So Max did something reckless and brilliant. He let other cement companies across Canada and in the States know that a great merger was taking place, which would regulate the price and the quality of cement. Over a few months he swamped the Fleming interests by bringing many of the cement companies in Canada into the mix, to create Canada Cement. Max made one of his own investment companies the principal controller of the deal. He used Sandford Fleming’s name to give it respectability, while he dwarfed and marginalized the Fleming interests. Then, with Clouston’s help, he took over the monopoly himself.
But speaking on Aitken’s behalf, I have to say that Max’s wiliness does not automatically give Mr. Fleming or Mr. Irvin the sanctity of the higher moral ground.
Finding himself in a precarious position, Aitken had simply turned the tables on those who were prepared to use him. Once on a roll, and seeing a fabulous opportunity to control stock in cement companies that would help reinvigorate the industry, he became the ruthless executor of his own advantage. But is that a terrible thing for a businessman to do? Is it even illogical? Many contend he put the difference between the actual worth and the paper worth of the companies involved in the merger into his own pocket. Others say he bribed Clouston, giving a huge kickback to the president of the Bank of Montreal. My question is pragmatic, I know. Was he the only one who knew Sir Edward Clouston had that bad habit of taking kickbacks? Did any of the CPR board members, who had been acquainted with the president longer and at closer quarters, know? Had they used this flaw themselves, perhaps to stop Max’s other ventures, like the Gazette purchase in 1909? Max, remember, was the one who was kept out of the business club in Montreal.
From this deal, Max ended up an exceedingly wealthy man. People felt that he had used the old man, Mr. Fleming, atrociously. Although the transactions remain murky on all sides, Fleming was never blamed and Aitken’s reputation would never recover.
But the lesson Max took from this cement caper was that he would always and forever be able to leapfrog over his opposition. This in some ways accounted for his erratic springboard approach to other great deals in his life.
They said he would not, could not, come back to Canada. Yet when you are a player of Aitken’s wiles, going to England in 1910, to the front row of Empire, who in hell would want to? But at any rate I saw him walking a street in Newcastle in 1958.
CHAPTER EIGHT
English Shores
England then was not the England of today. When Max scampered onto its shores in 1910, his pockets already laden with cash, his abilities fine-tuned, it was still one of the great powers in the world. It was still the greatest empire, at its twilight to be sure, but nevertheless, secure in itself and in all things British. Tolstoy says in War and Peace that the assumption was “What was British was proper and right.”
A queen had sat on the throne for sixty years and had defined an age, its men and women travelled the globe, and its military still controlled a good part of it. Max Aitken came from one small part of that globe, but his allegiance in so many respects was to Britain, and, in fact, he was a British citizen. It is strange nowadays to think that a boy growing up in Newcastle, New Brunswick, could suddenly find himself running for the British House of Commons.
Ion Benn the British Unionist (Tory) said he was the one to get Max his seat, because he had seen his potential while on a visit to Montreal. It is not really true that he “got Max his seat”—however, he did help him in many ways. He introduced him as a financier from Canada—and, more significantly, he clearly attached a value to this at a time when British financiers thought there was nothing valuable in Canada. As always, it is the fools who block the doors. But it was amazing with what relative ease Max Aitken went through the doors supposedly closed to him.
Max loved the Empire but over time would come to hate many of those who believed they owned it. This would become the principal difficulty in his life, and cause much trouble for him, morally and professionally. For he believed that he, a common boy from Newcastle, was as much a part of the Empire as they. That, in fact, was how the Empire promoted itself. Perhaps the least-known trait in Max was gullibility.
It is old-fashioned now, but then the Empire was lifeblood to many English-speaking Canadians, so it must have been a shock when many of the aristocracy tried to impede Aitken at every step. (It is equally amazing to me how many Canadians cheer that he was impeded.) The idea of him as an outsider would increase with his power and the hope his enemies had that he could be kept forever on the outside.
Tolstoy, in his famous observations on national conceit, said the British were conceited because they came from the greatest Empire on earth, and therefore believed everything that they did must be proper and right. This was still true when Max was a young man. I am sure many British did not think of Canada as anything more than property they (supposedly) owned. How he must have butted his head against them, this colonial with money.
THE FIRST LETTER of introduction he had to this rarified London was to a fellow New Brunswicker, Andrew Bonar Law. (Their museums are now fifty miles apart in the province of New Brunswick.) Bonar Law was born in Rexton, New Brunswick, in l858, and moved to Scotland when he was sixteen, after his mother’s death, to find employment with his family’s ironworks. By the time Max arrived, he was a well-established sitting member of the Conservative Party, having first represented Glasgow-Blackfriars and then Dulwich. In pictures he looks a little, at least to me, like Joseph Conrad, who would recently have published The Secret Agent, a strangely comic master-piece that shows a darker aspect of the seething temper of the times.
Law was cool to Max (coming from the opposite side of the Scottish Religious question) and Max felt Law could never succeed because of the “shape of his head”—perhaps the strangest and most comic of all the strange and sometimes comic beliefs Max the pragmatist had. But Law was not immune to the young man’s sales ability, and he bought five hundred shares of a stock Max was selling. Max was always selling, and when he went to England the main thing he was selling was himself, wrapped up as manna from Canada. He sold himself the same way as he sold eggs from his hens, or Bennett in Chatham—with too much sauce and not enough meat. You can imagine casually inviting him to visit you at some time in the future, only to discover him standing at your door at eight o’clock the next morning. In fact, Bonar Law once actually had the door locked against him, just like many others before and some after. But he let Max back in—just like many others before and some after.
It did show his ability to keep them, or at least himself, enthused.
Of course, meeting Bonar Law, the boy from Rexton, New Brunswick, who was to become prime minister of Great Britain in 1922, was a pivotal event in Max Aitken’s life. Bonar Law would become another older man who would string a tightrope and watch how the little Newcastle imp could don a top hat and twirl a cane while perched upon it.
In fact the friendship between these two New Brunswickers would shape the next twelve years of British politics, first within the ranks of the British Conservative Party and then within the office of the prime minister itself.
It is strange how quickly our man got on in Britain. One forgets that, as a British citizen, and as a millionaire, and with introductions to Bonar Law and other expatriate Canadians, Max Aitken had inroads already ploughed. And amid all this glitter—Henry James was still writing, George V was ascending the throne, young (or youngish) Churchill was conniving for power, there were parties in tuxes and dinner at the club—he must have thought he had landed at the top of the world. In a way he had. It was the London of Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, of London Bridge and the Thames, of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, of eighteenth-century scribblers like Sam Johnson and nineteenth-century icons like Charles Dickens, and of political men of only a generation before, like Disraeli and Gladstone. Max, too, wanted to climb to the top of the greasy pole—he was too certain of his destiny not to—but it’s hard to know if he
wanted the prime ministership. If he had thought Saint John, New Brunswick, was awe-inspiring when he was a boy, look what he’d gotten up to now!
He would never take up permanent residence in Canada again (though on three occasions he would try). He was one of the casualties, not of the cement shenanigans back home (or not just that) so much as of Canada’s inability to set a course for itself and keep its brightest and most influential citizens Canadian. In a sense Max was like Canadian silentfilm icon Mary Pickford, or fellow New Brunswickers Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM (who was born in Russia but educated in New Brunswick) and 1940s actor Walter Pigeon, or later still, Saint John–born Donald Sutherland. He, like they, had to go where there would be a reasonable chance of becoming a star. However, he would be blamed for this “flaw” of being Canadian—in Britain far more than they were in the States. And Canada and Canadians have treated the memories of these film stars with a reverence our pugnacious newspaper baron never managed to corral. Yet there was no Canadian of the century more influential. Perhaps in a way (shudder to think), a saviour of our way of life. Why is this not remembered? Why is our whole contribution to the world thrown off a cliff to oblivion, and none of us dare say shame?
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.
CHAPTER NINE
Knighthood
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.
CHAPTER TEN
Cherkley as a Front for
Family Life
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.
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