Read Online Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards - Free Book Online

his wife Gladys as beautiful decoy, spending as much money as the seatwarranted. He told a local reporter to go easy on him because he had been in politics only a week. That statement in itself is courageous, for it appeals to anyone with a sense of humour. It shows his understanding of what people wanted, and they wanted, at least for now, the bright new voice from Canada (even though they hated his Miramichi accent and the way he pronounced the names of their towns). He helped things along by having nice things written about him in Canadian papers, and then republished in local Ashton ones—a good enough ploy if one dares use it.
    The trade unions went for him, even though they recognized that he made promises whether or not he had any idea of their import. Sounds like the Bennett campaign of fifteen years before. Or in fact most campaigns of today. He won the seat by 196 votes.
    Now he was in, as a Tory, and immediately became friends with Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George— two radical Liberals (Churchill, of course, would later become a Conservative).
    Bonar Law was jealous of these new friendships of Max’s— and suspicious of their political stripes. He felt betrayed. All his life, Max would do infuriating things like this. But Aitken liked Lloyd George and Churchill in spite of their political stripes—and besides, Churchill was Churchill, one of themost famous names in Britain, who had chronicled his true heroics in the Boer War, and Aitken needed to meet him.
    However, what is less known is that, at this point, Aitken suddenly went back home—to Newcastle, New Brunswick. He was wined and dined as a great success and was asked to run as a Conservative for Northumberland County, where Newcastle was the shire town. He thought about it but decided against it. He went back to England. What caused this trip?
    This was one of three trips he would make back to Canada, hoping to settle at home. All three times he realized, like someone does with an unrequited love, that it is never to be. There is a picture of him as an old man, walking a lane in New Brunswick, with his limousine a hundred yards behind him—like a child searching for something he lost along the way.

CHAPTER TEN
Cherkley as a Front for
Family Life
    When he got back to England, he left his house in London and bought Cherkley, an estate twenty miles outside the city in Surrey, and Gladys and Rudyard Kipling’s wife got down to the job of remodelling it. Cherkley in fact looked something like a big square manse, but it had its moments, and was to become palatial and splendid. This was perhaps Gladys Aitken’s happiest year, with true friends helping her in her new home, young children—Janet, John William (called Max), and Peter—and an exceedingly popular (for the moment) husband. There would be parties and love and laughter—for a while. Her life would never be this content again. Max liked to think—and it must have been just a whim—that he could be something of a country squire. He would leave the rat race behind, and live with his brood on the estate. It lasted a month. Then he crept back to London, returning to Cherkley only on the weekends.
    THOUGH HE WAS only a backbencher, because he was an intimate of Bonar Law he was all of a sudden a major player. People were frightened of Max Aitken, as they are of any force of nature, and many wanted to reduce his influence to remove their fear. He was also inexhaustibly bright, and curious enough about others to make friends easily. But he could be as deadly as a snake with venom if thwarted. He continued in finance, both in Canada and England, bought a bank in Britain, and had a fondness for gambling in Monte Carlo.
    He stayed in London to see what was happening in the political theatre. Once again, he was not in Gladys’s life, though she struggled to make a life for them all. Now she was in a foreign land, with her children. He would come back and forth, but it was like it always was, and