4

London, Courtship and Marriage, 1903–1907

On his return to England from the expanses and excitements of South Africa, JB experienced a dispiriting ennui. ‘A sedentary London life with clubs and parties and books … seems to me now rather in the nature of the husks which the swine do eat,’ he told his sister,¹ while to his mother he reported that ‘I feel rather strange and my law is pretty rusty. It is a foolish point of view, I know: but after the last two years I cannot help feeling that the law is all rather a pother about trifles … I fell in with Gerard Craig Sellar the other day, profoundly depressed and bemoaning the littleness of civilised life. Even a million and a half sterling [he had inherited a great deal of money] are no consolation to him … Raymond Asquith looks ill and old. Everybody marvels at my healthy appearance and youth.’²

For a time, South Africa completely unsettled him:

I did not want to make money or a reputation at home; I wanted a particular kind of work which was denied me. I had lost my former catholicity of interests. I had no longer any impulse to write. I was distressed by British politics, for it seemed to me that both the great parties were blind to the true meaning of empire. London had ceased to have its old glamour. The eighteenth-century flavour, which entranced me on coming down from Oxford, had wholly departed, leaving a dull mercantile modern place … The historic etiquette was breaking down; in every walk money seemed to count for more; there was a vulgar display of wealth, and a rastaquouère craze for luxury. I began to have an ugly fear that the Empire might decay at the heart.³

It is likely that JB had changed more than London. If South Africa had taught him anything, and it had taught him a great deal, it was that, like Longfellow’s young man, he must be up and doing, with a heart for any fate. So he set about pursuing his objective of working in Egypt for the Earl of Cromer, an administrator of Lord Milner’s stamp and stature. Cromer was officially the adviser to the Khedive but, as British Agent and Consul-General, he was de facto ruler of Egypt and had a Staff of British administrators to help him. JB told his sister in a private letter that Cromer was anxious to engage him but that no opportunity to do so had yet occurred.

Meanwhile, Willie, having joined the Indian Civil Service, left for India in November 1903. The ICS, which attracted the brightest young men, was called ‘heaven-born’ because of the incorruptibility of its employees. Five years younger than JB, Willie had a similar desire for public service rather than private money-making. He had not been a very diligent scholar at Hutchesons’ Grammar School until his sister Violet died in 1893, when he seems to have grown up quickly and begun to study hard. While at the University of Glasgow, he made up his mind that he would join the Indian Civil Service and never deviated from that, following his brother to Brasenose College, where he read Classics and History, his fees partly paid for by his Uncle Willie⁴ and partly by winning a scholarship. The handsomest and tallest of the Buchan boys, he had intensely blue, myopic eyes, and wore a monocle. He was a good footballer, a better and more enthusiastic ‘shot’ than JB and, like all the male Buchans, a more than competent angler. He was popular at Oxford, because he was a good sportsman, witty, had a ready laugh, was exceptionally hard-working, devout in an unostentatious way, and he loved the place as much as his older brother had done. He was a prominent member of the Canning Club, the foremost University Tory political society.

His departure for India left a substantial gap in the family circle, which even JB felt in London, and which gave his mother rich opportunities for complaint. ‘Why, why will you weary about Willie? You cannot abridge time and space to suit your convenience?’⁵ JB wrote to her, having been goaded beyond endurance. And indeed Willie was a most affectionate and assiduous correspondent to his family, even more patient than JB with the megrims and vagaries of his mother.

JB was still finding London a petty, muggy place, ‘not to be mentioned in the same breath as Buchansdorp’⁶ after which he still hankered. The feeling was not helped by having to spend most of the Christmas holiday in London, since Strachey needed him to manage The Spectator for him. But it was not all drear, for he spent weekends away in country houses, meeting influential people such as the Earl of Selborne, who succeeded Lord Milner as High Commissioner, not to mention the powerful Alfred Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail and later Viscount Northcliffe, with whom he spent a winter’s Sunday in Surrey ‘rushing about a frost-bound country … in a magnificent motorcar’.⁷

In June 1904, JB was approached by the Chairman of the South Edinburgh Unionist Association, who was looking for a candidate to stand at the next general election, but he refused, for he saw that this was premature, while he struggled to get back his practice at the Bar. Members of Parliament were not paid until 1911; he simply could not afford to stand.

His holidays he spent climbing mountains. A real passion for mountaineering began when he was only seventeen and climbed a sheer rock face on Ben Alder; it was promoted by trips to the Alps with Anna and some climbing in the Drakensberg in South Africa. This was the perfect antidote to his sedentary London life. He had both the personality and the physique for it. He was spare, wiry, very strong, and had excellent balance. He claimed he had the opposite of vertigo, for he gained comfort from looking down from a great height. He was brave, indeed sometimes foolhardy. In September 1904 he climbed Ben Nevis with Walter and Sandy Gillon, himself a very accomplished climber, who successfully proposed him for the Scottish Mountaineering Club.^* After JB’s death, Sandy wrote in the Club’s journal:

He never served an apprenticeship. He just went at it by the light of nature. When I knew him his methods were original, unconventional, individualistic, but his movements were sure, decided, purposeful, and invariably he finished his climb. His assets were strong fingers and arms, rather short legs of enormous lifting power, an enviable poise … and a body that had limpet qualities … I never saw him tired. Mentally he had purpose indomitable, patience, courage, calm, self-control and nerve.⁸

In his fiction, JB wrote some heart-stopping descriptions of terrifying climbs and descents, notably the desperate crossing of the Colle delle Rondini in Mr Standfast and the cat-and-mouse chase with Dominick Medina in The Three Hostages. In The Last Secrets, his book on exploration, he described some real-life attempted ascents on Mounts McKinley [Denali] and Everest.

In November 1903, The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction was published, dedicated to Hugh Wyndham ‘in memory of our African housekeeping’. It was an immediate success, no doubt helped by the fact that a number of London newspapers carried two-column reviews of it on the day of publication. Although JB only went back to South Africa once more, he kept in touch with Lord Milner and the Kindergarten, sending them copies of the book, and continued writing about South Africa in The Spectator and elsewhere. Lord Cromer wrote a twelve-page letter in his own hand, praising The African Colony, remarking on how many analogies there were between Egypt and South Africa. However, by February 1905, it had become apparent that JB would not be offered a job in Egypt. Late in life, he chose to believe that it was the home authorities who declined to ratify Cromer’s choice, on the grounds of his youth and inexperience. Whatever the reason, he was mightily disappointed.

Restless, stifled, and short of interesting legal work, JB sat down to write his least-known, least-read, book, The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income,⁹ a guide to the law in this area for the benefit of both lawyers and laymen. Richard Haldane KC, MP,^* suggested that he write it, and agreed to contribute a preface. Published in 1905, it was sufficiently readable to prompt a later commentator to exclaim: ‘There are few other books on tax law which can be read in bed.’¹⁰

He kept up his South African contacts as best he could, joining a dining club that Leo Amery had founded, called the Compatriots, whose president was Lord Milner and which numbered amongst its members F(rederick). S. Oliver, a most unusual and engaging man – he was a Director of the department store, Debenham and Freebody, and author of a well-regarded biography of Alexander Hamilton – who was to become a close friend of JB’s. Other new friends included Violet Markham, a financially independent, Liberal social reformer from a Derbyshire coal-mining family, who was a granddaughter of Sir Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace. She was a force of nature, who was deeply involved and active in social and educational projects, and would later become a town councillor, then mayor, of her native Chesterfield.^* She also gained a reputation as a political fixer.

JB continued to provide financial support to his family. Early in 1905, when Mrs Buchan had made herself ill over worry about Willie in India and keeping up the house, JB advised a holiday and offered to pay all her medical bills. His mother could make money go a long way, but there were limits even to her ingenuity. And the Buchans would have felt it a great deprivation if they had been too poor to give money away liberally to charity. On one occasion in 1905, JB sent money for his mother to buy a dress and stressed to Anna that it should not go to foreign missions or ‘that bottomless sink, the Sustentation Fund’,¹¹ which supplemented the stipends of Free Church ministers.

In June, after JB returned from Cape Town, where he had conducted an appeal for the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, he tried to address the problem of Anna’s lack of interesting occupation and pressing need to get away from Glasgow from time to time. He was too busy to be able to spend much time in Scotland, but he could make her more independent of her parents. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am very sorry for you all but especially for my old Nan [Anna]. She is suffering what anyone must suffer who has an extended horizon and a limited opportunity. It is a complaint common to most young women nowadays. Had I been a minister in Glesca [Glasgow] and William a doctor in Strathbungo, and had we all lived together there would have been no horizon and therefore no complaints.’ His solution was to open a bank account for Anna, and pay £100 into it yearly. ‘That will give her pocket-money for clothes and any travelling she wants to do. I look to you all to see that she spends it on herself or at any rate by herself.’¹² Anna wrote in her memoirs, Unforgettable, Unforgotten: ‘I thought then, and I think now, that it was a remarkable thing for a young man to do. But it gave him pleasure, I believe, and it made all the difference in the world to me; to have a cheque-book of my own made me feel like a millionaire. Even when I no longer needed it he could hardly be persuaded to give it up.’¹³

That summer JB wrote to Anna, referring to his mother as ‘the old obstructionist’ because she wouldn’t take a holiday. Mrs Buchan was at risk of relapsing into a debilitating state of anxiety, and for someone normally so decisive, she was finding it difficult to settle anything. JB told his sister that she needed to be ‘removed by force’ and made to have a holiday in August, probably in St Abbs, and he got his way. Urged on by their sons, the Glasgow Buchans also finally moved to a smaller house at 35 Maxwell Drive, Pollokshields.

Mrs Buchan could be a severe trial to her children, especially when they began to go out in the world. Yet they retained their deep affection for her, a testament to how important she had been to them in childhood and how seriously they took the Fifth Commandment. Both JB and Willie had cause to be stern with her from time to time, but from exasperation rather than ill-feeling. Willie, so far away in India, looked forward to letters, even if they took three weeks to arrive by sea, and was often prey to anxiety about his mother, which he could only suppress by very hard work.

Meanwhile, there was just a hint from JB to his sister that he had been courting an American woman, for he told her that the girl had sailed for New York in July ‘leaving me broken-hearted. Though I bear it with manly fortitude, life can never be the same to me again, as story-books say.’¹⁴ Since there is no other mention of this woman in any letters, we must assume the tone was ironic. Certainly, he was getting out a great deal, going to dinner parties and even, although usually under protest, dances. But he was thirty years of age that summer and was now looked upon, both by his family and his contemporaries, as a confirmed bachelor.

It was well-nigh inevitable that, sooner or later, JB would meet Susan Grosvenor. By 1905 he was acquainted with Richard Haldane, Sir Edward Grey and Arthur Balfour, all of whom were well known to her mother. And he had met Susie’s cousin and best friend, Hilda Lyttelton, when staying with her parents in Pretoria.

The couple’s first meeting took place some time in the spring of 1905, when JB was taken to dinner at her home, 30 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, by a mutual friend. The custom was to call to thank the following week and, when he did so, JB found Susie alone in the drawing room; she gave him tea and they pursued a rather stilted conversation. When they recalled that meeting later, JB told her that he thought her haughty, while she thought him conceited and difficult to talk to. ‘Why we should have belied our real characters in this way I cannot imagine.’¹⁵ I think we all can.

When they met, Susie was twenty-three years old, shy and unassertive amongst strangers, but with a well-developed sense of humour and, in particular, a finely tuned appreciation of the absurd, which would too often cause her to collapse in helpless giggles. As a girl, she had had to leave the Opera House in Bayreuth during a production of Wagner’s Parsifal, helpless with mirth when the dove descended from the heavens upside down. She was kind, very gentle, and a tender support to her sometimes ailing, and always hypochondriacal, widowed mother, Caroline (née Stuart-Wortley), known to her as ‘Baba’, towards whom she felt a great protectiveness.

She was of medium height, slim, with a good figure, graceful in movement and with an erect carriage. She had particularly fine, long-fingered hands, as well as masses of pale blonde hair, which she piled on top of her head, with a fashionable, if faintly ridiculous, ‘teapot handle’ to it. She was good-looking rather than classically beautiful, having not entirely escaped the heritage of the Stuart-Wortley undershot jaw. Dora Carrington, the artist, who met her in 1916, thought her face was ‘Johnesque’ (like an Augustus John drawing). She was an attractive, agile and responsive dancer,¹⁶ although she endured the Season without much enjoyment. She was not at all keen on country sports or games, much preferring to spend her time reading.

Her origins were markedly different from JB’s. On her father’s side she came from an English aristocratic family that could trace its lineage directly back to Gilbert Grosvenor, ‘le gros veneur’ (‘the fat hunter’), nephew of Hugh Lupus, himself nephew of William the Conqueror. Her father, Norman Grosvenor, who died when she was only sixteen, had been the fifth of five sons and two daughters of Robert, 1st Lord Ebury. Ebury, a Whig, was a younger son of the Marquess of Westminster, and uncle of the first Duke of Westminster. Norman’s mother, Charlotte Wellesley, was a niece of the ‘Great Duke’ of Wellington. Norman’s connections and upbringing were, therefore, very grand indeed, even if, as a younger son, he could only ever have expected a modest patrimony, since the laws of primogeniture exerted such an iron grip.

His wife’s family, the Stuart-Wortleys, had made their money out of coal-mining in Yorkshire, her grandfather having been raised to the barony as the 1st Lord Wharncliffe. The Stuart-Wortleys could trace their descent directly back both to the Earl of Bute and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Alexander Pope’s great enemy), and were connected to Lady Louisa Stuart, the confidante of Sir Walter Scott. Caroline Grosvenor’s father, James a younger son, had been Recorder of London and Solicitor-General, but a riding accident finished his career and put him in a wheelchair, and there was never much money. Caroline’s mother, Jane, was a well-known philanthropist and her four sisters were notable for their good looks, artistic propensities and unworldliness.

Norman Grosvenor had been a particular friend of Edward Burne-Jones, as well as W. S. Gilbert, Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf), and the social reformers, William Morris and Charles Booth. His politics were Radical, or what we might term progressive Liberal. According to his daughter Susie, he was regarded by many of his stuffy relations as a traitor to his class, the more so because he declared himself, most daringly, to be an agnostic in religion. This caused great hurt to his gentle mother, as well as his enthusiastically Evangelical father^* (who had spent years trying to make the Church of England more Protestant by advocating the revision of the Book of Common Prayer), not to mention his two devout maiden sisters. But as Susie wrote later of her godly Grosvenor relations: ‘They were all, except his mother, a little blind to the fact that he [Norman] practised the Christian virtues of charity and loving kindness to an extent which they rarely attained.’¹⁷

In his ample spare time, Norman had been a very accomplished amateur pianist and composer. His works were praised by critics but never published, since he did not think them good enough. This gentle, cerebral, charming man was no seeker after fame nor, sadly for his immediate family, fortune. He had been a short-lived Liberal MP for Chester, and then gone into business, becoming the Managing Director of the Sun Fire and Life Insurance Company. He helped to found, in 1878, the People’s Concert Society, which provided classical music for people in the East End and for a number of years he served as its president.

Caroline gave Norman two daughters – Susan Charlotte, born in 1882, and Margaret Sophie Katherine, known as Marnie, born in 1887. For the first few years of their married life, the Norman Grosvenors lived mainly at Moor Park, the Palladian country house near Rickmansworth, owned by his father. Moor Park was then one of the great houses of England, a neo-classical palace in a Lancelot Brown-designed park. It had been, two hundred years before, when still Jacobean in outline, the home of Sir William Temple, whose ‘Moor Park’ apricot received a favourable mention from Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park. In Susie’s childhood there were fourteen indoor servants, including three footmen. It was a veritable Downton Abbey.

Thanks to Lord Ebury, the style of life there was markedly old-fashioned. Not only did Susie, her sister and her parents live there, but all Norman’s brothers, with their wives and children, nursemaids and governesses, along with the unmarried sisters. Lord Ebury treated them all almost like children, standing in the hall to give each their bedroom candle before everyone was sent to bed. He introduced a cheap harmonium to the splendid hall for Sunday evening hymn-singing and directed conversation at the interminable meals. The grown-up sons, in particular, took to playing elaborate games and indulging in wordplay to avoid the potentially explosive topics of religion and politics. The older female Grosvenors busied themselves in visiting the poor on the estate and in Rickmansworth, in an endless round of small benevolent works.

After eleven years, Caroline had had enough of such an airless life and she, Norman and the two girls went to live in London, in houses on the Westminster Estate, first in Green Street and then, most happily, at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street. They were plainly very contented together, and provided a secure and affectionate environment for their daughters, and rather more indulgence than was vouchsafed by other adults who, Susie remembered, were inclined to squash children at every turn.

A governess taught the girls at home. Susie read incessantly and very widely, including Dante in the original, with a crib, and she even attempted Hegel. Norman gave her a ‘most unVictorian’ run of his library. But she found it impossible to learn anything by heart. Her formal education was so sketchy that it was forever an impediment to her. Her governess had been chosen for her moral standing rather than her skill as a teacher and, although Susie learnt some English and history, her knowledge of geography and mathematics was lamentable. She wrote many years later: ‘I still mourn the fact that I was never taught to concentrate or to have exactness of mind when I was a child, and that I was never told of their vital importance in later life … We drew profiles [doodles] on our copy books and showed up sloppy and inaccurate work. We were scolded for this, but I don’t think we were as much to blame as our elders, who should have seen that all was not well with our education.’¹⁸

In 1898, aged only fifty-three, Norman died of cancer after a long illness. He was buried in the family plot in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Northwood, and Caroline spent years making a plaster headstone of an angel with outspread wings battering on a door, which was then cast in bronze. Apparently, being an agnostic didn’t prevent her believing in angels.

Mrs Grosvenor was only forty years old when her husband died, and his death was most likely the genesis of a periodic melancholic pessimism (what her sisters referred to as ‘Kyo’s disillusionment’) which at times undermined her daughters’ resolve. The girls, aged sixteen and eleven, also felt the loss very keenly. Mrs Grosvenor continued to live in society, but there was not a great deal of ready money, and she was at least partly beholden to the Duke of Westminster. When the estate sold the top end of Upper Grosvenor Street in the late 1920s, so that the Grosvenor Hotel could be built, she had to move across the road to the smaller, narrower No. 2.

Her relative impecuniousness, as well as her restlessness and intellectual curiosity, prompted her to spend much of the year abroad, taking her two girls to stay in hotels in cities or spas in Germany, France and Italy in particular, as well as spending two winters in Cairo. The beneficent effect of all this travelling was that the girls spoke European languages proficiently, especially German and French, and were exposed to the architecture and art of Dresden, Cologne, Paris and Florence. They were cultured far beyond what was usual for girls of their class. Moreover, in Cairo, Susie had her first opportunity to get to know men of her own age in a more relaxed environment than at home, for the place was swarming with underemployed army officers.

Although far from free from the ingrained sense of entitlement of her class, Susie understood the duties, as well as privileges, of her position. And, since her mother never considered university for her, she had to find some other way of immersing herself in something useful while waiting to meet potential husbands. When not staying in a variety of country houses (where she was often accompanied by her grey parrot), she worked as a volunteer for the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward at the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Tavistock Place, handing out meals to disabled children. She also worked several days a week at the Charity Organisation Society office in Baker Street.

She gave up working for the COS on her marriage, but never lost her interest in the problems of what were then called ‘the less fortunate’. To a man like JB, who had spent his own childhood and youth rubbing shoulders with the poor, and had compassion for but no illusions about them, Susie’s philanthropic instincts were very appealing.

Her upbringing instilled in Susie what she later called ‘an instinct to please’, a very useful social accomplishment. But, when she met JB, she was in need of rescuing, for such a bookish, unworldly girl, without a father, was in constant danger of accepting a proposal from the wrong man.

JB went to South Africa for a law case in May 1905 but, on his return the following month, the couple began to meet quite frequently. They both attended Lucy Lyttelton’s twenty-first birthday party in July, and went on with a party to Earl’s Court, probably to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which was a great hit there at the time. JB ever so casually told his mother who his companions were: ‘It was a very pleasant friendly party.’¹⁹

That summer, Susie spent much time at Crabbet Park near Crawley in Sussex, a house owned by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the writer and traveller, but leased to the very hospitable Sir Edward Ridley and his wife, who had been connections of Cubby Medd, and who liked to surround themselves with young people. JB was invited down several times that August, when he was deputising for Strachey at The Spectator: ‘I am going down to Crabbet every evening this week,’ he wrote to his sister on the magazine’s writing paper. ‘It is very pleasant after a dusty day in town to get down to that lovely old house^* and nice people.’²⁰

A tantalisingly undated letter written by Susie to her cousin, Hilda Lyttelton, from Crabbet Park, must derive from that summer, and is typical of her rather breathless style at the time:

… we are very happy here. We have had Mr. Buchan and Mr. [Harold] Baker here for Sunday. What dears they are especially Mr Buchan – We had great fun as we all ragged each other hard – and a Crabbet Magazine was instituted in which we all wrote things. Parodies chiefly. They were awfully good some of them. Mr Baker’s parody of Walt Whitman took the biscuit I think! … I am reading Morris’ Life^** which is awfully interesting. I spend my time reading here – and doing a very little drawing and a minus quantity of embroidery.²¹

JB told his brother in India about his trips to Crabbet, to which Willie replied, ‘you seemed to be having a frivolous time at Crabbet Park in your [indecipherable] party of unchaperoned youth’.²² Years later, Susie recalled those days:

There were many pleasant things to do at Crabbet – walks through the woods, lazy hours to be spent in boats on the lake over which the wild duck flighted at night. I remember … John lying under some trees outside the drawing-room window making notes for a review in the Spectator of a book on philosophy. He remarked at intervals ‘this man really shouldn’t write about philosophy when he knows so little about it’.

We started by having an amusing friendship discussing life and literature at great length and writing long letters to each other. We soon found that life had brightened for us both. He had never really settled down in London after his time of hard work and high adventure in South Africa, and I was suffering from a feeling of aimlessness.²³

In mid-September, JB intended to go climbing with his brother Walter in the Cuillins of Skye, which he loved above all other mountain ranges. However, before he went, he received a letter from his mother begging him not to go, as it was too dangerous, particularly since Sandy Gillon wasn’t going with him, and he wasn’t going to Glasgow first. This nonsense prompted one of the angriest letters he ever wrote to her, in which he made it clear that he resented her lack of confidence in him, that he was a very safe climber, and that he never went anywhere without a professional guide. (He had conveniently forgotten his escapade with John Edgar.) ‘The Bird [Walter] will tell you I am one of the safest of climbers, more especially as I have him in my charge.’²⁴ It must be said that Walter found his brother ‘exhilarating and terrifying’ as a climbing companion. In the end, she couldn’t stop him and he heard no more about it.

That October, JB wrote to Susie, enclosing a copy of The Watcher by the Threshold: ‘I’m afraid all the stories are rather crude – they were written at Oxford: but I still have “kind feelings” for the last one [‘Fountainblue’], which indeed is more or less the subject of the novel at which I am being vanquished by an impossible “ingénue”. I am going to make her half-Polish and half-Spanish, speaking no language but Basque, so that I may not be compelled to give specimens of her conversation.’²⁵

Why he considered these stories suitable reading matter for a very sheltered young woman, it is hard to imagine. In particular, ‘No Man’s Land’ is a very scary story about a relict population of Picts in Scotland who, apart from killing lonely shepherds, from time to time kidnap Scots girls to widen their gene pool.

However, it is easy to imagine how flattering it was for a twenty-three-year-old ingénue to be sent someone’s published work, so it is not surprising that she wrote back so enthusiastically: ‘I have just finished devouring it and I must tell you how awfully good I think the stories. They are so well sustained and interesting. The characters are so well drawn and clear … I hope we are going to see you again soon. If you would come in for tea or later any day you would always find us.’²⁶ Susie’s letters were sweetly naïve, rather unsuccessful attempts at worldliness, and full of innocent gossip. ‘You write just as you speak,’ he was often to tell her. In November 1905, JB told Charlie Dick: ‘I am pretty busy with Board of Trade work at the Bar, and a good deal of the Spectator falls on my shoulders in these days [since Strachey was away pursuing his parliamentary candidature]. Also the world is too much with me late and soon … I mean le beau monde. I dine out or go to plays very nearly every night, and I am being dragged back to balls again.’²⁷ This was the influence of Susie.

It was a time of frenetic politics, and JB now knew many of the protagonists. The general election in early 1906 brought a crushing defeat for the Tories, and the victory of the ‘Little Englander’ faction in the triumphant Liberal Party. For a Free-Trader who, though he called himself a Tory was truly a Liberal Unionist, and one who believed in the Empire, this was not good news. In his spare time he had been writing The Mountain, a contemporary novel about a young Northumbrian, much like him, who wants to go out to east Africa; it relied heavily on memories of a trip to Northumberland with Charlie Dick when they were at the University of Glasgow. He ran out of steam after five chapters.

In ‘A Reputation’, a short story published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1898,^* JB seems to be describing the sort of multifaceted career that he was later to have. There was obviously a debate going on in his head about whether the pursuit of public reputation was a worthy ambition, for in this tale he suggests that it may not do a man any good. Arnold Layden is not an attractive figure. An eminent lawyer says of him, ‘Layden has chosen a damned hard profession. I never cared much for the fellow, but I admit he can work. Why, add my work to that of a first-class journalist, and you have an idea of what the man gets through every day of his life. And then think of the amount he does merely for show: the magazine articles, the lecturing, the occasional political speaking. All that has got to be kept up as well as his reputation in society. It would kill me in a week, and, mark my words, he can’t live long at that pitch.’ But that was exactly what JB was doing up until January 1906.

However, in that month, Strachey offered him the job of assistant editor at The Spectator alongside Charles Graves, since the ageing Meredith Townsend had by now practically retired. It would mean a handsome £800 a year, conditional on him leaving the Bar, although he would be allowed to write books and magazine articles, as well as do any legal writing in his spare time. He would be expected to write a review, a leader and seven ‘notes’ a week, as well as help with the general editorial work. Strachey magnanimously told him that, although he himself would risk all his prosperity to resist Protectionism, he didn’t expect JB to do so. In reality he knew they were not far apart generally, and certainly not on the matter of Free Trade. If JB continued at the Bar there could be no retainer, but Strachey would guarantee him £150 of work a year. JB accepted the original offer, conditional on being allowed six weeks’ leave a year and with the proviso that when Townsend died, or retired, his salary would go up to £1,000. They also agreed that when Strachey was away, Graves would be editor and JB his assistant.

He lost his work for the Attorney-General in any event, when the Conservatives left office in December 1905, but he also gave up going into court and being available to take on cases. However, he did continue to write legal opinions, as Strachey had said he might. And the new regime gave him a certain amount of leisure, which allowed him both to pursue a love affair and to finish a work of political thought on empire, which he called A Lodge in the Wilderness.

Because of the iron rules concerning chaperonage of upper-class girls, courtships had to be pursued under the eyes both of observant, but mostly favourably disposed, contemporaries and also the rather more critical and cynical older generation. Fortunately for this couple, that generation was reasonably benign and, in Susie’s mother, JB found an active supporter.

During tea parties held at Temple Gardens, and dinner parties at Upper Grosvenor Street, Mrs Grosvenor had the opportunity of sizing him up, and the two quickly established a rapport. He called her ‘Gerald’, a mystifying nickname but one which suggests that she was happy to be teased, and she undoubtedly enjoyed exchanging choice political and literary gossip with him. For JB, liking soon turned to a real affection, since Mrs Grosvenor was not only kindly, sympathetic, intelligent and socially concerned,^* but she held an honoured position in a civilised and artistic circle, whose members required of him only that he be amusing and interesting. He soon grew to value her opinion. Although she mostly spent her time painting, he encouraged her to write a novel, The Bands of Orion, and helped to get it published by Heinemann in 1906.

In her turn, she introduced him to important political and intellectual figures or promoted burgeoning friendships. For example, through her he met Moritz Bonn, the clever young German-Jewish economist who had studied and later taught at the London School of Economics, and who was to become a lifelong friend of the family.

In February 1906, JB’s Uncle Willie died, after a long illness. JB went north for his funeral, which was attended by 800 people ‘for he was a well-known and much beloved man in all the countryside’.²⁸ His death was a grief to JB, since his uncle had been very kind to him and had widened his horizons as no one else in his family had thought to do. Willie Buchan’s death meant a change of the guard in Peebles, but that turned out to be a peculiarly smooth transition. His nephew, Walter, the twenty-three-year-old advocate, was appointed the agent (manager) of the Commercial Bank as well as town clerk and procurator fiscal in his uncle’s place. He moved to Bank House.

At this point, Willie’s two sisters decided to go to live in Guernsey, no doubt to warm their elderly bones, so Walter asked Anna to leave home in Glasgow in order to keep house for him in Peebles. This arrangement suited Walter, but, more importantly, he knew it would save her from the risk of gradually settling into a confined, spinsterish middle age looking after her ageing parents.

It was from early 1906 that JB began to nickname Susie ‘Miss Clara’, which almost certainly derives from the name of the girl in ‘Fountainblue’, the last of the stories in The Watcher by the Threshold. She is a shadowy figure who falls in love with the nice, ineffectual man, rather than the great but difficult man who saves her life.

His courtship of Susie continued slowly and circumspectly. By early April, however, they had established a firm correspondence, itself a mark of regard, for it required her permission (and possibly Mrs Grosvenor’s as well). He wrote, ‘It is so kind of you to allow me to write you this scrawl’, and signed it ‘JB’. In that letter, sent from Kildonan, where he was staying with Gerard Craig Sellar and fishing for salmon on the River Helmsdale, he demanded to know who the villain was who had said he was ‘a ladies’ man’, a piece of gossip that she had sent him. ‘A smoking pistol or a bloodstained sword will alone wipe out the insult. I don’t suppose any charge – except that of being a Liberal – could be more shamefully untrue, and if Gerald believes it, it will really be too much for me to bear.’²⁹ Susie had also passed on Violet Asquith’s remarks about the Balliol set (including her brother Raymond) as being dirty, blasphemous and woman-hating. He rejected it, saying he was not dirty, nor conspicuously blasphemous, nor woman-hating, but prepared to accept that he was the opposite of ‘susceptible’. Her rallying reply was, ‘I was very much amused indeed at your remarks about the Balliol set, especially the extreme “hauteur” with which you speak of the “woman-hating” accusation. To quote you, “the true members of the set never troubled themselves sufficiently about the subject to form any opinion”. I feel thoroughly put in my place along with the rest of my sex. I shall never err on the side of thinking that we are important again.’³⁰

When sending her two books of French poetry for her twenty-fourth birthday on 20 April, ‘because you said I might’,³¹ he was still not quite sure if he had presumed too much. A few days later he wrote that he was going to a dance, rather on sufferance, but was glad there was a chance she might be there. ‘I hope you will spare a few minutes from your Guardsmen to talk to me. I promise not to relapse into any barbarous exclamation like “Heck”.’³² Her teasing him about his use of Scots expressions prompted him to try to teach her some. In early April he wrote asking her how she was getting on with her studies in the Scottish language and defying her to translate ‘How mony nievefu’s of stoor mak’ a gowpen of glaur?’^*

At a time when the couple were still pursuing a diffident correspondence, her family were already speculating as to whether they would make a match of it. Her aunt Katharine Lyttelton wrote to a relation on 13 April: ‘I never know quite what to think about Susie and Buchan. I might add that it has not come to a climax yet. I love the little man, but it is difficult to be sure that there is enough there to make him blossom into a Birrell or an Asquith. (Birrell is worth 500 Asquiths by the way)…’³³ (Augustine Birrell, the Liberal MP and President of the Board of Education, may have been worth 500 H.H. Asquiths, but it is not a name to conjure with these days.) However, these matchmaking ladies would have to wait a while longer before JB proposed.

In early June he took Anna mountaineering for the second time, having accompanied her to Zermatt in 1904. This time it was Chamonix, and JB was still a little nervous when writing to Susie from there: ‘I hope getting letters does not bore you. Please forgive me if it does, but I have an idle hour before dinner and I thought I might employ it worse than in writing to you … Fresh snow falls on the tops every night, and the line of white against the morning blue is worth coming a long way to see. My sister, who has never climbed here before, is disappointed with Mont Blanc, which she says is a dull aggressive white thing, like a Nonconformist conscience. She is even more disgusted with the jokes I keep making to cheer my heart in difficult rock chimneys – which she calls “esprit d’escalier”.’³⁴

On his return to England, he gave Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism and Haldane’s The Pathway to Reality^* to Susie, and, later, these books to her mother as well. Susie must have had a stab at the Plato because there are comments on philosophy in her hand at the back of the book. The same month his brother, Willie, came back for three months’ leave, and was introduced to Susie at a dinner party in London.

In September the Buchan brothers and Anna went to Skye to climb in the Cuillins,^** this time with no apparent protests from their mother, and stayed at the renowned mountaineers’ resort, the Sligachan Inn. In a letter to Susie he wrote that they climbed the north face of Sgùrr nan Gillean, ‘where among other delicacies there were 100 feet of sheer rock to climb by cracks. Willie is a very poor climber [one can only pity him] and Anna and I had a lot of trouble with him. Besides he had a vulgar desire to take photographs and he always wanted lunch, which your true mountaineer thinks nothing of.’ He said that his letter was dull, ‘but there is nothing to write about when your mind has the perfect contentment of a Buddhist lama and your body the weariness of St Laurence after a long day on the gridiron’. He hoped to meet her at Rounton in Yorkshire, and sent white heather from the ‘Glen of the Fairies so it might be lucky’.³⁵

Susie, staying with her mother in Schlangenbad in Germany, told him she thought this letter ‘very characteristic and couldn’t have been written by anyone else – you sound very happy and contented in your favourite strenuous way. You are to repeat every Scrap of Gossip that you hear … Gerald and I will discuss it quietly and gravely over our meals instead of talking about Snakes or the Pathway to Reality which are at present her favourite subjects. They tell us that there are gold and silver ones – (snakes not Pathways) in the woods here…’³⁶

He replied, ‘You are a great angel to write me such a long delightful letter … You must come to Rounton^* … Please do, like a Christian and a lady … I am so glad that she [Gerald] is getting on with the Pathway to Reality. She mustn’t mind if she comes to great snags … The book I thought she ought to read next was Wallace’s Prolegomena to Hegel [sic] but on second thoughts I think Plato would be better.’³⁷ It is amusing to think of these stately Edwardian ladies, sitting in a plush hotel in a spa town in Germany, without a word of the Classics between them, struggling with Hegelian philosophy to please an enthusiastic and attractive young man.

After the trip to Skye, JB wrote to Susie from Cloan in Auchterarder, home of R. B. (Richard) Haldane, Secretary of State for War and author of the famous Pathway to Reality: ‘It is very nice of you to think me like Charles James Fox; but alas and alack! I am not. I wish I was never idle and never bored. I am incorrigibly idle at present, and I have been comprehensively bored ever since you left these shores.’³⁸

It was about this time that JB finally decided to put his resolution to the test and ask Susie to marry him. The timing was probably prompted by the projected publication of A Lodge in the Wilderness on 14 November. Although the first edition was published anonymously, for reasons unknown, JB’s friends almost certainly would guess it was from his pen and he knew that, buried not very deep in this symposium, was a paean of love for Susie. (He is Hugh Somerville in the book, and she Lady Flora Brune – fictional names never were his strong suit.) There are even expressions from their letters in it: at one point Lady Flora says to Hugh, ‘If I were not such a Christian and such a lady…’³⁹

Before he proposed, however, he had first to secure his future. He could not expect much, if anything, in the way of a marriage settlement. He was naturally uncertain that journalism and the odd legal opinion together would give him a sufficiently substantial and reliable income for a London household, which would have to include several servants, rather than simply a gentleman’s gentleman who lived out.

He decided to accept an invitation from Tommy Nelson to become a partner in the family publishing company, Thomas Nelson and Sons, as an editor and literary adviser, to be based mainly at the London office at 35/36 Paternoster Row, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. He travelled up to Edinburgh in early November to meet Tommy at Nelson’s headquarters in the Parkside Works in Newington and ten days later wrote to his mother: ‘I have investigated the business carefully, and have taken all sorts of advice, and I am satisfied they are continuing successful and capable of enormous development. They offer me a share in the profits and guarantee me a large minimum income … It would give me work I should be deeply interested in. I should live in London still and I should be able to go into Parliament within a reasonable time. Altogether I agree with Milner [whose name carried great weight with his mother, since his South African days] that it is the chance I have been looking for.’⁴⁰

The benefit was mutual. This was not a question of giving a job to an old chum simply for the sake of ‘auld lang syne’. JB had been reading manuscripts for publishers since his Oxford days; he was a published author, an assiduous reviewer of books and, perhaps most importantly, he had excellent literary connections in London, while not having entirely forgotten his Scottish roots. The firm, which had agencies also in Dublin, Leeds and New York, was on the cusp of a major expansion, and Tommy’s request came at an apposite moment. (Offices were opened in Leipzig and Paris in 1910 and Toronto in 1914.)

The agreement with Nelson’s, initially for two years, was that he should work full time for them, as a partner until the firm became a limited company, and then as a director, for £1,000 a year. Once the partnership was incorporated, he would be given enough ordinary shares to yield £500 in a normal year; before that, Nelson’s guaranteed him an income of not less than £1,500 a year.

When he got back to London, he wrote to his sister: ‘Everyone in London just now has a cold and is in a bad temper, except Strachey and Miss S.G. The latter has taken to learning Greek, has become a strong supporter of woman-suffrage, has invented a familiar spirit called “Sir Joseph” whose conversation is ridiculous, and is opening a church-bazaar next month.’⁴¹ He was at the stage of finding everything about her delightful.

He proposed finally on 10 November, very likely in the drawing room at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street, Mrs Grosvenor and Marnie having made themselves scarce. Susie turned him down.

Four days later, he wrote to his mother:

I asked Susie Grosvenor to marry me, and it is a marvel to myself that I have been able to defer the question so long. We have been intimate friends for years [well, eighteen months at most] and I know her as well as I know myself. She has not accepted me yet for she is in a great state of doubt as to whether she might not spoil my life. No really nice woman ever wants to be married; they have all to be coerced into it. I have given her a week, and I think she will accept me. But you may imagine the kind of state of worry I live in just now.

My dearest Mother, I want you to be kind to me about this and not make it harder for me. I know you will. [He knew nothing of the sort.] Burn this letter and keep what I have told you private for the meantime.⁴²

There are a number of puzzling aspects to this letter, most of them not amenable to rational explanation so long after the event. What exactly did Susie mean when she said she was worried she would spoil his life? Did she fear that she couldn’t keep up with the man her family persisted in calling a ‘genius’, for she certainly undervalued her own abilities, or was it that she worried about her periodic debilitating melancholy, which we may now identify as depression? And why did he tell his mother, knowing for sure that it would give her ammunition against a young woman she was bound to dislike, at least initially? Even more astonishing is the statement that no really nice woman wanted to marry. Was he trying to placate his mother by giving her the impression that all the running had been made by him? He didn’t succeed, if that was the case. Moreover, Mrs Buchan did not burn the letter. One thing is certain; this letter reveals his high state of anxiety, which had spurred this usually keenly rational being into writing irrational things. He thought he had made a mess of it.

Susie had not, however, turned him down flatly, and it is likely that her mother had stern words to say to her. For on 14 November, in response to an invitation to dine at Upper Grosvenor Street, he wrote a letter that any young woman would like to receive:

I will come to dinner tonight as you suggest. I quite understand your wanting to take time to decide and I love you for it, for you are very wise and I should not expect you to make [up] your mind easily. I am afraid I was very stupid and nervous on Saturday and did not say half what I meant. You see I have had no experience and I am always apt to understate my feelings. [He had obviously talked too much about his ambitions and excellent prospects and not enough about how he couldn’t live without her.] What I wanted to say to you – and what I shall keep on saying – is that you have come to mean far more to me than anything else in the world. I used to think only of my ambitions, but now everything seems foolish and worthless without you. I think I have always been in love with you since I first saw you, but last Christmas I began to realise how much you had come to mean to me. And then for a long time I was quite hopeless, for I did not think I could ever make you care for me in that way or give you the kind of things you wanted in life. Of late – quite unreasonably perhaps – I have begun to hope, and during the last month I felt that I had to put matters to the test as soon as possible.

Of course that is only my side of the case. I am miserably conscious how unworthy I am of you, for I think the whole world must be in love with your grace and kindness. And I have not very much to offer except chances. But I think I could make you happy, and one thing I can give you, the most complete devotion and loyalty. You are the only woman I have ever been in love with, and ever shall be in love with.

I don’t want you to decide hastily, and above all I don’t want you to let any kindliness or pity for a friend influence [you], if you are not quite sure. (I oughtn’t to write this, for you are so candid and wise and honourable that I know you would never say what you didn’t really and truly mean…) But, oh my dear dear child,^* if you can care for me, you will make me so gloriously happy, and I think we should both be happy people in life.

I won’t write any more for I shall see you soon. Brighton was very pleasant. I was very restless and distrait and must have been a great nuisance to Harold [Baker, his old Oxford friend], but it made me feel very well. Yours ever JB.⁴³

Not surprisingly this did the trick.

Even after their engagement, the only intimation that their relationship was physical comes in teasing comments about her golden hair becoming thoroughly disordered when they meet. The habit then of reticence about such matters (at a time when anyone might pick up a letter lying around) was too strong to break, on paper at least. Nevertheless, this was a true love match, and – as is obvious from all the extant letters to each other up to the last time they were separated in the autumn of 1938 – it was one that lasted.

Sundry writers have surmised over the years that there was a strong element of calculation in JB’s wish to marry Susie; that she provided an entrée into the heart of the British establishment that a Scottish parvenu required if he was to ‘get on’. The evidence simply does not bear this out. To begin with, he was already very well set up in her milieu before he met her. From his youth, he was known to a number of well-connected Scots, such as Andrew Lang, Augustine Birrell and the Marquess of Tullibardine, since class barriers were never so adamantine in Scotland as in England. At Oxford, he made a number of friends, whose parents would have dined with Susie’s mother. What is more, the Grosvenors were most notable for their wealth rather than distinction or fame in any other field, and Susie’s immediate family were not capable of advancing JB’s career in any particularly useful or material way. A more calculating man would instead have courted the likes of Miss Florence Wolseley, the heiress, or Lady Grizel Cochrane, the daughter of a Scottish earl.

If he had not discovered that he loved Susie and felt impelled to ask her to share his life, he might well have remained a bachelor. There was no stigma attached to it, as there was to spinsterhood; there were plenty of opportunities for social life and companionship amongst men, in particular, in London, and he could afford to pay staff to cook and clean for him. Moreover, there was no pressure from his family for him to marry, indeed quite the reverse, since his father had been the only one of six children to marry, while his mother had two bachelor brothers and, despite herself being happily married, was inclined to think JB’s marriage would break up the closeness of the family. If he had not fallen in love, he might still have married in the end but it would have been in order to have children, and the joy that he knew, from his own experience with a much younger brother, that they could bring. His most complex and best-realised fictional character, Edward Leithen, never marries, which suggests that JB had no prejudice against bachelordom.

A few days after the successful proposal, Anna wrote a generous, if not entirely frank, letter to Susie:

I have thought of you such a lot since John wrote me his great news last Friday. John has been all the world to me since I can remember anything and I don’t really think there ever was a kinder and more considerate brother. I used to wonder what I should do when John married but now that John has found the one woman in the world, I find I don’t grudge him to you in the least and can only rejoice with him in his great joy.

He is so blissfully happy and he says such lovely things about you. When I meet you, he declares, I shall be sure to fall in love with you too. I am prepared to be very proud if you will let me be very fond of John’s wife. I am looking forward so much to meeting you. You will try to like me, won’t you, for John’s sake?⁴⁴

The letter from Mrs Buchan to Susie was not so effusive. It is plain where she thought the balance of benefit lay:

My dear Miss Grosvenor,

I have just heard from John of his engagement to you and am writing to assure you of a very friendly welcome into our family – which has always been a most happy one. I think you are to be congratulated, for if John is as good to his wife as he has been to his Mother you ought to be a very happy woman. It is my earnest prayer that this may be the beginning of a most happy and useful life for both of you. I shall be very grateful to you if you make a happy home for my dear boy. My son Walter, with whom I am living at present, joins with me in every fond wish. We shall look forward to making your acquaintance when it suits you to pay us a visit.

With love and again hoping for you all that is best.

Yrs v. sincerely

Helen Buchan⁴⁵

However, in private, the complaints about JB’s engagement were long and bitter, and made Mrs Buchan ‘depressed’. Despite her assurances to Susie, Anna was not happy either. Fortunately, JB had a stout ally in Willie in India. Once the news reached him, he wrote to his mother: ‘I am altogether delighted and feel sure that John has done a very wise thing, though it does take a little time to adjust one’s point of view from John the Confirmed Bachelor to John the Engaged … I have written to Susie expressing my approval of her as a sister in law!’⁴⁶

His mother didn’t agree, for Willie was moved to write to her again on Christmas Day: ‘I don’t think you are taking John’s engagement in the proper spirit. It isn’t true to say that John is selfish when you know what a good son and brother he has been. In a matter like this John is the best judge, and how much happier you would be if you would only realise that. This whole thing is perfectly natural and inevitable and desirable, and in his own best interests. Of course it isn’t pleasant for you, as that sort of thing never can be to a Mother, but you want to take a much broader view of life, old body. I know that your mournfulness is chiefly due to your not being very well and Father being seedy. I am very sorry indeed to hear it, and I do hope you are both all right now, and will write me more cheerful letters.’⁴⁷

Mrs Buchan cannot be entirely blamed for her attitude. She had never met Susie, who came from a world she knew nothing about, being English and Anglican, nor had she watched the courtship unfold. Indeed, it is highly likely that Willie, as well as Anna, had taken care not to tell their mother what was afoot. Consequently, JB’s letter announcing his engagement must have come as a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky.

A Lodge in the Wilderness, a fictional political symposium published by Blackwood’s,^* was dedicated to ‘G.C.S.’ (Gerard Craig Sellar). The action takes place in a country house, Musuru, which resembles the fantasy house that JB wanted to build at ‘Buchansdorp’, but set on a high plateau in east Africa. The high-minded, well-heeled characters, nine men and nine women, from the upper and professional classes, are all there at the invitation of Francis Carey, a thinly fictionalised portrait of the late Cecil Rhodes. The fictional characters approximate to a number of real people, including Lord Rosebery, Lord Milner, the Canadian statesman Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Rand magnate Alfred Beit, Lady Leconfield, and Susie’s aunt, Katharine Lyttelton, as well as a big-game hunter, a soldier and a journalist. The women talk sense, and are taken seriously by the men, which in itself may have been refreshing. The protagonists, who display a number of different viewpoints – there are free traders and protectionists, Tories and Liberals – debate what Empire means and how it should best be developed. ‘Hugh Somerville’, JB himself, says: ‘What we are going to talk about is the whole scheme of life which a new horizon and a new civic ideal bring with them. It affects the graces as closely as the business of life, art and literature as well as business and administration.’⁴⁸ There is a specific rejection of ‘Jingoism’ by Lord Appin (Lord Rosebery): – ‘[Jingoism] means that we regard our empire as a mere possession, as the vulgar rich regard their bank accounts – a matter to boast of, and not an added duty … [Jingoism] belongs to the school of thought which thinks of the Empire as England, with a train of dependencies and colonies to enhance her insular prestige; but it has no kinship with the ideal of an empire moving with one impulse towards a richer destiny.’⁴⁹ The measured and reflective, if over-idealistic, tone of the book ensured a positive reception at the time and, a century later, the Dictionary of National Biography averred that ‘it remains one of the clearest and fairest analyses of British imperial endeavours’.⁵⁰ As a guide to JB’s attitudes and interests, it is instructive that the portrayals of the Jewish financier and the Canadian politician are favourable. But the modern reader inevitably catches a strong whiff of paternalism.

Thanks mostly to Mrs Buchan’s attitude, the engagement did not progress along a primrose path. Willie wrote early in the New Year that he was sorry JB had had a ‘slight breakdown’, by which he meant that he had been ill, since he was not suffering from a nervous collapse in December. (Either that, or it is a euphemism of his mother’s for the effect of a row with her.) Relations between him and his mother were plainly very strained. He was not much in evidence that Christmas, avoiding the kirk service on the Sunday before, so that he could go for a long walk with Walter. He left home on Christmas Day in the afternoon to eat a solitary dinner in Edinburgh and catch the night train, in order to arrive at Crabbet Park on Boxing Day, and spend the holiday with Susie and her family and friends. With what relief must he have settled into post-Christmas festivities with the woman he loved and amongst courteous, kindly, agreeable, uncensorious English people.

Devoted to his mother as he was, JB had chosen a bride who was almost the antithesis of her. With the exception of the golden hair, conspicuous family loyalty, proneness to low moods and pronounced social conscience, there were no shared characteristics. Susie was much taller, and more languid, lacking Mrs Buchan’s almost daemonic energy (Susie had breakfast in bed all her life), not at all interested in household matters, religious only in a muted and restrained Anglican way, chronically indecisive, absent-minded, always mislaying her possessions, and, crucially, coming from a markedly privileged and thoroughly entitled background. She might have to put up with possessing few dresses, but she could indulge her love of the contemporary theatre and spend time amongst friends in some of the grandest country houses of England. She was related to almost all the great, in the sense of historically prominent, families in England, whose traced lineage went back close to a thousand years, a fact that at the time would have impressed many a fond mother. Susie’s interest in politics and intellectual matters, and the fact that she was gentle, feminine, a very good listener, discreet, unselfish, without pretentiousness, and that she plainly adored him, were all virtues that would recommend her to JB, of course, and they would eventually win Mrs Buchan round. But it was tough going at first.

It is customary for a large, close-knit family to feel that anyone marrying into it has most of the luck and privilege on their side. Even so, it still seems odd that the Buchans – especially JB’s mother but Anna as well – did not consider that Susie was good enough for their John. What makes the irony even more piquant is that the aristocratic families that crowded around Susie, who it might be assumed would have been snobbish about a Scottish son of the manse, without title or inherited money, seem to have appreciated his qualities from a very early stage and were (mainly) delighted with the connection. As a relation said, when congratulating Susie on her engagement: ‘So you aren’t going to be a fat Duchess after all. I had always looked forward to being given one finger to shake at an omnium gatherum garden-party by your Grace, and now you’re going to marry something like a genius instead.’⁵¹ Susie’s mother wrote to one of her sisters: ‘I love him dearly. I don’t think you could help loving him. He is so manly and simple and so intelligent.’⁵²

True, there were one or two English people whom Susie didn’t please much more than she pleased Mrs Buchan. Virginia Woolf, to whom the Norman Grosvenors had been conspicuously kind when she was a girl, repeated the opinion of her brother-in-law, Jack Hills:^* ‘Susie Grosvenor is engaged to John Buchan and the wise – that is Jack – predict tragedy. How is she to live with a clever man all the days of her life? She is pretty and flaxen and brainless (that is Jack’s voice) and must have a man to hold her handkerchief – but her heart is excellent – He has a brain, edits The Spectator and thinks of politics.’⁵³

Much as JB liked her family, he couldn’t resist teasing Susie about some of her more reprehensible ancestors. In Midwinter, his historical novel set at the time of the ’45 Jacobite rising, he has General Oglethorpe remark about Sir Robert Grosvenor, a Cheshire baronet in the mid-eighteenth century: ‘Now Sir Robert’s mother [Miss Mary Davies] was an heiress and all the faubourgs of London between St. James’ and Kensington village were her fortune. Whence came that fortune, think you, to enrich the honest knights of Cheshire? ’Twas the fortune of an ancient scrivener [notary] who bought up forfeited lands from Cromwell’s Government, bought cheap, and sold most profitably at his leisure…’⁵⁴ In other words, a direct ancestor of Susie’s had become rich from the downfall of other, better men.

In January 1907, Mrs Buchan and Anna travelled to London to meet Susie, and to attend the couple’s engagement party. The first meeting took place at Brown’s Hotel in Piccadilly and it was a sticky occasion. They enjoyed more the engagement party in the mansion in Park Lane, belonging to JB’s South African friends, the Hermann Ecksteins, despite it being a ridiculously lavish affair in their eyes, with white heather, menus printed on silver bells, and silver slippers containing sweets. ‘One almost expected the footmen to be got up as cupids,’⁵⁵ observed Anna drily.

Having heard an account of this trip, Willie wrote to his mother: ‘What a lot of interesting people you and Nan met in London. Isn’t that one of the pros of John’s engagement? I am sorry you didn’t take to Susie, poor girl: but I hope you will come round. It is certainly your bounden duty to try.’⁵⁶ And to his sister: ‘I am glad you liked Susie, but astonished that you thought so little of her intelligence and looks … I never claimed for Susie ravishing loveliness, but my recollection of her is certainly one of smartness and cleverness, and I’m certain it wasn’t due to my freshness from the jungle. The prospect of matrimony may not be conducive to light conversation. It certainly would tongue-tie me.’⁵⁷ Willie, so much more worldly, would have met girls who looked and sounded like Susie at balls given by the Governor of Bengal.

Once JB decided to join Nelson’s, he knew he must resign from his position at The Spectator. Although he gave nothing like a year’s notice, Strachey wrote very kindly to him, saying that he was glad that JB had not shut the office door for the last time and that he wanted many ‘serious and sober’ reviews from his pen.⁵⁸ At least initially, these tended to be long round-up reviews of poetry, as well as articles on exploration, mountaineering and fishing.

In February a second edition of A Lodge in the Wilderness was published, with JB’s name attached, putting an end to all the speculation surrounding the author. At the same time, JB went to work in Edinburgh, having promised Tommy Nelson that he would spend two or three months there at once in order to learn about the publishing and printing trade at the Parkside Works.

The firm had been founded as a second-hand bookshop in West Bow in Edinburgh in 1798 by Thomas Nelson, a canny entrepreneur who could see that there was a market for cheap editions of out-of-copyright classics. In 1850 his son, also Thomas (who together with William had joined the firm some years before), perfected ‘the rotary press’, which revolutionised mass printing, since it could print on both sides of the paper, and very fast too. The range of books offered by the firm expanded to include ‘moral books’ (which became very popular as Sunday School prizes), educational and travel works, as well as adventure stories. In 1880, after a fire, the works moved to Parkside, near Arthur’s Seat, and the innovations continued, with upgraded presses that could produce standardised sizes of books. In 1900 these included the New Century Library of classic fiction, which were joined, in 1903, by the Sixpenny Classics, reprints of books out of copyright. These were in a standard size of 6 ½ by 4 ½ inches, for ease of production – the right size for knapsack, pocket, ‘and especially suitable for railway reading’.⁵⁹

When JB arrived at Parkside in early February, the company was well positioned to cater for the mass market in cheap good books, especially as Nelson’s were building an extension to the factory, a printing and binding plant with a production capability of 200,000 books a week. The other partners were the brothers Tommy and Ian Nelson, together with their capable and hard-working Canadian cousin, George Brown, who had imported an up-to-date (‘very complex and scientific’) accounting system from the United States. Nelson’s were notably good employers for the time: there were extensive sports facilities and a cultural institute for the employees, and women were well treated.

In May, three months after JB arrived, Nelson’s introduced the first titles in the Sevenpenny Library. These differed from the thin-paper Sixpenny Classics in that they were reprints of works still in copyright, so of modern rather than classic fiction, and they were handsomely bound in red and gold cloth bindings. JB sent the very first copy off the presses – The Marriage of William Ashe by Mrs Humphry Ward – to Susie, and four titles appeared in bookshops in May, with new ones added every fortnight. JB began to use his contacts amongst London literary agents to bring in works by Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells (whom JB described as ‘quite the most disgusting person’)⁶⁰ and his friend Henry James. Nelson’s technological efficiency and vertical integration ensured that the Nelson ‘Sevenpennies’ revolutionised the habits of the book-buying public;⁶¹ certainly their competitors were quickly forced to follow suit.

JB was in the thick of these new developments, even if he didn’t initiate them. As well as literary advice and the minutiae of book production, he found himself dealing with sales personnel, literary agents and general administration, including the sourcing of paper. While working at Parkside in early 1907, he stayed with Tommy Nelson and his wife, Margaret, at a large neo-Gothic house built by Tommy’s father, called ‘St Leonard’s’, very close to the Works. (It is now part of the Pollock Halls of Edinburgh University.) In March, however, he went to lodge in Hanover Street with Sandy Gillon, now practising at the Scottish Bar. At weekends he travelled to Glasgow to see his parents, for his mother was ailing, or to Peebles, so that he could walk the hills with Walter.

He was extremely busy learning the business. He wrote to Susie: ‘Today I have spent almost entirely in machine shops in the company of old and [indecipherable] Scotch engineers. They know their business uncommonly well and explain details to me with an Olympian superiority. Great engines always fascinate me, and I enjoy the work very much. But there is a great deal of detail besides which has not the interest of novelty.’⁶²

JB also took over responsibility for The Scottish Review, a weekly penny journal issued by Nelson’s, which he wanted to make into a Scottish version of The Spectator and was his particular concern from the time he first arrived at Parkside until it closed at the very end of 1908. The editor was a Scottish writer called W.[illiam] Forbes Gray, but it was JB who wrote a great deal of the copy, contributing a number of columns, including book reviews, a survey of politics and a ‘London letter’. The Scottish Review had grown out of a rather churchy periodical called The Christian Leader, which Nelson’s acquired in 1905. JB at once set about making it less parochial and more secular, with good-quality serial fiction and book reviews, stories and political articles by distinguished writers, from the Scottish novelist Neil Munro to R. B. Haldane. He also toned down its Radical and ultra-nationalist stance. He gradually introduced columns on art, music and the academic world, as well as one for women.

Gray increasingly worried that it went over the heads of the buying public. As he wrote, a little sniffily, in the Introduction to Comments and Characters, an anthology of pieces from The Scottish Review, published after JB’s death: ‘Buchan, I soon realized, was not enamoured of popular journalism, nor was he in entire accord with Scottish sentiment … Residence in England and South Africa, together with an Oxford education, had influenced his point of view, probably unconsciously, and interposed a barrier … between him and his countrymen…’⁶³

Gray freely admitted that JB was a delightful person to work with, since he appreciated good work and praised it. Interestingly, even by 1907, Buchan had taken on a veneer of Anglicanism that Gray thought was the reason why he did not view the Scottish Church very warmly, believing that, at that time in Scotland, there was ‘a kind of restless interest in church affairs which is no more a spiritual thing than an interest in party politics’.⁶⁴ (That criticism could certainly be laid at his mother’s door.)

Circulation and advertising both diminished under this regime so the plug was reluctantly pulled at the end of 1908. JB wrote to Gray, ‘It has been a gallant and worthy little paper, of which none of us have any cause to be ashamed.’⁶⁵ Its end was regretted by intellectuals, academics and literary novelists, but probably not that much by ordinary church-minded Scots.

Despite his extreme busyness, he found time to write to Susie (using her mystifying nickname Moufflée) every morning after breakfast. Since they were mostly apart, they had to express their love and suppressed longing for each other almost entirely through their letters. (‘O Mouffs, I am so sick of not seeing you. You have poisoned my life, for you are so much nicer than anything else that all my modest pleasures have paled in comparison.’)⁶⁶ JB missed her much more acutely than he had expected but could take the anodyne of hard work, while Susie found it almost impossible to distract herself, even by dealing with the torrent of presents that poured into 30 Upper Grosvenor Street. These included several silver inkstands from Asprey’s, a fleet of silver sauce boats, and an enviable set of lustre plates from William de Morgan himself. In those six months the couple only managed a few days together towards the end of March at Highcliffe in Hampshire, as well as a short trip to Peebles.

Willie in India had no doubt that Mrs Buchan’s hostile attitude to the forthcoming marriage was affecting her health, which deteriorated materially in February and March. ‘You are needlessly fretting yourself unwell,’⁶⁷ he wrote that April. In Ann and her Mother, Anna’s extremely thinly veiled biography of her mother, published some years later, ‘Mrs Douglas’ says: ‘Mark’s [JB’s] engagement gave me a great shock. It came as a complete surprise, and we knew nothing about Charlotte [Susie], and it seemed to me that it must break up everything, and that I must lose my boy.’⁶⁸

Anna herself, though she tried to make the best of things, was not entirely happy either, privately dreading the loosening of ties and caught in a tangle of illogicality. ‘To him I owed so much the pleasure and interest in my life that I very earnestly wished him well.’⁶⁹

It was little surprise that Susie suffered an acute crisis of nerves when finally she travelled up to Peebles to stay with the Buchans in late May, JB having had to go from Edinburgh to London to collect her, since there was no room in Bank House for her lady’s maid. As she wrote to her mother when she arrived at Bank House: ‘I had a horrid moment of homesickness before I got to Peebles. John told me his brother [Walter] was going to be there and my heart went into my boots – and I even went so far just before we arrived at Peebles station as to ask John to let me go home to my woolly one [one of her mother’s nicknames]. I really really meant it – I would have given all I possessed not to go on. However I pulled myself together and saw Walter on the platform. He is very short and has a much longer, narrower face than John. Then a small boy [Alastair] in a kilt and a cap with streamers was lifted into the carriage murmuring “Very glad to see you.” ’⁷⁰

A few days later she wrote: ‘Yesterday we had a tea party of the rank and fashion of Peebles. They all arrived punctually at 4 o’clock – I was an object of great interest as they had all read John’s books and regard him as a celebrity. We made conversation steadily for about an hour and a quarter. Peter [a terrier] was a great help as whenever topics flagged we patted him and stuffed him with cakes, with the result that he was very sick that evening!!!’⁷¹

Nothing in her life ever became Susie better than the way she approached the Buchan family. It was much more than simply a matter of good manners, but a serious attempt to please JB’s ‘people’. She studied beforehand to make sure she had topics of conversation for them all: flowers for the Reverend John Buchan, ‘the poor’ for his wife, poetry for Walter, novels for Anna, and she brought butterscotch for Alastair. She seems to have seen their worth at once, even if she had never come across anyone quite like them in her twenty-five years:

I was charmed by Bank House with its polished brass door-handle and its little hall, and the sitting-room with a glowing fire and books everywhere. I felt strange and a little alien to my new family, but we soon found that the same things made us laugh, and no bond is stronger. I was fascinated by my mother-in-law’s ability, and by the rapidity with which she worked. I can see her now writing long letters with her pince-nez perched on the end of her nose, or putting a lightning patch on her husband’s or sons’ underclothes, or making spills out of newspapers.

Her powers of work were amazing. She would get up at five in the morning and tackle the day’s tasks from then onwards with a pace and … concentration which would have exhausted most strong men. She radiated an incessant activity and had apparently solved the problem of perpetual motion. Her.husband and children adored her.⁷²

Considering how much Mrs Buchan sighed over the engagement, this seems remarkably gracious.

Of Mr Buchan, Susie wrote to her mother:

John’s father is such a gog [delight]. He has the most heavenly good-tempered way with him – and laughs and is laughed at by his family all the time. He plays the penny whistle delightfully – and Peter [the terrier] simply howls at it!!!

There is something very keen and strenuous about the atmosphere here; to begin with one feels very fit. They all talk awfully well – so intelligently and keenly and the amount of poetry quoted is amazing. One feels very alive and invigorated.⁷³

What impressed Susie particularly was the way the family practised economy as far as their own wants were concerned, while exhibiting open-hearted generosity to others:

I had known extravagant people who spent money on their own pleasures and had nothing left to give to others. I had also met many kind and generous people, but I had never before come in contact with any one family who economised so much on themselves and gave away money so unsparingly.⁷⁴

Thanks to Anna’s generosity of spirit, as well as their mutual weakness for collapsing into giggles at the same absurdities, she and Susie struck up a close and lasting friendship. One of the reasons they got on so well together was that they were bred to the same predicament: as bright as educated men but knowing that most avenues of worldly endeavour would never be open to them.

Susie had particular reason to be grateful to the twelve-year-old Alastair during this time, since he was unaffectedly delighted to make her acquaintance and was prepared to bake her cakes as tokens of his esteem. Being so much younger than his brothers and sisters, he had been a good deal petted in childhood by them, especially by Anna, who took charge to a great extent in bringing him up, since Mrs Buchan was deeply involved in kirk matters. Even disregarding the exaggerations prompted by family affection, he was plainly a delightful boy: funny, cheerful, idiosyncratic, a great dreamer, and much attached to his family. He was a voracious reader of poetry and prose and, when inspired by something he read, would march up and down the room, declaiming. He was particularly keen on Cyrano de Bergerac and would stand on the sofa, waving a home-made sword, and leap off, shouting ‘Cadets of Gascony are we’, as if he were ‘behind the walls of Arras’.

During her stay, Susie was taken to the farm at Bamflat, near Biggar and listened respectfully to the Masterton uncles, John and James, even though she could scarcely understand a word they said. They visited Helen’s sister, ‘Antaggie’, and her blind husband, Willie Robb, at Gala Lodge in Broughton: ‘Mrs Robb is very fat and cheerful and was dressed in a shiny thick silk dress and Mr Robb told us Scotch stories and played the pianola. We sat consuming scones in the little drawing room and listening to talk about the various ministers.’⁷⁵ Fortunately, at times JB managed to contrive to get his fiancée alone to breathe some fresh air walking in the hills round Peebles, or by the River Tweed as far as Neidpath Castle or Manor Water. By the end of the fortnight, Susie had won over most of the family; it was only Mrs Buchan who refused to unbend.

After the Whitsun holiday, JB settled down to working daily at Paternoster Row in London. He acquired immediately as his secretary an eighteen-year-old girl straight out of secretarial college, called Lilian Alcock (after 1916, Lilian Killick), with whom he was to have a close working relationship for the rest of his life. She was efficient, reliable, literate, intensely loyal and dependably discreet, and she became a dear and respected friend of the Buchans, despite never dreaming of calling them by their first names. Decades later she remembered her first day working for JB at Nelson’s in London, when he dictated forty letters at high speed, in a high-pitched voice that could blur the vowels, so that she once wrote down ‘Countess of Ayr’ when he was writing a letter to the County Surveyor.⁷⁶ He could dictate at 160 words a minute, never hesitating when dealing with letters or speeches. ‘I would not say that he was a business man in the ordinary sense of the word,’ she wrote much later, ‘but he was business-like and methodical to a degree.’⁷⁷

There is much truth in that, for, although JB was very interested in most processes of the business of Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, and had an excellent relationship with the workforce, he seems to have had something of a blind spot about the firm’s finances, and often recommended books to George Brown on gut instinct rather than an informed, costed assessment as to whether they would make Nelson’s money or not. Brown, and even more the long-suffering production manager, George Graham, had sometimes to rein in his enthusiasms.

The last weeks before the marriage were made extremely fraught because Mrs Buchan was so unwell. Thin, weak and downcast as she was, JB began to think that there was no chance that she would make the wedding and that it might even have to be postponed. He told Susie that ‘I am very distressed about her, and Anna, for once, seems at her wits’ end. The truth is that she has no desire to get better, and won’t be persuaded to do anything.’⁷⁸ As a result of these anxieties, even JB’s generally equable nerves became strained. A fortnight before they were married, he wrote to Susie: ‘Darling mine, I was a hideous cross old bear with a sore head last night and you were a kind little angel, and I don’t deserve to have such an angel, and I am very sorry, and I won’t do it again and that’s all.’⁷⁹

Despite worrying about his own mother, he had space to be anxious about Susie’s. Just before they married, he wrote to his fiancée: ‘The person I can’t get out of my thoughts is our poor Gerald. You see my gain is the measure of her loss, and as the one is so enormous the other must be very bad. I am very sorry for her. She is a great angel.’⁸⁰

In the end, all the Buchans were well enough to attend the wedding and the sun shone brightly on the afternoon of Monday, 15 July 1907, as the bride arrived at St George’s, Hanover Square. (How JB, who loved Thackeray, must have smiled at the thought of being married in the church of Vanity Fair.) Susie had been conveyed – rather queasily – the half mile from Upper Grosvenor Street in the Duke of Westminster’s^* carriage, which had been lent for the occasion. She was met by her uncle, Lord Ebury, at the door and they walked up the aisle to the strains of the Allegro in C from the Serenade for Chamber Orchestra, composed by her father, and played by his friend, Dr Walford Davies, the organist of the Temple Church.

The square eighteenth-century church, with its wide nave, box pews, gallery, and chancel floor of black and white marble, was filled with what the newspapers called ‘a fashionable crowd’, although it also included the Grosvenor Square road sweeper, a long-time friend of the bride’s. St George’s had seen many society, and indeed Grosvenor, weddings, but this occasion was a little different. Instead of the customary sober, white and green mixture of lilies and trailing smilax vine, the flowers on the screen erected across the chancel steps were colourful sweet peas, red rambler roses and mauve wisteria. These struck one commentator as being ‘rather suggestive of a maypole’.

The bride, who was described as ‘extremely comely’, wore an ivory-white stiff satin gown, with a fichu bodice and kimono sleeves of silver-embroidered chiffon, made for her by the voguish dressmaker, Madame Kate Reilly of Dover Street. Her veil was of ultra-fine Brussels lace and trailed to her feet. She carried a sheaf of white lilies. The young page, who carried her long train, was Ivor Guest, the son of a cousin, and the very image of little Lord Fauntleroy in his pink and silver brocade court suit, with lace ruffles and paste shoe buckles. Susie was accompanied by seven bridesmaids, including her sister, Marnie, and JB’s sister, Anna. They wore plain long skirts and fichu bodices of pale pink ninon de soie, embroidered with silver ‘passementerie’, over white glacé silk. On their heads they wore wreaths of pink roses, and they carried little baskets of sweet peas. These dresses were intended to show off the slenderness of their waists and were modest in the extreme.

Mrs Grosvenor gave away her daughter, while Hugh Wyndham,^* a friend from South Africa days, was best man. Dr Cosmo Lang officiated. He had been born in a Church of Scotland manse, but was now the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, resplendent in purple. JB would not permit an address on the grounds that you never knew what a Bishop might say. Hugh Wyndham reported that Mrs Buchan glowered at Lang. If she did so, it was perfectly understandable, since not only would she have considered him a traitor, but she was bitterly hurt that her husband had not been invited to take part in the ceremony. Certainly such a snub looks, at this distance, to be a piece of reprehensible Anglican bad manners, but the Reverend John Buchan, though disappointed, was resigned. He knew his church history too well.

While the Register was being signed, the congregation sang ‘O Perfect Love’, a hymn specifically written for weddings; this was followed by Mendelssohn’s anthem, ‘Lift thine eyes to the mountains, whence cometh help’, which we can safely assume was the bridegroom’s choice.

The public prints had a field day. There were descriptions, not all very accurate, in many national and provincial newspapers and periodicals. Queen even carried a fashion plate to show Miss Grosvenor’s wedding dress and ‘going-away’ outfit, as well as the bridesmaids’ dresses.

Although the outfits of some of the most aristocratic guests were described (Mrs Ivor Guest must have looked wonderful in corn-coloured painted chiffon), little was said in the English newspapers about any of the Buchans, except the groom. He was ‘clever and popular’, ‘the well-known novelist and literary critic’, and ‘in his way, a very remarkable man’.

There were no photographs taken of the couple after the ceremony, since Susie’s mother did not want the guests to be made to hang around – photography in 1907 being still a laborious business. This was later a source of regret to the family, although presumably not to Master Ivor Guest, the elaborately dressed page boy, who grew up to be a dignified politician called the 2nd Viscount Wimborne.

The reception was held at Upper Grosvenor Street, and the papers were keen to stress that the dowager Duchess of Westminster had favoured it with her presence. If any of the grand guests, such as the Countess of Kerry or Adeliza, Countess of Clancarty (names reminiscent of Vanity Fair), later remembered this wedding as different from any other that they had attended at the fag end of the Season, it might well have been because of the fond farewell they witnessed between Susie and her parrot, Aglavaine. This parrot ‘had a commanding upper beak and a mass of wrinkled grey skin round a pair of bright dark eyes. In spite of his formidable appearance, he was a gentle and affectionate bird who had no objection to being kissed.’⁸¹ He was wrapped in a towel so as not to spoil the bride’s pale blue crepe de chine ‘going away’ dress, but fought noisily to get out and clamber onto his mistress.

Willie Buchan, far away in India, wrote in fine fraternal style to his sister: ‘I saw portraits of the misguided couple in several of the papers … I perceive you were dressed in ninon-de-soie. Never heard of it. But John said you looked beautiful. Surely that wasn’t possible … What a gay gallivantin’ family you are! And my elderly respectable father kissing his daughter-in-law and jaunting over to Paris! He’ll be losing his job one of these days…’⁸² Since Free Church people were absolutely not given to social kissing, this gesture, by the man who had taken so little part in the fractious debates over JB’s marriage, mutely but eloquently signalled the acceptance of Susie into the Buchan family – to the whole world, but most particularly to his wife, Helen.

The first week of the honeymoon was spent at Tylney Hall in Hampshire, a house owned by Sir Lionel Phillips, the Rand magnate. It was luxurious to a point: pink, scented water flowed from the bath taps. From Hampshire the couple travelled to Achensee^* in the Tirol, staying on the north side of the lake at the Hotel Scholastika, which backed up against steep mountains covered in fir trees. They went for walks in the woods and rowed on the lake and JB did some work on a novel, possibly Prester John, although he told her mother that Susie was ‘a dire distraction’.⁸³

They moved on to Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites, where JB intended to introduce his wife to the joys of mountaineering, as he had succeeded in doing with his sister Anna. An alarmed Willie, who had all too vivid memories of his brother’s rock-climbing exploits, wrote to Anna that he trusted JB hadn’t succeeded in making Susie a widow or an angel in the Dolomites.

JB did not kill either himself or Susie but he tested her good nature and courage sorely. He persuaded her to climb Monte Cristallo, the mountain that looms up to a height of 10,000 feet north-east of Cortina, and offers glaciers, screes and some stiff rock climbing. Baedeker’s guide to the Eastern Alps⁸⁴ considered it only suitable for ‘adepts’. They slept the night before the climb in a little hotel at the top of the Tre Croci^* pass, rose at 3 a.m. (‘oh so horrid’),⁸⁵ dressed by candlelight, and started out long before dawn. Susie would have been walking in a long skirt and uncomfortable, stiff, hobnailed boots. ‘We went over 2 snow slopes and then up in to the rocks – somehow or other I was pushed up by John and Pierre Blanc [their guide]. We breakfasted on the top about 9.30 having taken all that time from about 4.30 am to get there.’⁸⁶ What she didn’t tell her mother was that she developed an acute attack of vertigo on the way up, when Blanc advised her at one point to put her foot ‘into the void’.

JB was decidedly more upbeat about the expedition in his letter to ‘Gerald’: ‘We took it very easily, and we had splendid guides, one of whom Susie used largely as a pack mule. She had some vertigo going up, but Pierre and I performed wonders of [indecipherable] so that we were always on each side of her. But at the top she recovered, and came down quite easily … She must have far more physical strength than any of us imagined. Of her pluck there could never be any question. I am very glad she has done a little climbing, and she is glad herself … Cortina has been a great success.’⁸⁷ (In 1937, however, he told Janet Adam Smith, a keen mountaineer, that ‘if I had not had the two best guides in Europe we should not have got down’.)⁸⁸ Despite his brave words to Mrs Grosvenor, JB had learned the first stern lesson of marriage, which is to give up that which really does not suit your spouse. He hardly mountaineered seriously again.

In mid-August the couple boarded a train to Venice, where they stayed on the Grand Canal at a fifteenth-century Gothic palazzo, the Hotel Europa. It was directly opposite the Dogana di Mare and the church of Santa Maria della Salute and was full of cultural ghosts, since Verdi, Turner and Proust had all stayed there. The Buchans visited St Mark’s, which they found ‘rich and glowing’, as well as the Accademia, were serenaded in a gondola, visited Torcello and Burano in an orange-sailed felucca, and even took a small steamer to the fishing village on the sandbar in the Venetian Lagoon where the Lido had been established in the 1850s and which was in the process of becoming an upmarket resort.^* Here they were given bathing clothes – Susie’s was ‘a sort of Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers all in one, and striped pink … We obtained also two bright-yellow straw hats shaped rather like cornucopias and tied under one’s chin with damp white strings and then walked some way down to the sea. Anything more killing than we both looked would be hard to imagine. We reluctantly gave up the hats and plunged into the sea which was Prussian blue and hot and gogglie [delightful] to the last degree … It was the most delicious experience I have ever had.’⁸⁹ In late August they returned home by train after what Susie called a ‘heavenly’ honeymoon. She cried when they arrived at Paris. They had been away a leisurely six weeks.

In Memory Hold-the-Door, JB wrote briefly about his engagement and marriage:

I had no longer any craving for a solitary life at some extremity of the Empire, for England was once more for me an enchanted land, and London a magical city … I had been suffering from loneliness, since my family were four hundred miles away. Now I acquired a vast new relationship – Grosvenors, Wellesleys, Stuart-Wortleys, Lytteltons, Talbots – and above all I found the perfect comrade. I have been happy in many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.⁹⁰

*JB was also elected to the prestigious Alpine Club in 1906.

*Haldane was a great Liberal swell, a barrister, philosopher and politician who, as Secretary of State for War, instigated important army reforms before the First World War.

*She was an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in the 1918 general election.

*As Lord Robert Grosvenor M.P., he had served in a number of Whig administrations and had supported factory working hours’ reform. Late in life, when Lord Ebury, he opposed William Ewart Gladstone on Irish Home Rule.

*Not that old. Crabbet Park was only built in 1873, but in the Queen Anne style, which is what foxed him.

**A biography of William Morris, probably one of the two volumes of J. W. Mackail’s The Life of William Morris, published in 1899 and 1901, respectively.

*Included in the collection Grey Weather, John Lane, London, 1898.

*She helped found both the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women, and the Women’s Farm and Garden Association. The latter continues to this day. She was appointed CBE in 1920.

*‘How many fistfuls of dust make a double handful of mud?’ If this is a Scottish saying, I can find no Scot who has ever heard of it. It may have been already redundant by the early twentieth century. JB to Susie Grosvenor, 3 April 1906, NLS, Acc. 11627/1.

*Haldane’s Gifford Lectures, originally delivered extempore, then put between hard covers.

**It is no surprise that the Cuillins feature in Mr Standfast.

*Rounton Grange was owned by Sir Hugh Bell, the steel founder (and father of Gertrude Bell). Caroline Grosvenor was a long-time friend of the family but JB also knew them.

*A common expression in those days, which Susie would not have considered patronising.

*Nelson’s brought out an edition in 1917.

*J. W. Hills was the widowed husband of Virginia Woolf’s half-sister, Stella Duckworth.

*The Westminsters no doubt remembered JB as one of their hosts in the house in Parktown outside Johannesburg in 1902.

*Later the 4th Lord Leconfield.

*Franklin Scudder mentions the Achensee in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

*The name he gives to the inn in ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’.

*Five years later, Thomas Mann set Death in Venice there.