Lord Beaverbrook Read Online Free Page B

company (intellectually speaking), which gives us the first indication that the Beaver was imbibing when he was sixteen or seventeen. On the Miramichi at that time, of course, this might have been a relatively mature age to begin. He talks about a back room at Adams’s (my mother’s name but no relation) where he boarded, and the lumberman William Richards (my grandfather’s name but no relation), and about parties and card games and drinking that went on. I am sure they did, and I am pretty sure Max would have a hand in some of it. He was far too exuberant not to. He was too gregarious not to have a devil-may-care attitude. The nights were too wondrous not to join in, the girls—for which he always had a weakness—too pretty. But I also know something about the drinking excesses of youth, and Max seems to be the kind who was too energetically ambitious to have spent too much of this energy drunk. Miramichi drinking habits are dangerous, and peer pressure is deadly. Many young men (and women) succumb to thistemptation. I believe his determination to succeed in the world, to make father figures proud of him, prevented wholesale inebriation, or at least curbed it. Also, among the fashionably drunk, it is never popular to be your own man. Max was always his own man.
    He has a story about what he was like at that time, which shows the kind of man he was to become. Wanting to go out to a dance—he was already an habitual skirt-chaser, something which would plague him, and others, most of his life—he asked his landlady, Mrs. Adams, to sew up a small hole in his best pair of pants. She told him she would do it for fifty cents. He did not have fifty cents, but, going into the living room, he saw fifty cents sitting on the fireplace mantel. He took it to Mrs. Adams, saying, “Here’s your fifty cents.” He did not lie. He got the job done. Was this calculated or spur-of-the-moment devilment? The second seems likely, but the fact he told the story shows how important quick thinking was to him. It would serve him well many times in the future. It would serve the world well, too—but it would also lessen him in the eyes of men, and cause much pain.
    HE GOT ON at Tweedie’s law firm as a clerk, and did run Bennett’s first foray into local politics. But Tweedie was tosay later that Max was into so many different ventures, he sometimes wondered if Aitken was working for him or he for Aitken. He also mentioned that people would come to the door seeking out Max Aitken’s various talents rather than to inquire about a legal matter. Of course this was said in hindsight, and might not have been said at all if Aitken had not become Lord Beaverbrook.
    In some ways, R.B. Bennett, as father figure, was the greatest influence in Beaverbrook’s life. Max never forgot him, and never forsook him, even in the 1930s when Canada blamed Bennett, then prime minister, for the woes of the Depression. (This was reflected in the name Canadians gave the cars that, because of the price of gas, had to be hauled by horses: “Bennett Buggies.”)
    But loyalty was one of Max Aitken’s admirable traits. It was a trait he always let you know he had, and a trait that would work against him at crucial moments in his life.
    Another trait, exuberant but inadvisable, was the tendency to give out promises on Bennett’s behalf during the campaign. He would ride around the streets of Chatham on those quiet evenings on Bennett’s bicycle, handing out leaflets— and promising everything from new docks to new sidewalks to new jobs, if only Bennett were elected. So it was here that the notion that Max Aitken was a notorious liar got itsofficial start. It’s an accusation that is true in part, yet often his promises were more mischievous than manipulative, given out with a brazen, what-the-hell attitude. There is a difference between mischief and calculation, and I believe one should also have the grace to realize he was seventeen.
    Though the child is father