John Buchan

• 1. Introduction

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  John Buchan, the Scottish novelist, ended his life as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada. In Montreal in 1937 he stood with a typed speech that reporters already held. By hand, he added the words "and to Canada's King" to a line about where a Canadian's first loyalty lay. The press release left those words out. The Montreal Gazette called the statement "disloyal", and imperialists were furious.

  Buchan was born on the 26th of August 1875 and died in 1940. In between he wrote over a hundred books, among them The Thirty-Nine Steps. He also worked as a barrister, helped run Britain's wartime information effort, and sat in Parliament. How did a minister's son from Perth come to represent the Crown in Canada? What did a thriller writer do for the government in the First World War? And why do critics still argue over what he believed?

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• 2. A Minister's Son

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  The double villa at 18-20 York Place in Perth, now named after him, is where Buchan was born. His father, also named John Buchan, was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. His mother was Helen Jane Buchan, born Masterton. He was their first child, and the family raised him in Kirkcaldy, in Fife.

  Summer holidays with his maternal grandparents in Broughton, in the Scottish Borders, gave him a love of walking, scenery and wildlife. All three appear often in his novels. Leithen Water, a tributary of the River Tweed, lent its name to Sir Edward Leithen, the hero of several books.

  After the family moved to Glasgow, Buchan attended Hutchesons' Boys' Grammar School. At 17 he won a scholarship to the University of Glasgow. There he studied classics under Gilbert Murray, wrote poetry, and became a published author.

  In 1895 a Junior Hulme scholarship took Buchan to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read Literae Humaniores, the Classics. A Senior Hulme scholarship in his third year added to his financial security. His friends there included Raymond Asquith, Aubrey Herbert and Tommy Nelson. He won the Stanhope essay prize in 1897 and the Newdigate Prize for poetry the next year. He was also elected president of the Oxford Union.

  Six of his works were published during those years. One was Grey Weather, a book of short stories from 1899. Three were early adventure novels: John Burnet of Barns in 1898, A Lost Lady of Old Years in 1899, and The Half-Hearted in 1900. A young Sholto Johnstone Douglas painted his first portrait in 1900, around the time he graduated.

  In June 1901 Buchan was called to the Bar as a member of the Middle Temple. That September he travelled to South Africa as private secretary to Alfred Milner. Milner was High Commissioner for Southern Africa, Governor of Cape Colony, and colonial administrator of Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. The job made Buchan an early member of Milner's Kindergarten. South Africa left him with an acquaintance with a country that would feature strongly in his writing.

  Back in London in 1903, Buchan returned to writing and to the law. In 1905 he published a legal book, The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income. On the 15th of July 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, a daughter of the Hon. Norman Grosvenor and a cousin of the Duke of Westminster. They had four children: Alice, John, William and Alastair. By then he had joined the publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons and become a deputy editor of The Spectator.

  Prester John, another adventure novel set in South Africa, appeared in 1910. Around the same time duodenal ulcers began to trouble him, an ailment he later gave to one of his fictional characters. In March 1911 he was adopted as the Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk, in the Scottish Borders.

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• 3. Words as Weapons

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  When the First World War broke out, Buchan began writing a history of the war for Nelson's. It eventually ran to 24 volumes. He kept adding to it throughout the fighting.

  In 1915 Buchan worked in the Foreign Office and spent time in France as a war correspondent for The Times. That same year he published The Thirty-Nine Steps, a spy thriller set just before the war began. Its hero, Richard Hannay, was partly based on Edmund Ironside, a friend from Buchan's South African days. A sequel, Greenmantle, followed in 1916.

  In June 1916 Buchan was sent to the Western Front, attached to the British Army's General Headquarters Intelligence Section. His task was to help draft official communiques for the press. On arrival he received a field commission as a second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps.

  The War Cabinet under David Lloyd George recognised his abilities in 1917 and named him Director of Information. In effect, he led Britain's propaganda effort. In early 1918 he became head of a Department of Intelligence inside the new Ministry of Information, under Lord Beaverbrook.

  Writing the History of the War posed a delicate problem. Buchan had close connections to many military leaders and to the government, so criticism came hard. He still criticised the army's conduct in places, and he disagreed with some statistics and official statements. Of Winston Churchill he wrote that the country could never be sufficiently grateful for his services at the outbreak of war. He added that Churchill was usually picked to take blame for decisions his colleagues shared equally.

  Lord Beaverbrook once asked Buchan to meet Herbert Vivian, a journalist and neo-Jacobite. Buchan was in fact ambivalent about the Jacobite cause. He still wrote romances about that adventurous period, including A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys in 1922 and Midwinter in 1923. The war also earned him the British War Medal and the Victory Medal in 1918. On the 15th of December 1918 he became a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy.

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• 4. Westminster and Church

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  As the Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk, Buchan still backed some Liberal causes. He supported free trade, national insurance and limits on the powers of the House of Lords. He refused to support Home Rule in Ireland. He also rejected what he saw as class hatred stirred up by Liberals such as David Lloyd George.

  In 1920 Buchan moved to Elsfield in Oxfordshire. He became president of the Scottish Historical Society and a trustee of the National Library of Scotland, and he kept ties with several universities. Robert Graves, who lived in nearby Islip, recalled that Buchan had recommended him for a lecturing post at the newly founded Cairo University.

  A by-election in 1927 made Buchan the Unionist Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities. He belonged to the Unionist-Nationalist tradition. It held that Scotland should be promoted as a nation within the British Empire while remaining part of the United Kingdom. He reflected on the Great Depression in Scotland and the high emigration it caused. He said: "We do not want to be like the Greeks, powerful and prosperous wherever we settle, but with a dead Greece behind us".

  After the United Free Church of Scotland merged with the Church of Scotland in 1929, Buchan stayed on as an active elder. His congregation was St Columba's Church in London. In 1933 and 1934 King George V appointed him Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

  On the 1st of January 1932 Buchan joined the Order of the Companions of Honour. The honour recognised his contributions to literature and education. He had also urged the House of Commons to create a public body for film in the mould of the BBC. When the British Film Institute was formed in 1933, he was among its first nine Governors. He served until he left for Canada in 1935.

  In the early months of the Second World War, Buchan read John Morley's Life of Gladstone, and it affected him deeply. He believed Gladstone had taught people to fight materialism, complacency and authoritarianism. He wrote to Herbert Fisher, Stair Gillon and Gilbert Murray that he was "becoming a Gladstonian Liberal."

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• 5. Zionism and Its Critics

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  In 1930 Buchan aligned himself with Zionism, and he spoke out in Parliament against the treatment of Jews in Germany. At a mass demonstration organised by the Jewish National Fund in 1934, he called Zionism "a great act of justice". He also described it as "a reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong which have stained the record of nearly every Gentile people." Chaim Weizmann was a friend, and Buchan helped him keep alive Britain's commitment to a Jewish state.

  The Penguin Companion to English Literature called Buchan a "convinced imperialist" and judged that his social and political ideas had less admirable implications. In 1996 the Glasgow newspaper The Herald said that his poem The Semitic Spirit Speaks "is poisoned by prejudice". Critics have not let his record on Zionism settle the question.

  Defenders note that Buchan never published The Semitic Spirit Speaks, a satirical poem. He disliked some of the very rich Jews he met in South Africa, and he disliked Rhodes. Others he plainly liked. Hermann Eckstein hosted the Buchans' engagement party in London in January 1907. Lionel Philips later gave the newlyweds a home in Hampshire for the first week of their honeymoon in July 1907. Earlier fiction also showed favourable Jewish characters, including A Lodge in the Wilderness in 1906 and the 1912 short story "The Grove of Ashtaroth".

  The author Anthony Storr described Buchan as "overtly antisemitic". The critic Roger Kimball allowed that some of his language could read as colonialist, racist and anti-Semitic. Kimball noted that those attitudes are voiced by fictional characters. He still thought it likely that Buchan shared the prejudices of his society until the 1930s. The American academic Jordan M. Poss said such accusations deserve examination, and he pointed to a passage in The Thirty-Nine Steps that seems damning unless the reader keeps going.

  That passage belongs to Scudder, the American freelance spy who is murdered early in the novel and who makes disparaging remarks about Jews. The narrator calls those remarks "eyewash", and later events prove them wrong. Buchan's granddaughter Ursula argues that the charge rests almost entirely on comments by fictional characters. She warns that "it is important to avoid anachronism", since stereotyping was commonplace across society. Kimball adds that by the time the Nazis rose, Buchan had dropped any aspersions against Jews from his novels. In his words, Buchan "probably is good for you, especially considering the alternatives on offer."

  The Jewish National Fund entered Buchan's name in its Golden Book, and Susan Tweedsmuir's name went in as well. A Nazi publication, Who's Who in Britain, printed in Frankfurt in 1938, listed him as "Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity". One history of the Jewish experience in Canada calls Lord Tweedsmuir the "most visible supporter" of Jews there, and says the couple lent "the cachet of the Crown" to the cause.

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• 6. A Viceroy for Canada

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  In 1924 Buchan and his wife were guests at Kingsmere, the estate of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. King was deeply impressed. He said he knew no man he would rather have as a friend. He called Buchan "a beautiful, noble soul, kindly & generous in thought & word & act".

  One evening in 1925, King told Governor General Lord Byng of Vimy that Buchan would make a fine successor. Byng agreed, since the two were friends. Word reached the British Cabinet, and Buchan was approached, but he was reluctant. Byng had been writing to him about the constitutional dispute of June 1926 and speaking disparagingly of King.

  On the 27th of March 1935 Sir George Halsey Perley announced the appointment in the Canadian Parliament, standing in for the ailing Prime Minister R. B. Bennett. On the 1st of June 1935 George V raised Buchan to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir, of Elsfield in the County of Oxford. Mackenzie King, then Leader of the Opposition, advised that Buchan serve as a commoner. George V insisted on a peer.

  Tweedsmuir was sworn in on the 2nd of November 1935 in the Legislative Council of Quebec, known as the salon rouge. Mackenzie King had just become Prime Minister after a Liberal election victory the month before. Tweedsmuir was also the first Governor General appointed since the Statute of Westminster of the 11th of December 1931. That made him the first chosen solely by the monarch of Canada on the advice of his Canadian ministers.

  He arrived with a longstanding knowledge of Canada, built partly on a 1924 memoir of an earlier Governor General, Lord Minto. He had also written appreciatively about Canada as a journalist on The Spectator, and had followed Canadian forces while writing Nelson's history of the war. The Champlain Society later made him its second honorary president for 1938-1939. He set out to travel the length and breadth of Canada, Arctic regions included. He explained that a Governor General's duty is "to know the whole of Canada and all the various types of her people."

  Through the Great Depression, Tweedsmuir preached unity. He argued that ethnic groups "should retain their individuality and each make its contribution to the national character". He added that "the strongest nations are those that are made up of different racial elements."

  In 1936, after discussion with the Canadian Authors Association under Dr. Pelham Edgar, he approved the Governor General's Literary Awards. Nicknamed the "GGs", they now have seven categories in English and in French. He and Lady Tweedsmuir also set up the first proper library at Rideau Hall. In January 1940 he invited influential Canadians to Rideau Hall, including Sam McLaughlin, president of General Motors of Canada. He told his sister in Scotland that he hoped to build "a Hollywood in British Columbia". Vancouver would later be nicknamed "Hollywood North".

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• 7. Crown, Neighbours and War

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  Late in January 1936 George V died, and Rideau Hall in Ottawa was draped in black crepe. All formal entertaining stopped during the official mourning. The new king, Edward VIII, soon seemed set on marrying the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, which angered much of the Dominions.

  Tweedsmuir told Buckingham Palace and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of Canadians' affection for the King. He also warned of the outrage Catholic and Protestant Canadians would feel at such a marriage. By the 11th of December 1936 Edward had abdicated in favour of his brother, who became George VI. Tweedsmuir, acting as Governor-in-Council, consented to the British abdication legislation. In 1937 he granted Royal Assent to the Canadian Succession to the Throne Act. He joked that in a single year in Canada he had represented three kings.

  The royal tour of May and June 1939 was largely his idea, conceived before the 1937 coronation. The official event historian, Gustave Lanctot, suggested the idea grew from the fact that George VI would take the additional title of King of Canada. Mackenzie King doubted it, thinking it wrong to spend money on royalty while the poor went hungry. Tweedsmuir answered that the visit would have a unifying effect, and that the American leg would help relations among democracies.

  More than a year passed with no reply from Buckingham Palace. In June 1938 Tweedsmuir used a rest cure at Ruthin Castle in Wales to press the matter. He sailed back to Canada in October with the commitment secured. During the tour he kept out of sight. He said that while the King of Canada was present, he retained only "a shadowy legal existence as Governor-General in Council."

  The King and Queen opened the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in May 1939. George also sat in Parliament and granted Royal Assent to bills in person. On the royal train, between Truro and Bedford in Nova Scotia, the King named Tweedsmuir a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. The royal couple began their visit to the United States on the 8th of June.

  That American visit was the high point of Tweedsmuir's effort to build a bond with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They met in Quebec City at the end of July 1936, and again in spring 1937 during an official visit to Washington, D.C. The aim was to show Europe's dictators that America stood with Canada. Roosevelt had to stay circumspect because isolationist opinion feared another European war. With Mackenzie King and Roosevelt, Tweedsmuir also proposed a conference chaired by the United States and including the dictators. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refused to consider it.

  On the 10th of September 1939 Tweedsmuir signed Canada's declaration of war on Germany, a week after Britain's. That week let aeroplanes and munitions cross from the neutral United States, whose Neutrality Act barred exports to belligerents. Autumn talks on a Commonwealth air training plan in Canada were long and hard, since Mackenzie King insisted Canada control the facilities. In mid-December 1939 Tweedsmuir helped win British agreement, and King thanked him warmly. King wrote: "What a mischief there would have been had there been another moment's delay!"

  On the 6th of February 1940 Tweedsmuir suffered a slight stroke and struck his head on the edge of a bath at Rideau Hall. Two surgeries by Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute could not save him. He died on the 11th of February. In a radio eulogy Mackenzie King called him one of the greatest and most revered of Canada's Governors General.

  In the Senate chamber on Parliament Hill, his body lay in state. A state funeral followed at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Ottawa. The cruiser HMS Orion carried his ashes back to the United Kingdom for burial at Elsfield, the Oxfordshire village where he had lived.

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• 8. The Last Buchan

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  Eleven years after Buchan's death, Graham Greene wrote of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Its settings, pace and pursuits "were to be a pattern for adventure-writers ever since." Greene and his brother Hugh later dedicated The Spy's Bedside Book "To the Immortal Memory of Wm Le Queux and John Buchan." Fifty years after Buchan died, the historian David Stafford judged his impact on the genre profound. J.R.R. Tolkien admired and drew on his adventure stories. In 2004 the military historian Sir John Keegan called him "a writer touched by genius". In 2015 The Guardian ranked The Thirty-Nine Steps 42nd among the 100 best novels in English.

  Alfred Hitchcock's film The 39 Steps appeared in 1935, with Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, though Buchan's story was much altered.

  Buchan's output includes nearly 30 novels and seven collections of short stories. It also includes biographies of Sir Walter Scott, Caesar Augustus and Oliver Cromwell. His biography of the Marquess of Montrose won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1928. Greene titled his appreciative review of the 1941 novel Sick Heart River "The Last Buchan". In that book, called Mountain Meadow in the United States, a dying man faces the meaning of life in the Canadian wilderness.

  His grandchildren Ursula, David, James and Perdita Buchan also became journalists or writers. Ursula wrote a biography, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan, published in 2019. She describes a man from humble origins, with no money or family influence, who built a hugely successful career. She credits his intelligence, humanity, wit, courage and an elegant prose style, all underpinned by a sincere Christian faith.

  In 2010 the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada designated him a "person of national historic significance". At least four later Governors General admired or took inspiration from his approach: Vincent Massey, Georges Vanier, Adrienne Clarkson and David Johnston. The historian Roger Hall wrote that Buchan's role as a moral compass seems most worthy of note. Keegan said that moral certainty gave his fiction something elusive, a moral atmosphere.

  Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in British Columbia was created in 1938 to commemorate his 1937 visit to the Rainbow Range by horseback and floatplane. It is now divided into Tweedsmuir South Provincial Park and Tweedsmuir North Provincial Park and Protected Area. He wrote that he had seen nothing more beautiful than the park the province had honoured him by naming. Streets, schools and a peak across Canada also carry his name.

  Back in Scotland, a John Buchan Story Museum stands in Peebles in the Scottish Borders. A place called John Buchan Way in Broughton, where he spent boyhood summers, carries his name too.

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