry with the party’s direction, Max still supported Churchill as prime minister. This made Winston quip that Beaver, “Loves the rider and dislikes the horse.”
BUT IN 1930, the Conservative Party was floundering. Beaverbrook, knowing this, got his meeting with Stanley Baldwin.
What could the Beaver give Baldwin? Well, for one thing, he was the greatest propagandist in the country. Even if he didn’t go to the Express office, he still ran the paper. If his paper turned its support to the Conservatives again, Baldwin would make much of a speech that Beaver would give on his Free Trade dream to the House of Lords. It wasn’t much, but it was all Beaverbrook could ask.
That is, he was always forced to hold the lesser hand now. No one any longer came to him seeking mergers. Government support of a speech in the House of Lords meant nothing. And Beaverbrook’s speech in the House of Lords was a failure, for, like many Miramichers, he talked in rough measure with mangled words.
Perversely, he set out in 1930 to independently deliver Free Trade to the Empire. He put in money and mounted his crusade—there is a great picture of him, resembling a somewhat smaller Teddy Roosevelt circa 1912, hat in hand, preaching to the crowd as the wind blew. He stumped and platformed and promised, but it did not come about.
If Free Trade was the one thing in the world that he wanted, he either prepared for it poorly or didn’t understand it well enough to sell. Or perhaps the gadget he was trying to sell had been looked over one too many times. For in the end, he was still selling. He was still the salesman walking along the boom road.
MAX’S FAILURE TO DELIVER to Britain and the Commonwealth his vision of Empire Free Trade (flaws and all) in the early 1930s showed the limitations of the Commonwealth itself. It also showed a dying Empire. This uncouth Canadian financier wasn’t going to fool Baldwin the way he did those poor Canadians (or, as Baldwin said, the way he was able to fool Bonar Law and Churchill).
For some I have spoken to, Max was a thief because he earned too much money. One has to draw the line—and I’ve noticed with his greatest detractors that line was/is always drawn with their own intellectual comfort in mind. But the real sore spot with some of these men was that he had earned it not in England, but in the far-off colonies.
Am I defending him? Not a bit of it. I am questioning them. Empire Free Trade failed, and the British Empire was fading to black.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Signs of a New War
Prime Minister Baldwin was disastrous for Britain and disastrous for Beaverbrook. But Max was in many respects disastrous to himself. And he became more disastrous as time went on. He was a financial genius trying to be a politician, and a brilliant and sometimes revolutionary newspaperman trying to force political policy. He was headstrong and tenacious, and he hated to be outmanoeuvred. It made for many bad days. Once, when he got tired of all his Free Trade battles, he mentioned to Lord Berkinhead that he wished he could go back to those quaint and innocent days when he was plotting to overthrow Lloyd George. But he could not. And much of what he did do after Free Trade seems to be a kind of tarnish. He hung out with lords and ladies, and was instrumental in trying to keep Edward VIII in power, because unlike his friend Churchill, he did not realize the constitutional calamity it would cause. Edward VIII asked for and received the support of Max’s paper. (Max was, I am sure, awestruck by the monarchy, and could not say no.)
But Churchill saw it differently. Though he too supported the king and tried to delay the abdication, he believed Edward had a moral and a sacred duty to forget this woman—at least as a wife. Edward of course did not. It all sounds quaint today, and in hindsight, given suggestions about what kind of king Edward would have made, it may have been best for Britain that he did not forget her. But at the time, when love triumphed over duty, it deva
stated many Britons.
William Manchester relates in Alone, the second volume of The Last Lion, his three-volume biography of Churchill, that one night, sitting with the Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII) in Monte Carlo, after the coronation of George VI, Churchill told him how he had betrayed the British people, in a way only Churchill could, which did not for one moment lose the tone of respect.
There was a spinelessness about the duke and duchess, who at one point actually believed that a Hitler win would put Edward back on the throne. Many must have hoped for this in the Conservative, Liberal, and Labour parties, judging by the way they ignored Churchill’s warnings. And, as writer and broadcaster Alistair Cooke points out, when Paris was about to fall, the duke and duchess were still there, and had to be ordered into the departing car by their chauffeur. “They were at their best,” Alistair Cooke said, “when the going was good.”
This could never be said about Churchill himself. “There are two Winstons,” Max Aitken once said ruefully. “Winston Up and Winston Down. Winston down—with his back to the wall, is magnificent, Winston up—when things are going his way, is intolerable.” Both Alistair and Max were right.
AS THE 1930S WORE ON, Max had his games, his dogs—two shitsus that he would carry about and fuss over—his trips with Jean Norton, his paper, his baggage of a past that would not go away. His dreams of going back to Newcastle and living in peace and quiet. He had other lady friends and his games of political intrigue. He was still plotting, still trying to be the boy wonder all over again. When they mention a loose cannon, show a picture of Max in a sunhat, smiling out from under its brim.
The men of power he kept tabs on were the ones, almost to a man, who he felt had forced him into the House of Lords in 1917, which meant that Max’s cannon was always firing in every direction. But he could never fire fast enough or get them all—and even to his adversaries he could and would be surprisingly generous. He once gave Baldwin, who had hurt him more than any other politician save Lloyd George, £25,000, telling him to give it to the charity of his choice. Baldwin said the reason for this was an accident in which Max came close to death, and he was afraid. Well maybe—but I guarantee it was never Baldwin he feared.
He learned of Hitler’s rise to power, and watched, numbed, as his Conservative Party turned on the only man in the country who might be able to defend them: Winston Churchill. During these years, Churchill almost lost his seat, certainly lost his cabinet seat, and needed spies within caucus just to find out what was going on. He was laughed at by people like Bernard Shaw. (Well, who wasn’t? Shaw was good at laughing, often at better men.)
But Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin were determined to prove Churchill wrong, and they prostrated themselves to one of the most evil men in history in order to do so. As Hitler said about these men in 1944: “My enemies are worms—I met them in Munich.”
When future prime minister Clement Attlee said that Beaverbrook was one of the most evil men he had ever met, he was at the same time agreeing on policy with those who smirked at Churchill and dined with German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (later hanged for war crimes).
But then again, most people seemed to lack foresight in those times. “Scholarships not battleships!” was a chant that was used against Churchill and his ilk.
“Insensible,” said Sir Archibald Sinclair, then head of the Liberal Party, when asked about the prospects of a British continental army. This was in 1938.
But Beaver did not want war either—and said as much. “No War This Year” his paper stated in 1939. And he too had friends both Italian and German.
That is, he vacillated just as others did. He went to clubs, and ate with pacifists, as well as anyone else. There were leftists on his paper now, like Michael Foot, who later became a Labour minister and was a long-time friend. Still, for most of this time, Beaverbrook was the only support Churchill had.
He allowed Churchill to publish his so-called “war mongering” in the Daily Express when no one else in the land would give him a platform and Winston gave his speeches to an empty House of Commons. “You were given a choice between war and dishonour, you chose dishonour and you will have war!”
(Though even Max refused to publish Winston for a stretch in 1938—as a favour to appeaser Neville Chamberlain, then the prime minister.)
On another front, Aitken brought former Canadian prime minister R.B. Bennett, who had betrayed him on Empire Free Trade, to Britain and got him a knighthood, and taught him what wines to serve with dinner. Max had a father figure beside him again, and he seemed to enjoy his company.
During this time there were moments when Max had an uncanny ability to see with a clarity few men had.
An editorial in his Evening Standard sounded a warning about the enthusiasm over the Munich Pact—while, like most papers, supporting it.
It is also interesting to note that one of the great men of the century, George Orwell, criticized Beaverbrook’s papers for pacifism in the face of danger. Still, it might have been wiser for Orwell to understand that the left-wing papers he himself had at one time cherished called for peace right up until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.
Max did not like the guarantee given to Poland by the British government—that if it was attacked by Germany, England would respond—because the guarantee was given without consulting the Dominions.
He also disagreed with the mutual-defence pact with France, sensing that, if push came to shove, France would capitulate, and Britain would be on its own defending Poland, which could not defend itself. Strategically he was right—as it turned out, deadly right.
He was wrong, however, from the standpoint of moral obligation, and he was wrong to keep Churchill off his pages, however briefly. When Baldwin kept Churchill out of his third cabinet, for fear he would anger Hitler, Winston boldly said that no greater crime had been committed since Roman emperor Caligula appointed his horse a senator. He was laughed at; he was right.
But no matter what people wanted, war came in 1939. And as it would turn out, without Beaverbrook the Battle of Britain might well have been lost and England’s neck wrung like a chicken.
As Churchill famously said during a speech to the Canadian parliament: “Some chicken, some neck.”
Beaverbrook provided much of the early gristle in that tough neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY
War and the Boy
from Newcastle
The war came in September 1939, spellbinding in its seeming stupidity. Hitler, self-mesmerized, had no choice. No one was around to stop him. And perhaps that grandest puppet master of all, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was egging him on. (Some biographers actually say this, and believe that Stalin was expecting an attack. Whether or not this was so, he made the most of it in the end.) Hitler, too, thought Britain’s promise to Poland was an ill-considered one, and they wouldn’t hold to it. He was wrong. Prime Minister Chamberlain had a moral obligation to Poland, and tried his best to prosecute the war, and then resigned. Grudgingly, he handed over the reins to Churchill. And Churchill’s war cabinet appointed Max Aitken as minister of aircraft production.
He was now an unwilling player, with his asthma and ill health, yet here he would be an almost indispensable one. Within a few months he more then quadrupled the manufacture of aircraft. Each day he was slandered in the House of Commons for duplicity and mismanagement, and he kept going. When the Continental army was forced from Dunkirk in May 1940, he made every effort to retrieve spare airplane parts that were left behind.
There is a story, related by Peter Howard in his book Max the Unknown, of Aitken going to see Churchill and meeting in the foyer a high-ranking naval commander who delightedly told him that a new shipment of steel for his destroyers had arrived. Max said great, and, pulling rank, went in to see Churchill first.
“What’s happening, Max?” Winston asked.
“I just got a great shipment of steel for our planes,” Max said.
“Wonderful news,” Winston beamed.
He was the boy giving his landlady her fifty cents all over again.
There are those who said he did not do what he said he was going to do, and that he fudged the results. Historian Roy Jenkins seems to think this, or at least intimates that Max was not that important. As with almost all of what Jenkins says about Beaverbrook, I am going to disagree.
It is widely suggested that, when he took over as minister of aircraft production, there were five Spitfires in reserve—that is, once the pilots were in the air, five aircraft were left in the hangars.
Four months later, 6,400 aircraft had been built. Where did Aitken get most of the raw materials? From Canada and the States. Where did he get many of the pilots? From Canada as well. He bartered to get machinery and engines from Detroit. When Henry Ford said he would not build engines for belligerents in a war that did not concern the United States, Max used his old connections with Rolls-Royce to get engines and went to the smaller Packard Motor Car Company to build them. Some say that, because of this, he had a hand in jump-starting American production for its own war effort. He spoke of thousands and thousands of planes. Did he fudge the records? Probably—he was Beaverbrook. Did he come up against a bureaucratic wall? Of course, this was England. Was he fighting for England’s life? Absolutely. His arguments would start in cabinet, against one, and then two, and then sooner or later he would be taking on all comers, with poor Churchill trying to keep the peace daily.
“He swept through every department like Genghis Khan—it was remarkable,” said Air Force colonel Moore-Barbazon, member of parliament for Chatham. “He was one of the people Churchill spoke about when he said, ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few!’” (This is not a well-known summation of that famous line.)Was he indispensable? For a little while, a little while as indispensable as Eisenhower or Marshal Zhukov. Did he make enemies? Of course he did, he was . . .
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