Local Boys
Friends. By Lord Beaverbrook. (Heinemann, 12s. 6d.)
Is this the key to Lord Beaverbrook? There are civilisations which muddy history by producing effects, remote and baffling, long after they have perished and disappeared. Eighty years ago, Canada's maritime provinces held a civilisation : a small, prosperous colonial life with a distinction of its own. It was Canada's New England : many of the first families of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick indeed descended from loyalists who had chosen King George and moved north during the Revolution, while around them had grown a professional society of Scottish doctors, mer- chants, lawyers and clergy who remembered the Edinburgh of Sydney Smith and Scott. When Montreal and Toronto had spittoons and duck- boards, the Maritimes had books, pianos and Doric porticoes to their churches. The heart of their wealth and style was their ship-building- the fast, fine clippers which carried salt cod and ice to the West Indies, and brought back sugar. rum and occasional Negroes. With steam and iron ships, all this collapsed. All that remained was the best educational system in Canada, and a genera- tion of uprooted young men with Scottish ideas, beyond their incomes, of what the world should yield them. Undoubtedly the most exalted ambi- tions filled the minds of a New Brunswick minister's son named Max Aitken, and a solemn young schoolmaster he admired named Richard Bedford Bennett.
• In their way, the achievements of the Maritime diaspora rival those of the Scots themselves or the dispersed Austro-Hungarians in our century. Beaverbrook became-Beaverbrook. Bennett was to become leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Prime Minister of the dominion, and- which seems to be the point of this memoir-the man Lord Beaverbrook most revered. Their curi- ously unequal relationship recalls that of Carlyle with the gloomy, evangelical Edward Irving : young Max, nine years the junior, copies Bennett's handwriting, follows him into law, and then out to the prairies, where he almost forfeits his mentor's esteem by opening Calgary's first bowling-alley. Both took as model Andrew Bonar Law, who had travelled farthest from a New Brunswick birth- place, and embraced his campaign for Imperial Preference. Lord Beaverbrook still thinks they might have built an Empire Zollverein in the Thirties, but for a fatal falling-out over Bennett's election. But he takes the blame on himself; when Mackenzie King defeated his friend in 1935, Lord Beaverbrook procured Bennett a house in England beside his own and a viscount's seat in the House of Lords.
Even there, he gave Bennett precedence. There is something touching about the way Lord Beaver.: brook maintains, with increasing fiction, their boyhood relationship : the cheeky, shrewd but volatile young Max learning life's worthier goals from the bony, freckled and serious teacher. Cer- tainly, the picture has more charm than that of the disappointed elderly politician, whose humour- lessness and egoism Lord Beaverbrook admits. But charm, even liking, do not seem to have been the strongest elements in their lifelong bond. Rather Lord Beaverbrook seems intent to convey a sense of value, a heavy but durable integrity to which such faults belong. It is as if he wished to keep by him, not so much Bennett, as the core of a vanished tradition, the puritan simplicities and strengths of the New Brunswick where they were the lads most likely to succeed.
RONALD DRYDEN
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