A forgotten Canadian

         "Lord Beaverbrook" by David Adams Richards with an introduction by John Ralston Saul
    
         David   Adams Richards is a well-known novelist from New Brunswick. In this "Extraordinary Series"  book, he gives us a brisk outline of Max Aitken, later Lord BEaverbrook. Aitken was New Brunswick lad who went on to fame anf fortune in Canada and then Great Britain.
       Some of Aiken's triumphs in the business world were full of tricks and sleaze. Still by 1910 before he was even 30, he was a multimillionaire, owner of the massive Canada Cement Company and husband to a lovely woman named Gladys Drury. Alas, Aitken cheated on her many times.
      Then having outraged business classes  in the Maritimes, Aitken fled to Montreal. Then after having put together the Canada Cement Company, he took off to Great Britain. It was about l910 and Britain still ruled the waves. Aitken became a member of the Conservative Party. He befriended prominent Liberals like Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. He helped make Lloyd George Prime Minister in the midst of world War One. Then six years later he did the same thing for Bonar Law.
      But Aitken, a small man with a big mouth received no thanks for this. The English elite looked down on him as a crude low class colonial. They took his money but never liked him. To them, Aitken was trash.
      "He was a financial genius," writes Richards of Aitken who was now Lord Beaverbrook, "and a brilliant revolutionary newspaperman. He hated to be outmanoeuvred. It made for many bad days."
      It did indeed. As a newspaper owner, Beaverbrook made even more money owning newspapers like the very popular "Daily Express". Then came World War Two. Winston Churchill, now Britain's Prime Minister, made Beaverbrook Minister of War Production. Beaverbrook did a great job. He turned British industry into a war making machine that saved Britain from a Nazi  invasion.
      But once again he fought with so many people that Churchill tired of his friend. He sent him travelling to Russia where he got on well with Josef Stalin, and the U.S, where he befriended its president F.D.R.
    "He never could  sit still," writes Richards. This intense energy lay behind Aitken's fortune-making, womanizing, and his failed push for free trade within the then-British Empire.
    In 172 pages, Richards brings back to life, a man now long forgotten, except for his home province of New Brunswick.
    Reviewed by Dave Jaffe