Lord Beaverbrook (11 page)

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.

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 wrote 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.

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.

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.

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.)