Lord Beaverbrook Read Online Free Page A

birthplace of the Cunard Shipping Line (which was later sold to England’s White Star Line, which built the Titanic ) and of some of the greatest lumber barons in the country. Its industries were the physical industries of lumber and the sea.These were extremely sophisticated industries for the time, and Max would have delighted in scampering about the town, discovering the promise in such things. This and playing pranks were his two main pastimes. For the rest of his life he couldn’t seem to do without either. His boyhood was a time for driving his parents and siblings to distraction. (His older sister Rahno once threw him down a flight of stairs in an attempt to kill him.) Perhaps nowadays the boy would have been put on medication. And what would have happened to his empire then?
    One cannot help but think of him as an elderly man at dinner with potentates from the Empire—ladies and lords, members of parliament—watching them with a mischievous glint in his eye, as his friend Peter Howard says, like a cat ready to pounce. The idea, if he ever had it, that once he was finished with school he wouldn’t have to deal with mundane people ever again, proved to be wishful thinking. He would have to deal all his life with those who thought inside the box, who had dutifully done their lessons, who could get high marks in everything except thinking for themselves. Often he would have to fight them alone. In fact, in the end, they were the ones who did him in. Like a cat being pecked to death by ducks.

CHAPTER THREE
Lawyer’s Apprentice and
Campaign Manager
    There were many law offices on the Miramichi, in which many boys of Max’s age and demeanour articled. This certainly was one way into the greater world, and young Aitken knew this. By the age of fifteen he was ready to leave his father and mother and try life on his own. I believe the only champion he had at that time was himself.
    He knew one of the finest law firms was that of Tweedie’s, across the river in Chatham. So he waited his chance, and took advantage when it came, and one spring day about l896 he met Mr. Tweedie, portly and proud of it, and a locally famous lawyer, on the ferry boat travelling from Newcastle to Chatham. Engaging him in conversation, the ever-optimistic Max appealed for a job as law clerk. It was the same kind of chance meeting he would have a few years later with John Stairs of the Union Bank of Halifax.
    He had so many of these chance meetings in his life, one wonders how random they were, and how many times he took the ferry ride before this particular chance meeting occurred. So Moccasin Mouth, and double-dealer, went as law clerk, smiling all the while.
    LATER HE SAID he went into law at Tweedie’s because R.B. Bennett was a lawyer there, and Max wanted to emulate Bennett, who was already a local politician. That is the same R.B. Bennett who would one day become leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of Canada. Max’s childhood longing to be accepted by older men, and his precocious ability to keep them entertained, would become over time instrumental in the affairs of great men and of nations. Was his father ever jealous of this, or did he have too much else to think about? For, even by nineteenthcentury standards, Max was young when he went out on his own.
    R.B. Bennett, twenty-six at the time, and a former teacher in Douglastown, a village between the two main Miramichi towns of Chatham and Newcastle, was a highstrung, driven political animal, who could quote Disraeli and had legislative ambitions. (Anyone who could quote Disraeli would be welcome in my house, at least once.) Hewas the first, and therefore the most important, father figure of the many Max Aiken would seek out.
    At seventeen, Max ran Bennett’s very first political campaign, for alderman of the newly chartered town of Chatham, New Brunswick. This was in l896. Bennett was a church-going Methodist and a teetotaller, and Max says this is where they parted