Lord Beaverbrook (14 page)

This act of disrespect smacks of wilful immaturity after sixty years.

So, there was no ambassadorship. But Max kept insisting, spoke to the New York papers about how a second front was needed . . .

WE ALL KNOW
Max Aitken got his wish. A quasi–second front came in August 1942. But it was done in a way that was almost calculated to prove to him that he was mistaken—and to prove to his last great mentor, Joe Stalin, that such a thing was just not feasible at the time. It was a deadly frontal assault on a beach at Dieppe, by Canadian soldiers running up beaches against heavily armed pillboxes and impenetrable defensive positions, and Max bore the responsibility and felt the sting. At least in some way, because those who were against it wanted him to. Was this conscious or unconscious slaughter to prove a point to the boy from Newcastle? Who knows? Perhaps in the god-awful fog of war, both. Max did not see it coming until it was too late. For years after, he blamed Louis Mountbatten, the overlord of the operation, for the Canadian casualties at Dieppe.

“Shake the hand of a Canadian you haven’t killed,” Max said when he met Mountbatten soon after.

It was a fiasco, without any air or naval support (which the Canadians right up until the moment of the battle were promised). It was a humiliation in which his Canadians fought and died—and not only this, but some made it, through withering hellfire to the town of Dieppe itself, an almost impossible feat of heroics. Max, shaken to the core,
gave up his second-front campaign. For the rest of the war he spoke of other things to which the government should be committed—the price of commodities, etc., and pretty much left the decisions of the war to Churchill.

After this, he joined cabinet meetings only as an adviser, and in 1943 he took up agriculture and farming to help the war effort. He wasn’t a great farmer himself, of course, but as always he made sure those he hired or consulted were. He even sent honey to Attlee’s wife, and it has been said that the Attlees appreciated it. (So perhaps he wasn’t so evil after all.)

Late in the war, in 1945, as he was sitting in a war cabinet meeting, a note was handed to him simply stating: “Jean is dying.”

Churchill, seeing the note, announced: “The cabinet can do no more business today.”

A.J.P. Taylor states that Jean Norton’s death was Max’s greatest loss since Gladys in 1927. He might marry again, late in life, but the two great loves of that life were gone.

In the end he was, in a way, far more British than the British, in a way more Imperial than any, more certain that things had to be done in a certain way. Of course he was always like this. It was his way or the highway. Still and all, he was the consummate outsider in a world that pretended (and only pretended) to like outsiders.

The portrait of him painted by Graham Sutherland in 1953, which hangs in the foyer of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, shows an elderly imp, with that smile that always displayed a hint of cunning mischief. As one biographer said, he was still the Prince of Mischief. Mischief was his great asset and liability. That and the ability to be at times four moves ahead of everyone else.

After the war, the country was going in another direction. He found himself quite suddenly an old man, all his dreams now out of fashion with the times.

He was seen in Chatham, near his old law office one day by a group of North Shore Regiment soldiers. My wife’s
uncle Bill Savage, wounded at D-Day as a boy of seventeen, was one. They hollered at him:

“Beaver—thanks for getting staples to us in the war.”

And one said:

“Well the war is over. What about some of that money now?”

He laughed heartily at this and, putting his hands in his pockets, turned them inside out, to show he hadn’t a cent on him. Then they all laughed at that. He was the boy of eight again, playing Birds in a Bush.

He got the name Beaverbrook put up on Tweedie’s lawfirm’s office door. But he didn’t stay. He had nowhere left to go. He went back to England.

He was an elderly man now, wearing straw hats in sunny places, attendants at his side, smiling wanly at the camera. He resigned from the Conservative Party in 1949. His dreams of Imperial preference gone, he chained the lady at the top of his newspaper masthead. He hadn’t given up the fight for it until 1952. By then, he and Churchill knew that the world of Britain was fading, that it was America’s world now. Churchill sat in the House, and became prime minister once more, but Beaverbrook was gone from active politics. He did seem in the end to have the grace to know when to leave. His best days were
behind him by thirty-five years. By the mid 1950s he knew this, and seemed contented.

The old world had crumbled beneath him, just as it had done an age before to the Victorians. For some reason, pictures of him as an old man seem to me to be most significant. In one, he stands silently to the side while Senator John F. Kennedy speaks with the president of the University of New Brunswick, Colin B. Mackay. He had known old Joe, Kennedy’s father, who was an Irish-American and hadn’t wanted America supporting Britain in the war. All of that was over now.

The old war horse spoke of the new power-brokers with amusement and not without a hint of sarcasm—of the new prime ministers with disdain. They would have been no match for him, just as Churchill said about himself with the same people. But they were old men going on their final journey on unsteady feet. There is a picture of Max and Winston with Harold Macmillan, taken in 1962. They are sitting together on a couch, and we sense that each of them is attended by aides. In formal evening attire, they face the camera without looking at it, and seem to acknowledge each other without even a glance. Only people who have come through wars together can do so.

“I met an old man who couldn’t piss. I can piss, I just can’t walk,” the Beaver once said.

Once, when Churchill did not remember a gift Max had sent him, he said: “My friends are going from the head down. I am going from the feet up.” He was.

He was still writing books. He wrote a biography of Lloyd George, and had one planned on his arch-enemy Baldwin that he did not write, or at any rate did not complete. His books have a style that is pure . . . Beaverado. You can see it in everything he wrote. He had to be king-maker and king-breaker. And if you love him, then you accept that. Beyond this, in his words there is a slight indication that he was never really sure exactly why things happened. But he knew they did. He also tried to get his life in order, and began a campaign to give many of his assets away.

He was still railed at and belittled by people. One of these was the once-famous British journalist and philosopher Malcolm Muggeridge—a man incensed that Beaverbrook should have money and power. What is even more telling about Muggeridge (and this is the real bone of contention he raises) how dare he spread his largesse to lowly backward New Brunswickers? You see, that was the thinking when Muggeridge said that there were more statues to Beaverbrook in New Brunswick than there were churches. (Muggeridge lied of course.) Yet Muggeridge persisted without saying what rankled him: What rankled
Malcolm was a man giving so much to so many supposedly illiterate people from the winter dark.

Well, I came from that winter dark, that backward province too. I grew up two blocks from Max’s old home, roamed the same streets at night. I took in the same offices of adventure, and displeased the same kinds of people, and made my way in a world that was as often as closed toward me as his was toward him.

Max seemed to know that. He seemed to know that Christ, wherever he might be in the hearts of men, would embrace a boy from Harkins every bit as warmly as a boy from Harrow. But there are always people who just never catch on.

MAX’S HEALTH FLUCTUATED
and so did his interests. He took trips to France, and planned books that he did not start or did not finish.

He gave the Beaverbrook Art Gallery to New Brunswick in 1958—filled with paintings by Salvador Dali, Gainsborough, Sir Josiah Reynolds, Sutherland, Picasso, Matisse, and many others. Great New Brunswick artists like Millar Britain and Jack Humphrey were represented there too. (As was my uncle Harry Richards in 1965.) Though, as I write this, ownership of the collection is being contested by his grandchildren, who
for some reason, say they are “hurt” by the people of New Brunswick, whom they “care for.” Let’s just say they have captured the spirit and essence of those British their grandfather fought so valiantly against.

The Old Manse Library where I first wrote is now the Beaverbrook Museum. Many other buildings besides these bear his name.

He did not do this so much for himself—and why should it matter if he did? He gave because it made him feel good, and perhaps important. So what? He donated money and became a chancellor of the University of New Brunswick. He never asked for a penny back.

He retired to his great estate at Cherkley. He took trips to France, kept up with his old papers: “What’s the news?” he would say whenever he answered the telephone.

He still loved and bought the newest gadgets, just like the typewriter he had carried on the train all those years before.

Once in France, at a party, the Duke of Windsor was showing off a pair of expensive cufflinks that the duchess had bought for him. Everyone began to show their own, except for Max. Finally cajoled into it, he drew back his jacket sleeves to reveal safety pins in his shirt, just like those he had worn to the dance in Saint John when he was eighteen. He had never escaped his youth after all.

He married again late in life. The new Lady Beaverbrook was Lady Christofor Dunn, the widow of Sir James Dunn, the financier he had met in Edmonton when he was nineteen years of age.

In the 1950s he received honorary doctorates from Mount Allison and Saint Thomas universities. The tribute speeches written for these investitures by the universities were gushing and almost embarrassing proclamations of our province’s reverence for him.

We used to see him about town also. I admit the dates are vague, but my father pointed him out to me one day, in 1958 or 1959. All I saw was a little stooped elderly man getting into a car in front of the town hall. I was too far away to say hello, and probably would have been too tongue-tied if I had been closer.

He used to stop youngsters on the road, asking them if they would like to go for a drive. He took my friend Don Doiron for pop and chips in his car, when he was in Beaverbrook Settlement one day. Don told me he was amazed that a man would sit in the back seat and have a driver. That self-pleasing innocence would all be looked upon as strangely suggestive today, wouldn’t it? Don sat beside him in ratty sneakers and shorts, and Max spoke to Don about fishing trout in the brook nearby, just as he had
done long ago. He pointed out to his driver old men and women whom he said he knew. He probably did. Another boy he invited for a ride said he couldn’t go because he had a baseball game. I once told this to an American professor who dissolved in cackling laughter at the boy’s answer. It is not the boy’s fault. He was just a boy going to a baseball game. Still, the boy remembered the incident. Most likely the game and who won is long forgotten.

Why did Beaver do this? Was he looking for his lost youth? Did he wish to revitalize himself? Or was he trying to make sure others remembered him? All of this and more, of course! He was, after all is said and done, trying to remember the way it should have been for him—and trying to instill what he thought the memories should be into the hearts and souls of others. This is really the greatest contest he had. But he couldn’t do it. He would fail at this as well—and though he had done more than most men ever would, I am sure he often thought of himself as a failure. For it is impossible for a man who had that much ambition to ever succeed. As much as Max championed himself, as much as he bragged—and he did brag always—part of him felt he had failed. He kept coming home so people could tell him he hadn’t. That was a trick, too. But in the end, he couldn’t convince himself that he was home, so he went back to his adopted nation.

THE CANADIAN PRESS BARON
Lord Thomson gave him a tribute dinner in London when he was turning eighty-five, and flew four New Brunswick First Nation chiefs, two Micmac and two Maliseet, over as a surprise for the celebration. One Micmac chief, Mosey Francis, of Eel Ground, a reserve near Newcastle, brought back a piece of birthday cake. His granddaughter Hazel has told me it is still in their possession.

A British newspaper interviewed Max, and found him to be an “echoing gallery through which stump all the great figures of half a century.” The interviewer asked him the one question: Was he sorry about not being able to accomplish Free Trade.

“I was unworthy,” he said quietly.

In his final speech, he told those gathered that he had been an apprentice all his life, from those first days back in Chatham, and that he would soon depart for somewhere else—he was not sure of the direction—but he would be an apprentice once more. He returned to Cherkley and was not seen again.

He died on June 9, 1964, in the arms of his wife Christofor. There was a service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Then, in September, on a warm fall afternoon, just the kind he himself would have skipped school for, his ashes were
brought back to Newcastle and placed in his bust, which stands in the town square. Led by our teachers, we all went in double file from school to the park, me and my brothers and sisters, and my wife, Peg, though I did not know her then. There was a tribute, the bugle sounded, and a gun salute rang out under the clear blue sky. Some of the buildings he knew as a boy, now tottering in old age, surrounded him.

My wife’s cousin, a cadet named David Savage, handed the Canadian flag to Max’s widow. There was much dignity and solemnity in honour of a man many of us could not remember. In some way the Miramichi was his Rosebud. Like Citizen Kane, he loved it dearly and missed it always; but perhaps he had forgotten along the way where he laid it down. That didn’t seem to matter any more. For this was his river, and the wanderer was now, at long last, back home.