Lord Beaverbrook
ALSO IN THE
EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS
SERIES:
Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe
Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson
Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto
Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam
Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin
by John Ralston Saul
Stephen Leacock by Margaret MacMillan
Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray
Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland
L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart
Lester B. Pearson by Andrew Cohen
Mordecai Richler by M.G. Vassanji
Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden
Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci
SERIES EDITOR:
John Ralston Saul
Lord Beaverbrook
by DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS
With an Introduction by
John Ralston Saul
SERIES EDITOR
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Copyright © David Adams Richards, 2008
Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2008
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CONTENTS
Introduction by John Ralston Saul
Author’s Note
1 Beaverbrook
2 Early Times
3 Lawyer’s Apprentice and Campaign Manager
4 The Great World Beyond
5 Mr. Stairs of the Union Bank of Halifax
6 Marriage in the New World
7 The Great Canadian Cement Caper and the CPR
8 English Shores
9 Knighthood
10 Cherkley as a Front for Family Life
11 Law Becomes Conservative Leader
12 War
13 The Making of Prime Minister David Lloyd George
14 On Shaky Ground
15 The Press Baron Alley Fighter
16 The Long-Coming Rise of Mr. Bonar Law
17 And Then Poor Gladys Dies
18 Free Trade and Stanley Baldwin, I Presume
19 Signs of a New War
20 War and the Boy from Newcastle
21 Comrade Stalin’s Man
22 Last Years
CHRONOLOGY
SOURCES
INTRODUCTION BY
by John Ralston Saul
How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.
This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?
For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.
These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.
All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twentyfirst century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.
Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.
You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.
The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.
That is why a documentary is being filmed around e
ach subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.
There has not been a biographical project as ambitious as this in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons.
What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in their lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of these people, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.
Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.
David Adams Richards is absolutely right. No Canadian has ever been as powerful on the world scene as Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. If there was any possibility that a colonial could push an empire around and change its intent, this was it. And God knows Beaverbrook tried. If he saw himself as a failure in the end it can only be because empires can’t be shaped by colonials or outsiders of any sort. To believe they can is part of the delusion of the special relationship. Empires have neither friends nor allies. And they don’t have special relationships. They have power and selfinterest. The trick is to exploit them without getting in their way. Beaverbrook is the example for all time of just how far a colonial can go. But as he would tell you, it just isn’t far enough.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was not yet fourteen years old when Max Aitken died. I make it clear that what is written here about the actual events in his life are documented in other places—by his biographer A.J.P. Taylor, or his friend Peter Howard in his book Max the Unknown; by his biographer Gregory P. Marchildon in his book Profits and Politics; by the biographers of Churchill, like Manchester and Jenkins, or Stalin, like Alan Bullock, or by the imp Max himself in his book My Early Life. However, this book’s interpretation of these events, both his successes and failures, and why they happened the way they did, is my own.
CHAPTER ONE
Beaverbrook
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.
CHAPTER TWO
Early Times
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 firs
t 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.
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