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.) He was 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 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 this temptation. 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 to say 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 its official 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 of the man. “Here’s your fifty cents” was in fact an omen of things to come—and some of them would grow darker as the years went by.
On election night, with the results in, Bennett the victor thanked his young charge profusely for such a successful campaign. The morning after, when he learned what he supposedly had promised to men he didn’t know, and to some he never liked, Bennett was furious.
“You will never handle a campaign of mine again,” declared Bennett, who always had his eyes on the greater prize.
“Well, I’ll never again give wholesale promises of that sort,” Max concurred.
Both statements, of course, were false.
THERE WERE MANY things for him to do—go to dances, and run campaigns, and be a man-about-town at seventeen— estranged from his father and the awful stricture of church. Out in the world you had to be a very different man than in the manse. It was the difference between being a gunslinger and a sodbuster. His life seemed to prove that he had made an early choice between them.
Having parties was better than sitting listening to a sermon. He had listened to enough of those. Playing cards was better than reading verse. Ice-boating on the river in the winter with some sweet maiden was better than studying about Gaul (he doesn’t mention one particular girl in his life at this time, so perhaps there was more than one, or perhaps, because of his looks, he was rebuffed. He had, after all, a mouth like a moccasin).
Still, life seemed idyllic for a time. His dreams at this point were probably very locally focused, for he was a clerk in the firm of his hero, Bennett. I am sure he could no more see London, England, from his office window than he could see Sheldrake Island, which was at one time a leper colony for his and my countrymen.
However, late in l897, our future prime minister, R.B. Bennett, seeking better opportunity in the West, left for Calgary. Max Aitken suddenly discovered the offices of Tweedie to be cold, cramped, and unceremoniously boring, as A.J.P. Taylor states. His dream of always being Bennett’s right-hand man, and helping this man to great success, was gone. What would he do? He needed someone to pin his sleeve to. Or did he? Maybe he could be what Bennett was. So he simply advertised the fact that he had taken over Bennett’s position in Tweedie’s firm.
He told his family prematurely that he was to take Bennett’s chair, something for which, he believed, as office clerk and lawyer apprentice, he was in line.
“Yes,” I can hear him telling his startled Mom and Dad, “I will have my name on Tweedie’s door. I will become the barrister for the church—when it needs me!”
He desperately wanted them to be proud of him. He wanted the world to know him. He had talent, enormous talent, that they didn’t register, and it was like an unformed substance in him. He would brag about it until they understood it was there. In some ways he would do this all his life.
It was a humiliation, then, to learn that the chair would be given to a man named Mitchell, the son of a Father of Confederation from Newcastle, who had done his law training at university. It felt like a betrayal by Tweedie himself. (The firm did, as a courtesy, later on put his name on the door—as Lord Beaverbrook.)
However, his assertiveness had rankled—and in some ways frightened—Tweedie, who could not get a handle on the boy, or control his exuberance.
(This is how R.B. Bennett secretly felt about Aitken, too. There was too much of the showman, the circus act, the juggler on one leg, and his need to prove himself was too exhausting for these older men. He would never be made welcome in pleasant society; to have him near was almost always an embarrassment. It was an embarrassment they, like many others, were later to hide from him, whenever they needed his exuberance and showmanship. To tell the truth, I am not sure he ever caught on.)
So the boy was let go.
But Aitken’s life is often an example of how bitter disappointment, supposed failure, and disaster can at times help you immensely. If he was master of his own fate, this then was a twist he had not expected, one which in the past sent him at first under the mechanics of a mower, and now to Saint John, and then to the great world beyond.