Lord Beaverbrook

by David Adams Richards

  THERE ARE PICTURES of him at spas with his children, Peter and Max, and later on, looking out over seacoast resorts by himself or attended by butlers or advisers. Now and again there is a picture of him with a woman of interest, like his lover Jean Norton. As he grew older, he wore those large sunhats that made him seem a comic little fellow, half-hidden, with a playful smile. At times the smile seems to be a plea, maybe for understanding or a truce of some kind.

  As much as he was part of the great world, he is seldom pictured in groups of people. Usually there are only one or two others, unless he is trying to stump for some cause like Empire Free Trade. This does not imply he was not happy with things. He was an original, oddity, and outcast, all at the same time. An outcast tends to become used to it. Max learned to delight in it. He irritated the mighty and confused the poor, so that both saw him as a peculiarity. As he said of his sons, they would have been much better off going to Harkins Academy, in Newcastle, than to Eton, where three-quarters of his enemies had gone. So, although he took his children to resorts, he must have seen in them the faces of those who were trying to hold him back. And he bullied them because of it.

  In certain respects, though, he must have been very lonely. From the time he was twelve, he prosecuted his life from no vantage point but self-will. Lonely? One just has to look over the wreckage of his life, his marriage, and his career.

  There is a story of him, one night at a dinner, making fun of many of those titled men who had stabbed him in the back, using quips and barbs they could not answer, in order to entertain a young actress who was sitting beside him. They had titles and no money, he claimed, and they hated his money and begrudged him his title. They were men who, as Peter Howard said, had lost their fortunes, or their fathers’ fortunes, and had no ability to make another, so they cursed the man who made his own, and came to them from across the sea (from that land of wolves and primitive Redmen).

  The young actress said nothing to him as he used his scathing wit against them. Not for the longest time. Then she turned her pretty little head, and said:

  “My dear sir, you are making fun of who you paid to belong to.”

  He wasn’t behaving like a Brit, he was behaving like an American, and they hated him for that too. Or, I should say, to give credit where it is due, he was in a way behaving like a Canadian. It was like the old joke: A Scotsman was asked during the war how he could tell a Brit from an American from a Canadian. The Scot replied that a Brit walked into a bar as if he’d like to own it. An American walked into a bar as if he owned it. A Canadian walked into a bar—he didn’t give a fuck who owned it. There was that about Canadians—back then.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Long-Coming Rise

  of Mr. Bonar Law

  Cold, dreary, foggy London in the war. The great monuments are shrouded; there are dirigibles in the sky. It must have been in the back of little Max’s mind when he looked out the window of his London hideaway—like a spectre in the fog itself: David Lloyd George’s handsome face with its drooping moustache, and his radical posturing. (That was it—the radical posture! As Churchill said of Gandhi, so Max Aitken must have thought of Lloyd George—another con man).

  He must have also thought of his good wife, Gladys— perhaps a better wife than people like either Beaver or I deserve—preparing to campaign for him, and then him having to tell her to let it go and step aside, for he had been stabbed in the back by the crème de la crème of British society. No sir, you could never close the drapes on that!

  So, after a time, Prime Minister Lloyd George was no longer pleased with our little Max Aitken from far-off Newcastle, New Brunswick, on the Miramichi. Soon enough Prime Minister David Lloyd George was complaining about him. Complaining about him taking his own view of things, independent of the government. And there was something else. That damned paper, the Daily Express, and Max’s wish to rupture the cozy alliance between Liberal Lloyd George and Conservative Bonar Law, the one man Lloyd George feared. (He feared Law so much that he often asked Beaver to go to Law’s house to break bad news, such as the reinstating of the much-hated Winston Churchill into the wartime cabinet.)

  Ah, but wasn’t that cozy alliance one that Max helped form?

  Aitken stayed at his apartment in grimy old London and waited. And watched. And plotted. Now, he didn’t plot directly. No, like a street fighter, he was a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy. A bottle over the head at the right time.

  Besides, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t try to bring down this coalition while there was a war.

  But the war—as awful as it was, and as long as it did last, and as many empires as it did manage to destroy—did not last for ever. It was over in November 1918, and Max had his papers—and as anyone who ever read anything by him could tell you, one knew when he wrote something, or, even worse, had something written.

  As early as August 1918, Max was allowing certain editorials to be printed in the Express that would cause the coalition government embarrassment and discomfort.

  In one such incident, Lloyd George sent Churchill (now back in cabinet, and Beaverbrook’s one remaining Liberal friend) to ask for an explanation about an editorial that was as cutting as it was truthful. The editorial stated that the tottering Liberals were saved from defeat only by the outbreak of world war in 1914 and certain people’s (i.e., Lord Beaverbrook’s) gracious help. And this in an editorial in a paper owned by a man who was still minister of information for the sitting coalition government.

  Beaverbrook would not retract or condemn the editorial, nor would he disclaim credit for it. This is how tough the little bastard was—staring down both Churchill and David Lloyd George at the same time.

  As far as Churchill was concerned, as is suggested by Peter Howard and others, this was “a blatant form of political rebellion,” and he cautioned Max that he would be sorry to have to deliver this news to the prime minister. Still Max would not draw back. And any Miramicher can understand why. A year and a half before, he had been in a better position in politics than Winston, and had in fact advised him on how to save his career. Now Churchill was once again in power. No, Max could not draw back!

  When the news was delivered, it was reported that Lloyd George decided to let it go. He had enough fights on his hands without taking on Aitken, and he knew he needed the paper’s support—or at least its indifference to his political aims. Max knew, in his petulant way, that he had ruffled the feathers of the bird he wanted to bring down. But it would take more than one shot.

  MAX AITKEN RESIGNED from office as minister of information in October 1918, due to ill health. Everyone thought he was faking, but he was very ill and, through to the end of the war in November, was in serious jeopardy of losing his life to an abscessed tooth. His resignation, though, also meant that he could turn his full attention to the flaws of a government of which he, up until that time, had been a member.

  “Beaverbrook now seemed not merely independent of the Government, but hostile to it, and it was hard to believe that he had once been the intimate friends of Cabinet Ministers,” A.J.P. Taylor writes about this period. But men in both parties—those “intimate friends” had dealt him a terrible blow, had kept him on the outside, ridiculed his Empire Free Trade platform and his paper, and for almost ten years had besmirched his name and his faroff Canada. Now they blamed him for having the audacity to fight back.

  Max used his paper as a weapon. In fact, why publish a paper that disagreed with your own opinions? No newspaper baron in his right mind would do so. Simply put, he felt an intrusive wartime coalition government was one thing—but a government should not be interfering with an average citizenry after the war, nor should it send more British and Canadian troops in to fight alongside the White Russians in their war against the Bolsheviks. (They were sent.) It was bad for business and bad for everything else, and his was not the only newspaper that wrote this. His was simply the loudest.

  There is an aside here: Max and Russia. Max was secretly fas
cinated with Bolshevism, and even at times applauded it. Perhaps he was not as enthusiastic as Bernard Shaw or other artists (who did not seem to realize that, if they lived in Soviet Russia, they would be the first to disappear), but it seems he did look upon it as a legitimate ideology. He was always hesitant to oppose it. There is, however, the great quip he made in Glasgow, while stumping for Free Trade a few years later. When a Communist shouted him down, saying, “Beaver, have you been to Russia? There is no unemployment in Russia,” Max said, “Yes, I have, and you are right—there is no unemployment in Russia.” He paused, and then added, “I’ve been to the Glasgow jail, and there is no unemployment there either.”

  I think this was part of his general perversity—to argue any side that rankled those he was arguing with at the time.

  Unfortunately for Max, in 1922, just when it seemed that Bonar Law, who had now led the Conservative Party since 1912, might be able to break free of the coalition and lead the Conservative Party to victory, poor health made Law step aside. That left in the running those whom Max distrusted.

  Austin Chamberlain, Max’s enemy from the party leadership race of 1912, became leader of the Conservative Party within the House of Commons in 1922, and Chamberlain was inclined, as Peter Howard said, to support the coalition. And of course he hated Max Aitken for keeping him from the leadership. But as Max upped his editorial displeasure with the coalition, Chamberlain, in order to embarrass the press baron, suggested that the government was unsuitable to Beaverbrook only because he had businesses and oil interests in the East of which England disapproved. Max had no Eastern oil interests. This was a lie, and one that seriously discredited Max Aitken’s motives.

  The slander angered Max enough so that, as Peter Howard states, he went to visit Bonar Law. Citing the disrespect he had for Chamberlain, “a yes man” for Lloyd George, he convinced Bonar Law to come out of retirement to be the saviour of the Conservative Party.

  Ill and elderly, Bonar Law came back in June 1922 and opposed Chamberlain in a leadership runoff over the very fact of the coalition. The coalition finally fell. In the next general election, the Liberals went down to defeat.

  It was a horrendous election. William Manchester writes that Churchill’s wife, Clementine, campaigning for her Liberal husband in Ireland, was spit upon. The noble local Irish paper made a point of mentioning that she carried “her un-baptized baby in her arms.” Churchill himself was under threat of death, and had armed guards at his door. Beaverbrook of course did not wish this. But he spent money to help the Tory candidates wherever he could. So, in the election of 1922, Bonar Law became what Max had wanted him to be since 1912, prime minister of Great Britain.

  Winston’s son, Randolph Churchill, stated in his book Lord Derby, “King of Lancashire” that “the prime mover and principal agent in the plan to bring down the coalition Government” was Lord Beaverbrook.

  Max would become known forever as what Jenkins liked to call, in his biography of Churchill, “a bounder” and a deeply distrusted press baron. And this is much how he is perceived today, even by many in our hometown.

  Well, Churchill did not distrust our Max, nor did Bonar Law.

  WITH BONAR LAW as prime minister, Max Aitken was perhaps at the height of his power as a back-room strategist. He wanted to use the new power of Bonar Law to support, among other things, his vision of Free Trade. Again, this was the main thing on his mind. Commonwealth Free Trade was to him the balm to keep Britain great, to keep it Imperial, without the need to meddle in Europe, and to safeguard against the great power of the United States, in financial, not military, forums. He wrote about this continually in his papers’ editorials.

  Max was of his day. He believed in his own supremacy—as a white Englishman. He did not consider that the world had changed and many who had benefited most from Empire no longer claimed they wanted it. Max was old-fashioned and, in his own way, naive—as men from the colonies are at times, who believe in Empire more than those who are more privy to its blessings. In some ways Max believed he was a godsend to the people of England. If not, why would he be there? And it was in some part not only Empire Free Trade but Empire consolidation—a kind of unity, almost like amalgamation—that he was working toward.

  But psychologically any talk of Empire after such a terrible war was in bad taste. I don’t think Beaverbrook understood this. His time, if he had it (and he did have it), was gone over yonder.

  And then, Bonar Law, prime minister for only seven months, died in 1923.

  With a vacancy at the top of government, the king had to choose to replace the deceased Bonar Law. It was said the Conservatives wanted to turn toward the common man. So Law’s former clerk, and second-term MP, Stanley Baldwin, suddenly found himself “The Man.” Truly a quixotic choice.

  Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin! From 1923 to 1937 it was to be the age of Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin in Tired Great Britain.

  Since they hated each other, it was a stroke of fate that would put Max Aitken into the wilderness for years.

  Max was much like Tolstoy’s unfortunate dice player. At first, everything he threw worked to his call. From Saint John to London, he could not seem to roll bad dice. Then, after a time, try as he might, the dice no longer went his way.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  And Then Poor Gladys Dies

  What kind of life she had, we can imagine. Like one of the characters in Anna Karenina, she was left alone with the children for long stretches of time while her husband gallivanted. Some say she did not mind this—the price to pay, so to speak—and was not a great bedfellow for him, often being asleep by nine at night, not really on the same beam. He loved the gay evenings, and sooner or later he kept her from them, simply because of their different needs. Then, after a time, with his politics and finances and other involvements, he lost interest in her and the children. He was an open mark to be blamed for this. He knew and accepted this as well.

  She thought of these bed partners of his as trivial encounters. Some say the only love interest she really minded was Jean Norton. A.J.P. Taylor says this was because Norton was someone Beaverbrook wanted to shape and mould and develop, and he could not do this with Lady Beaverbrook, who, as Lord Birkenhead once commented, “had a breeding and a beauty to recommend her to any society in Europe.” It was Jean Norton he was in bed with when Gladys came to visit him at his hideaway in London. This is what Beaverbrook’s daughter never forgave.

  Norton was the wife of a member of parliament, and had children of her own. And she was in Max’s league, so to speak; like him she felt a need for companionship at the expense of a more sober spouse. They fought too, Beaver and Jean—but he must have loved her in some way. (Though he said, and I have no reason not to believe him, that the one love of his life was Gladys Drury.) Jean and he travelled together to Europe, played together in Italy, went to Monte Carlo, while her husband—understanding fellow—wanted to help Max with his finances.

  Gladys was not so understanding. She decided to fight back. So she told him she was tired of being stuck out in Cherkley and asked to move to London to be closer to him. He relented and bought Stornoway House near Green Park for her. She moved to London with the children, and then found out that the little bugger had moved Jean Norton out to Cherkley. One would have to be callous to even consider this. But it’s a gambit that somehow seems naughty rather than harmful. It would, as Miramichers say, have “seemed like a good idea at the time.” How much time elapsed after Gladys went out the front door before Jean swooped in the back? Max is not the only one to blame here. What in hell was Jean Norton thinking? Did she think it harmful?

  Harmful it was, perhaps in some ways soul-destroying. In 1926, Gladys left for a trip around the world with her daughter Janet. When she came back, Beaver believed he was prepared to settle down with her—to make it all up. She wrote him a letter expressing her love. But she was ill now. He had taken trips all his life with others. Now she went to Belgium alone, hoping for treatment. He wrot
e her a wonderful letter about how he would change—how she must live. How he would no longer take on the world, how he would spend more time with her. Who knows if he meant it? I know he believed he did.

  But he did not get to prove whether he did or not. In fact, he was not to see her again. She came back to Stornoway House and died on December 1, 1927, while he was absent. In fact, Gladys had lived most of her life in Britain alone, far from her family in Canada, and with children who were estranged from a father they hardly knew.

  If we want to talk about Max Aitken’s tragedy—this was it.

  HE DID CHANGE after this in some ways. He never gave up Jean, but now he acquired hiding places, to seek solitude from the world. From here on out he wanted to see no one. From here on out no one could get in touch with him—until he wanted them to. There were new hiding places in England and the Bahamas. In many ways he now hated the world—night life and politics and all of that. But still he needed people near him, so he would call them late at night and ask them over. Late at night—that is the time of the secret extrovert. The comical magician, the game-player. He would arrive in the Bahamas and wire Winston to come and see him.

  (This is a real Maritime trait. I can think of a dozen well-known men from the Maritimes who were/are exactly like this. You get a phone call at eleven at night and are asked if you are in the mood for a snack. . . . )

  He began to liquidate his assets in Canada and elsewhere. Some say after Gladys died he never went to the Daily Express building in London again, except once during the Second World War to show Churchill a movie. This did not mean he released his hold over his paper. No, he wouldn’t do that until the 1950s. However, he sold his holdings in cinema and made a fine profit. He also said (rashly) he would take no more interest in the affairs of men. He would go home to Newcastle and live in contemplation. But he never made it back. In fact, after such a time, whatever Newcastle ever was to him was lost.