8

Elsfield and London, 1927–1935

JB’s political ambitions had been slow to revive after the war. He resigned the Conservative and Unionist candidacy for the Peebles and Selkirk constituency (by this time Peebles and Southern Midlothian) in 1918 and turned down the offer of Central Glasgow, in succession to Andrew Bonar Law, in 1922. That did not mean that he was not thinking about politics or meeting politicians. In particular, he had grown to know and admire Stanley Baldwin, the mild-mannered, shrewd, politically conservative but socially progressive, rather lethargic ex-businessman, the would-be classical scholar who also loved the works of Sir Walter Scott. As for Baldwin, he had been a fan of JB’s fiction ever since a day in 1902 when he had bought a second-hand copy of The Watcher by the Threshold at Paddington Station, and he responded positively to the younger man’s keen intellect and lack of partisanship when he met him. From 1924, they began to collaborate on plans to expand Conservative education.

In 1927, on the death of Sir Henry Craik, JB was invited to stand as one of the three Members of Parliament for the Scottish Universities in the resulting by-election. He scarcely hesitated before accepting, since this constituency had the virtue, for a man in indifferent health, of not requiring him to do any of the wearing electioneering or speech-making that had been necessary when he was the candidate for Peebles and Selkirk. He had merely to write one election address, to be sent out by post to all the eligible voters, who were the graduates of the Scottish Universities.^* He achieved 88 per cent of the vote.

When he had first stood as a political candidate in 1911, there were friends uncertain as to which party he would espouse. In 1927 there was no such uncertainty, but he let it be known that, although he sat as a Conservative, since he was a firm believer in party government, he was an MP for the Universities and he would not be single-mindedly partisan. After he arrived in the House of Commons, he was apt to call members of other parties ‘My Honourable Friend’ if he knew and liked them, when the convention was (and still is) to do that only to those on your own side. As he wrote in a short story of 1910: ‘Every man has a creed, but in his soul he knows that that creed has another side, possibly not less logical, which it does not suit him to produce. Our most honest convictions are not the children of pure reason, but of temperament, environment, necessity and interest. Most of us take sides in life and forget the one we reject.’^*

As it happened, 1927 was a difficult year for the Conservatives. Large majorities cause their own problems, especially for newer members who want to get on, and the party had also been thoroughly shaken by the General Strike of 1926. The first major debate of the new session concerned the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Bill, designed to outlaw secondary industrial action and ensure that there could not be another General Strike. Labour members thought the measure vindictive and were also fearful that funds from unions would decrease, since this Act required trade union members to contract in rather than out of the ‘political levy’. All in all, the Bill had rather soured the atmosphere in the House.

Nevertheless, this was an exciting time for JB. Here was something he had dreamed of doing – if intermittently – ever since he was a young man, and he always enjoyed feeling that he was in the centre of the action. He had plenty of ready-made friends in the House of Commons: Lord Hugh Cecil, who was MP for Oxford University; Philip Snowden; Walter Elliot from the Borders; and Leo Amery, the imperialist thinker from South African days. He soon made more friends, such as Oliver Stanley, W. S. (Shakes) Morrison, Robert Boothby and Harold Macmillan. Members of Parliament were genuinely fascinated to meet him, since he was a celebrity.^* And he developed a broader acquaintance than most, for he was on good terms with many in the Labour Party, and seemed able to draw out the best from even that dry old stick, Clement Attlee.^** The latter thought him a most delightful man and a very broad-minded one – ‘a romantic Tory, who thought Toryism was better than it was’.¹ Even the wilder Glasgow members, such as James Maxton, a ‘Hutchie bug’ like JB, Tom Johnston and David Kirkwood, did not scare him, despite Maxton having been imprisoned for a year during the Great War for promoting strife in the shipyards. These men found JB friendly, sympathetic and non-partisan, and he liked their humour and egalitarianism. However, his propensity for speaking kindly of most people meant that he was open to the charge of insincerity and even, occasionally, toadyism.

Life changed substantially for JB when he became an MP. Instead of commuting daily to London, he left Elsfield on a Monday morning and came back on Friday afternoon. Susie travelled up to London sometimes to join him, particularly if they had accepted a dinner invitation, but she was happy to stay mainly in the country. He would lodge with his mother-in-law in Upper Grosvenor Street or (more conveniently for the House) with her hospitable sister, Blanche Firebrace, in Buckingham Palace Gardens; but more often he slept at St Stephen’s Club, a haven for Conservative MPs, close to his office in St Stephen’s House and across the road from the Houses of Parliament. If not invited to dine out, he would eat mainly in the House of Commons or in one of his clubs. He wrote to Susie every day, the letters a mixture of concern for her, the children and their doings, a list of the people he had dined with, and political gossip – a distillation of the day’s events, fleshed out no doubt over dinner on Friday. Mercifully for Susie, his letters were often typed by Lilian Killick, for they were practically illegible when he wrote them on his knee while listening to a debate in the House.

Private letters, especially those to his family, did not often bring out the best in JB as a writer. Once his youth was past, he saw letters as a means of keeping in touch, rather than – except on rare occasions – displaying his feelings or his personality and interests. He wrote so many, particularly to his mother and his wife, that they have a rather deadening sameness to them. They were the early twentieth-century equivalent of the nightly telephone call to reassure the recipient that they are loved and all is well. Only at times of triumph or disaster did he expand in his letters to his mother. Those to Susie were not very different, except that he would ask for her advice, especially on family matters, and he rarely, if ever, failed to tell her how much he missed her. His letters to his children, as they grew, were affectionate, perceptive and engaged. Any criticism was lightly done, while praise was heaped on honest effort in any field.

He spent his mornings either at Paternoster Row or at Reuters’ headquarters in Carmelite Street. He would lunch with political colleagues in the House, pass the afternoons sitting on Parliamentary Committees or charitable trusts and, after dinner, would spend the rest of the evening in the House, listening to debates or waiting to vote. It was a pleasant, orderly, thoroughly masculine existence.

Although he took his seat in May 1927, he bided his time before delivering his maiden speech. The occasion he chose was the vote of censure moved by the opposition leader, Ramsay MacDonald, on 6 July against the government’s proposals for reform of the Parliament Act, on the grounds that these were unconstitutional. These proposals, which had been developed by, amongst others, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cave and Lord Birkenhead (F. E. Smith), were designed to restore some of the powers to the House of Lords that had been ceded in 1911. By 1927, however, attitudes had altered, and these proposals were causing disquiet even in die-hard Tory circles, especially as the House was at that moment embroiled with the contentious Trade Disputes Bill.

The censure debate began with a speech by MacDonald. He was followed by the Prime Minister, who defended his noble colleagues’ plan but made it pretty plain that his heart was not in it. JB, knowing that he had 150 of the more progressive Tory members at his back, then rose to his feet and criticised the Labour leadership for wanting to censure the plans but also the Tory government for supporting such backward-looking proposals. His thesis was that the Parliament Act had turned out surprisingly well and that, although the British constitution had many anomalies, it nevertheless appeared to work. He went on to say that the argument used for Cave’s scheme was fear of some revolutionary intention on the part of some future Government. There was no worse cant talked in public life, he averred, than the cant about revolution:

… whether it is used by those who hanker after it or by those who fear it … I am as credulous and as imaginative as most men, but my imagination and my credulity cannot rise to these apocalyptic heights. But suppose there was any such danger of revolution, how could any paper barrier prevent it? There will be no revolution, no constitutional revolution, in Britain until the great bulk of the British people resolutely desire it, and if that desire is ever present, what Statute can bar the way?²

In his speech he also quoted Edmund Burke:

The old building stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, till an attempt be made to square it into uniformity. Then, indeed, it may come down upon our heads altogether in much uniformity of ruin.³

It was a nimble and witty speech, with graceful allusions to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents, and it was endorsed by both David Lloyd George, who called it a brilliant, wise and eloquent maiden speech, as well as by Winston Churchill, both men who he might not have expected to back him. One Liberal MP, Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy, said his speech could not have been made more damaging if it had been delivered from the Liberal benches.

JB told his mother the next day, in a long letter euphoric from relief: ‘I never started anything in such poor form. I was feeling very tired and not very well, and it was horrid, hot, muggy weather. To make things more difficult “The Times” announced that I was going to speak, and the whole stage was set as if I had been a Cabinet Minister … Besides, I was going to attack the [Tory] Government and try to get them to drop this foolish House of Lords scheme, which would split the party, and that is not an easy job for a new Member, especially when the Prime Minister is an intimate friend.’ Matters were not helped by Stanley Baldwin not saying exactly what JB was expecting him to say, so he had rapidly to recast his speech. He rose to his feet at about 5.30 p.m., ‘with a very empty House, in which interest was absolutely dead. You know I am not often nervous, but my legs knocked together and my mouth was as dry as a stick!’ He spoke labouredly at first, but as the word went round that a maiden speech was in progress and the House filled up, he began to enjoy himself. He spoke for more than twenty minutes and was cheered to the echo, so that Lloyd George had to wait several minutes before he could begin. ‘I had a ludicrous amount of congratulations, which I must store up against the day when I shall make a fool of myself.’⁴ He particularly enjoyed telling his mother how pleased the Clydeside Labour Members had been, coming up as a group to congratulate him. Maxton told him, ‘Man, we were terrible nervous when you began, for we thought you weren’t going to get away with it, and we were awful happy when you got started!’⁵ To Henry Newbolt, JB wrote: ‘I got on surprisingly well, but my goodness! I was in a funk at the start. There is no doubt that the thing that pays in life is audacity. We have killed this foolish scheme, and Baldwin told me privately that I had done him a great service.’⁶

James Johnston, a political commentator, wrote that he had heard many maiden speeches, but none that made such an impression on him and the House. He thought the voice sometimes had something of the ‘Free Kirk whine’ about it, but was generally a pleasant blend of Scotland and Oxford. However, it did not match the golden quality of the words. He thought the speech statesmanlike in the noblest sense ‘for it exhibited a mind which does not live on catchwords and stratagems but on great fructifying ideas’.⁷ The Spectator stated: ‘The wide knowledge of a student of history, the grave enthusiasm of an ardent patriot, the pawky commonsense and shrewd realism of a Lowland Scot, the deep sympathy and understanding underlying the whole, and the impressive eloquence of the final passages, combined to give this speech an unusual distinction, and to place it upon a plane far above the level of ordinary Parliamentary debate.’⁸ JB gave an equally accomplished speech a few weeks later on the history of the Union with Scotland, and the benefits it had brought, which may have surprised MPs by its mixture of wit and erudition. All this augured very well.

Later that year, a measure came before the House that thoroughly engaged his interest. It concerned changes to the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, which had been accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities but which had to come before the House of Commons, since the Church of England is established and subject to statute. The Book of Common Prayer dates from 1662, but is close to that devised by Archbishop Cranmer during the previous century. The language was already archaic by the seventeenth century and, by the early years of the twentieth, was causing disquiet to Anglican clergy – although not their congregations, who generally were keen to keep to the old ways. The modifications that the Church of England advocated were not substantial, but they were unacceptable both to Low Churchmen, who thought them too Romish and, to a lesser extent, to High Church Anglicans, who thought they were too Calvinist.

This debate produced a great deal more heat than light, since MPs, especially Evangelicals, seemed to wish to fight the Reformation all over again, and it needed the cool intelligence of a man bred in another tradition to try to bring them back to some sense of the point of the debate, namely the constitutional rather than liturgical implications of a measure that the Church of England hierarchy was impatient to implement. Although raised in a different Church, JB knew a great deal more than most of his colleagues about the history and content of the prayer book that they clung to. He attended a Book of Common Prayer service every Sunday in Elsfield, and was well versed in church history.

In an elegant speech he tried to tear the debate away from the metaphysical and back to the pragmatic. He likened MPs to Milton’s fallen angels ‘in wandering mazes lost’. He owned that there was a fear that the measure was a denial of Reformation principles and a departure from the Reformation heritage, but maintained that, since England was a Protestant country, he regarded the Reformation settlement as an implied part of the Constitution. It was masterly because it was so clear.

[The Reformation] was a re-birth of the spirit of man. Its essence was simplification. The great organism of the mediaeval church, with all its intricate accretions of fifteen centuries was exchanged for a single revelation, the voice of the Almighty speaking through His word to the individual heart and judgement … Liberty was its keynote, liberty as against enforced obedience. It involved in a reformed Church a certain degree of self-government and that involved the right to change … But what I would press upon the House is that this liberty to change, with all its imperfections – this liberty to change with popular approval – is the very opposite of the authoritarianism against which the Reformation was directed.

He went on: ‘The Promised Land remains the same; its direction is the same; but there are various routes to it across the desert.’⁹

The Evangelicals were not having it and the vote was narrowly lost. The following summer, the measure came again to the House, and again the vote was narrowly lost. This time JB did not speak. Some parishes adopted the 1928 Prayer Book, illegally, but it took until the 1970s before the Church of England felt able to have another crack at modernising church liturgy, and this time it succeeded.

Besides the Constitution and religious practices, JB concentrated, as most backbenchers did, on a ragbag of worthy concerns, in his case tending mostly towards safeguarding and improving the lot of the general population: Scotland, including whether there should be a Scottish Parliament;¹⁰ education, both of children and adults, including attempts to raise the school leaving age to fifteen; protecting workers’ rights; the Empire and free trade; the countryside and its protection; the media, including films, and their use for education and entertainment; and the cause of a national homeland for Jews. He spoke on a variety of subjects, from unemployment to greyhound racing (he tried unsuccessfully to get a Bill through Parliament to regulate it), to the importance of air power in any future conflict. He managed to get a Bill through Parliament to outlaw the capture and caging of British wild birds in 1933. (The more substantial Protection of Birds Act of 1954 was piloted through the Commons by his daughter-in-law Priscilla Tweedsmuir, MP for Aberdeen South, while his son Johnnie saw it through the Lords.)

In the summer of 1929, Ashridge House in Hertfordshire opened as a residential college, training lecturers and providing public lectures and discussions, and in effect promoting the development of a corps of educated young Tory thinkers. JB was made chairman of the executive committee. Those trained at Ashridge College of Citizenship went out to influence opinion in the universities, under the auspices of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations, founded in 1931, with JB as its first President. (He chaired and spoke at every annual conference of the Federation until he left for Canada in 1935, exhibiting his keen interest in developing political consciousness in the youthful.) The infusion of ‘one-nation’ Conservative values and ideas promoted by Ashridge and the Federation galvanised the intellectual wing of the Conservative Party in the years before and after the Second World War.

In 1928, JB joined the Central Council for Broadcast Adult Education, which was set up by the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE, formed 1921) and the BBC. The following year the BIAE collaborated on a widely consulting commission, looking at educational and cultural films. The report, ‘The Film in National Life’, published in 1932, provided the intellectual underpinning for the foundation of the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1933. In May 1932, JB had suggested, during a debate on the Sunday Entertainments Bill, that 5 per cent of Sunday cinema takings should go to the assistance and development of British films:

What those who are interested in the matter desire to see is something positive, a constructive effort to help in the development of this great medium of instruction and entertainment … The idea is ultimately the creation of a film institute, not a Government Department but a private body with a charter under the aegis and support of the Government.¹¹

The purposes of a film institute, as he saw it, would be: to act as a school for the study of technique and interchange of ideas; to improve public taste; to provide advice to teachers about the educational possibilities of film as well as government departments on the use of film; and to secure the development of the assets for film production that the country and Empire possessed. His idea of a levy was accepted, the Institute was set up by Royal Charter, and JB became one of the nine founding Governors, and Chairman of the Advisory Council.

His interest in the BBC (as with the BFI) stemmed from his post-war preoccupation with the importance of informing and educating the general public, if it were not to fall prey to the kind of demagoguery that had seduced the masses in Russia in 1917, and was affecting Germany and Italy. He was a supporter of it against its early critics in Parliament, although not a completely uncritical one: ‘We have not had many pieces of good fortune as a nation since the War, but I think that one of them has been the Broadcasting Corporation.’

He went on to say, in a passage arguing against censorship:

I see no reason why a Communist should not be allowed to broadcast his beliefs and the reason for them. Incidentally, I cannot imagine anything more damaging to Communism … Truth … comes from an honest clash of opinion and not from the suppression of it. Controversy, honest, straightforward, well-regulated controversy is the only salt which will save a most valuable side of broadcasting from going rotten. After all, we can trust our people. The British Broadcasting Corporation, as it has grown up today, is a peculiarly British product, and, like all our true indigenous products, it is based upon a trust in the ordinary man.¹²

As a result of his interest in the issue, JB joined a cross-party consultative committee to advise on controversial political talks.

In November 1929 he took the trouble to articulate his political creed in an article in The Spectator entitled ‘Conservatism and Progress’. He began by writing that he disliked the word ‘Conservatism’ since it seemed to connote the duty of preserving always, at any cost, when the real duty may be that of ruthless destruction. ‘It suggests an antagonism to rational change.’ He preferred to be called a ‘Tory’ since it originally meant an Irish robber and he thought a bandit had a more hopeful attitude to life than ‘he who cherishes relics which should long ago have been buried or burned’.

His was a humane doctrine, rejecting the idea that society could be fully comprised by any set of categories. ‘[The conservative] is inclined to be suspicious of mere logic and highly suspicious of all abstractions. He dislikes undue simplifications and anything that savours of mechanism … The problem in all politics is how to give to actual human beings the chance of a worthy life.’ In his view, conservatives (with a small ‘c’) had no passion for change for change’s sake but, when the case for change was clear, they would act boldly, for they set no sentimental value on a tradition which had lost the stuff of life:

The two great problems of today in the widest sense are, I take it, the business of reaching a true democracy, where everyone shall be given a chance not only of a livelihood, but of a worthy life, and the business of building up some kind of world-wide régime which shall ensure peace and co-operation between the nations.¹³

Some of JB’s critics have accused him of Fascist sympathies on the basis of an article that he wrote for The Morning Post, published on the last day of 1929. It looks dashed off, probably on Boxing Day, and is a not very interesting overview of global politics in the preceding decade, in which he noted the decline in parliamentary institutions and the rise of dictatorships in a number of countries. He praised the new kind of imperial unity (since 1926) based ‘on the completest liberty of the constituent parts’ and went on to write that but for that, and ‘the bold experiment of Fascism’,¹⁴ the decade had not been fruitful in constructive statesmanship. However, in his opinion, the post-war recovery of European countries such as Italy and Germany had much less to do with a creed or a man than with ordinary people working hard. His true and considered political views are clear from his many other expressions of support for democracy, moderation and pluralism; it is indicative that a little more than a year after the Morning Post article, he began the contemporary novel, A Prince of the Captivity, in which he describes a sinister and murderous German political brotherhood, plainly based on the Nazi Brownshirts.

In 1928, Hodder and Stoughton brought out a collection of his short stories, The Runagates Club. The genesis of these tales was various, some of them having already appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine, but JB gave them unity by declaring them stories told after dinner at the fictional Thursday Club. The fifteen members of the club include a number of Buchan stalwarts – Hannay, Arbuthnot, Leithen, Lamancha, Palliser-Yeates, Sir Arthur Warcliff – but others, such as Major Oliver Pugh, are introduced for the first and only time. Most have had exciting, sometimes secret, jobs in wartime. (Dominick Medina, suave villain of The Three Hostages, is a member of the club until his demise.) JB reproduces the Clubland atmosphere that he enjoyed, although it must have been rare in real life to hear such a collection of cracking tales, however distinguished the company. Like JB, these men are not your average club buffer but classically educated men with a taste for the apposite Biblical quotation. In the Preface he writes of the storytellers and the varied lives they have led – ‘the ornithologist had watched more perilous things than birds; the politician had handled a rougher humanity than an English electorate.’¹⁵

One feature of these stories, especially those written in the 1920s when JB was a thoroughly assimilated Establishment figure – and on the surface a very conventional one, climbing his way, hand over hand, up the pole to worldly success – was how unconventional they can be. A number of tales in The Runagates Club run counter to the world’s expectations and expose the fears in every secure person’s breast.

In 1932 life imitated art when JB met Rudyard Kipling at a luncheon of The Club, and the talk turned to the rhythms and assonances of the King James Bible and how it was that such a wonderful style was the product of compilers who were theologians and linguists, not writers. JB raised the intriguing possibility that they might have consulted William Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, and Kipling leant across the table and asked JB whether he could use the idea ‘much as he might have asked for his fellow-member’s portion of gooseberry fool, should Buchan not happen to want it himself’.¹⁶ The result was one of Kipling’s last short stories, ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’.

JB’s next full-length novel, The Courts of the Morning, came out in 1929 and was dedicated to Ferris Greenslet, with a poem about the similar delights of fishing on each side of the Atlantic. Hannay has only a walk-on part in this novel, while Leithen appears not at all. This is Sandy’s show, the man who grew more and more like T. E. Lawrence as the books went on; the guerrilla insurrection that he leads in a fictional South American republic, called Olifa, might well have appealed to Lawrence. As James Buchan has pointed out, Olifa is the Arabic word for ‘friendship’, the working title for the book was Far Arabia, and the landscape of desert and coast looks like the northern Hijaz, the scene of some of Lawrence’s military exploits during the Great War. The Courts of the Morning is a complex tale about loyalties, intervention, mercenaries, moral equivocation and unlikely redemption and, pleasingly, the women – Barbara Dasent, who eventually marries Sandy Arbuthnot, and Janet Raden, now Lady Roylance – have just as much courage and mental strength as the men.

This story doesn’t really work, the topography as well as the politics and military tactics^* being too complicated and long-winded to be truly engaging, although there are some memorable scenes in it, such as the description of the Poisonous Valley into which the hapless Archie Roylance crash-lands his aeroplane.

The year 1929 turned out to be a difficult one for JB. A general election was held at the end of May, under the shadow of rapidly increasing unemployment, and the Conservatives, who campaigned on the slogan ‘Safety First’ – which JB thoroughly disliked – lost more than 150 seats and had to give way to Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party, in a hung parliament. JB kept his seat but lost 10,000 votes. He also lost a number of Parliamentary colleagues, in particular Harold Macmillan, although he got back in two years later.

Although JB had no electioneering of his own to do, he spoke for others, travelling long miles, especially in Scotland, during the election campaign. The upshot was that he had to take to his bed for much of the summer and autumn, only going out publicly once to give an address on Mary, Queen of Scots, in Peterborough Cathedral in late July. He scarcely appeared in the House of Commons at all that year and, when his contract with Thomas Nelson and Sons ran out in November, he did not renew it, thus breaking a connection that had lasted for nearly twenty-three years.

Thanks to his capacity to write when ill, however, he spent his time at Elsfield composing a contemporary ‘comedy’, which appeared the following summer. This was Castle Gay, a title that only became ambiguous long after his death.

In this comedic, tongue-in-cheek thriller, Dickson McCunn has a minor role, for he is outshone by two of the Gorbals Die-Hards, Jaikie Galt and Dougal Crombie, whom he had more or less adopted, and who are now young men. They have done him proud; indeed, the book begins with a stirring account of Jaikie scoring a try for Scotland in a rugby international. This is a tale about an unctuous newspaper proprietor, Thomas Carlyle Craw – a mixture, JB said, of Lord Rothermere and Robertson Nicoll – who, despite a keenness to ruin other people’s privacy, obsessively guards his own. He is kidnapped by students for a rag and, during a week of enforced tramping in the Lowlands and an encounter with disreputable Central European republicans, he learns something about himself and humanity. It is salutary to note that this book (as with the short story, ‘The Last Crusade’, included in The Runagates Club collection) shows that JB perfectly understood the concept of ‘fake news’. This novel also contains the beginnings of a touching love story between a scion of a played-out Highland aristocratic family and Jaikie, one of the most appealing and well-realised of JB’s creations, which continues in The House of the Four Winds. This is a liaison that a 1920s readership may not have been expecting, but it is true to JB’s beliefs in the efficacy of private charity and the inherent greatness of all humanity.

To make up the shortfall in income, when he left Nelson’s, JB began to write well-paid celebrity columns for The Graphic (not unlike those for The Spectator in tone and range), as well as the rather more down-to-earth Daily Express. He also wrote the Atticus political gossip column in The Sunday Times, where he could utilise his knowledge as a House of Commons insider. In the early 1930s he achieved an income of about £9,000 a year.

By the turn of the decade his children had grown up to be the not unusual mixture of anxiety and pride to their parents. Alice was taught well by governesses at home, before being sent, aged about sixteen, to a small, cosy ‘finishing school’ in a suburb of Paris, to learn some domestic practicalities as well as French culture. On her return, she submitted to more than one London Season, when her parents took a house in Westminster for six weeks in the early summer, so that they could play host at parties, and escort her to dances. After that, she petitioned her parents to allow her to train to be an actress and, despite her Scottish grandmother’s forthright protestations (in some quarters, acting for women was thought to be almost tantamount to prostitution), and the disapproval of the stout phalanx of Stuart-Wortley aunts, she got her way. Alice wrote years later: ‘My mother with sublime moral courage faced the drawn-down upper lips and raised eyebrows of her relations … found me respectable lodgings in London … and paid my first term’s fees at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.’¹⁷ Although JB never much enjoyed the theatre, claiming that plays sent him to sleep, he was punctilious in attending her performances, and thought her a very gifted speaker of Shakespearean verse. She also published a novel in 1931, and wrote a short play about Guy Fawkes, which won first prize in the Oxford Drama Festival and was produced at Elsfield, with JB acting the part of Sir Thomas Tresham and Alice the Countess of Hatfield. She won a national poetry recitation prize. However, she suffered, periodically, from a similar aimlessness to that which had beset her mother in youth.

Meanwhile, Eton was turning out to be a mixed blessing for the boys. They had been happy enough at the Dragon School in Oxford but the move, aged thirteen, to the most famous public school in England proved a challenge for them. Johnnie was always happier at home, fishing or flying his falcons – although he was consoled by being allowed to keep a kestrel in the school laboratory – but he generally behaved himself. He gained a place at Brasenose College, and ‘went up’ in the autumn of 1930. He spent much of his time there rowing for his college. While at Oxford he flew peregrine falcons and then acquired a goshawk, called Jezebel, who was, according to his father, his soul’s delight. He spent one summer vacation on a scientific expedition to the recently evacuated (and now permanently uninhabited) island of St Kilda beyond the Outer Hebrides and another working as a deckhand on a Hull fishing trawler.

Alastair and William were even less enamoured of Eton than Johnnie and had a habit of bumping up against authority, and were beaten for it. Alastair was, in adolescence, a rebel, while William became unhappy and stopped studying. Their tribulations prompted expressions of affectionate exasperation from their father, but whether he really saw their predicament clearly is uncertain, since his imagination, strange to say, occasionally failed him. Three of his four children were at times wayward and awkward, not entirely impressed by Border and Presbyterian values and, with the exception of Alastair, less capable of the swift and hard work that came so easily to JB, nor the sturdy self-discipline that made it possible. But a source of their difficulties (if that is not too strong a word) was JB’s own celebrity. A man whose most ordinary goings out and comings in were frequently cause for a column inch or two in The Times was not like other fathers. So the intense pride that his children felt in him was sometimes overlaid by acute frustration. William, in particular, squinted in the glare of his father’s magnificence, since he wanted to be a writer, the pre-eminent field in which his father laboured. In fact, his father always encouraged him to write, praised his poetry and was later to tell Alice that he thought the boy ‘the literary genius of the family’.¹⁸ William often felt the lack of his father’s presence. He wrote later about the difficult or remote fathers of his schoolfriends: ‘By comparison my own father seemed a different kind of being: cleverer, swifter-moving, more humorous, and infinitely more approachable – when, that is, he was there to approach.’¹⁹

Things improved for William in his last year at school, when he found the energy to produce, with a friend, an ephemeral magazine entitled Masquerade, in the process of which he learned something about publicity, marketing and publishing, which served him well in adult life. Even here, his father was hovering, anxious to help him, in this case unhelpfully. JB produced a short story for Masquerade, which he later expanded into the novel The Island of Sheep, but he asked his contemporaries to write pieces as well. These included J. M. Barrie, Henry Newbolt, Father Ronald Knox, Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward; with the exception of the last named, what a collection of embarrassing dinosaurs they must have seemed to a couple of eighteen-year-olds.

In Oxford University term time, the Buchans reserved Sunday afternoons for entertaining undergraduates to tea. These young people were friends of Johnnie’s, or the offspring of their friends, or students whom JB had met in one of the undergraduate clubs of which he was a patron or president, such as the Oxford Exploration Club. Wilfred Thesiger was one of these. Janet Adam Smith, the daughter of the Principal of Aberdeen University, George Adam Smith,^* first met JB, whose biography she would one day write, at one of these tea parties:

This was perhaps the characteristic Elsfield occasion, and to the Buchans an unpredictable one, for anything from one to thirty might turn up – ‘the Amalekites’^* the family called these invaders. There would probably be guests staying at the Manor – Violet Markham, or the Amerys, or the Robert Cecils – who would give the undergraduates a fresher view of the world of politics or government than would be found in the North Oxford drawing-rooms they visited. Not that there was any talking-down by the seniors: in the conversation round the large tea-table, which was often general, everyone was encouraged to talk (as in the Buchan home in Glasgow) and everyone was listened to – at least by the host, if not by his own contemporaries. It was not quite the talk of Oxford; cleverness cut less ice here, speakers had to be ready to back up their views with facts.²⁰

It sounds rather alarming, but indeed the hosts were so kindly that many a shy ‘undergrad’ retained for their entire lives a happy picture of Elsfield Manor and its occupants in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Susie enjoyed these afternoons greatly, since she could talk (or, more happily, listen) about books, politics or genealogies with a small group of clever, polite young people, who did not hide their admiration for her husband. JB recalled in his reminiscences that ‘there was a legend in the family that wherever one went on the globe one would meet somebody who had been to Elsfield. These guests were of every type – Blues, hunting men, scholars, Union orators, economists, poets – and of every creed from Jacobitism to communism.’²¹

A. L. Rowse, a Socialist, found a calm welcome at Elsfield. He reminisced rather sadly after JB’s death about the latter’s ‘extraordinary catholicism of sympathy … In fact, I believe it was a special recommendation with him that one was on the other side … With one young neophyte of the Left, ardent, impatient, fanatical, touchy, he was patience and courtesy itself.’²² The Buchans retained their interest in, and affection for, Rowse, looking in on his Labour Party headquarters at Falmouth, while holidaying in Cornwall, to wish him luck during his election campaign in 1931.

The story of the friendship between T. E. Lawrence and JB, which developed in the Elsfield years, bears retelling, since this maverick figure – romantic, quixotic, tortured, sensitive, prickly, conflicted, masochistic, brilliant – was very important to JB. He said about Lawrence, uniquely, that he could have followed him over the edge of the world. JB had succeeded in reconciling the antithetical sides of his own nature, but he understood and could not condemn the fissure in Lawrence’s: the ‘eternal war between what might be called the Desert and the Sown – on the one side art and books and friends and leisure and a modest cosiness; on the other action, leadership, the austerity of space’.²³ He was perfectly aware that Lawrence was ‘an agonist, a self-tormentor, who ran to meet suffering halfway. This was due, I think, partly to a twist of puritanism, partly to the fact that, as he often confessed, pain stimulated his mind; but it was abnormal and unwholesome.’²⁴

The two men met about half a dozen times a year when the Buchans were at Elsfield; Lawrence would arrive, usually unannounced and often on a Brough Superior motorbicycle, and disappear as quickly as he came. Conversation with him was an intense pleasure to JB, since they had much in common, talking about anything from the works of C. E. Doughty to The Odyssey to ideas on Empire. Lawrence knew more about the history and technique of war than any general JB had ever met:

If you were once admitted to his intimacy you became one of his family, and he of yours; he used you and expected to be used by you; he gave of himself with the liberality of a good child. There was always much of the child in him. He spoke and wrote to children as a coeval. He had a delightful impishness. Even when he was miserable and suffering he could rejoice in a comic situation, and he found many in the ranks of the R.A.F. and the Tank Corps. What better comedy than for a fine scholar to be examined as to his literacy by the ordinary education officer?²⁵

JB reckoned that T. E. Lawrence wrote the best letters of anyone he had known, apart from Raymond Asquith, but he also said that Lawrence was a great writer who never quite wrote a great book. He considered The Seven Pillars of Wisdom to be ‘a shapeless book [that] lacks the compulsion of the best narrative’,²⁶ something, of course, about which he knew a great deal.

In May 1925, Lawrence had asked JB, on the spur of the moment when they met in the street, if the latter could help get him back into the RAF, since he didn’t care so much about the Army. (He had had a six months’ stint in the Air Force in 1922 under the pseudonym of Aircraftsman Ross, but his true identity had been discovered and the resulting publicity had not pleased his superiors.) He told JB in a follow-up letter, which he signed ‘T E Shaw’, ‘The difference between Army and Air is that between earth and air: no less.’ He wanted to be in the ranks, rather than be an officer, ‘for I’m afraid of being loose or independent. The rails and rules and necessary subordination are so many comforts.’ He ended the letter by apologising for the bother to JB, ‘but the business is vital to me: if you can help straighten it out, the profit to me will far outweigh, in my eyes, any inconvenience to which you put yourself!’²⁷

JB, whose friends knew he could be relied upon, swiftly and without parade, to do what he could to help, wrote a long and eloquent letter to Stanley Baldwin; he, in turn, petitioned Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff. In early July, Trenchard performed a volte-face, sending for Lawrence and telling him that he was suitable as an RAF recruit. This prompted a heartfelt letter of thanks from Lawrence to JB: ‘The immediate effect of this news was to put me lazily and smoothly asleep, and asleep I’ve been ever since. It’s like a sudden port, after a voyage out of all reckoning.’ He had been hoping for it for so many years ‘as the only way of getting across middle age’. Lawrence finished by asking JB to tell his children ‘that the bike (Boanerges is his name) did 108 m[iles] an hour with me on Wednesday afternoon. [I]; think the news of my transfer had gone to its heads: (cylinder heads, of course).’²⁸

In 1928 he wrote from Waziristan to say that he had managed to extend his service in the RAF for another seven years until 1935. ‘I wanted you to know that I am making the best use I can of the gift you let Mr Baldwin into giving me in 1925.’²⁹

Back in England in 1931, Lawrence wrote in answer to JB’s suggestion that he write a life of Alexander the Great, that he thought it unlikely he would ever write anything of his own again. ‘You have in me a contented being, and no literature rises out of contentment.’ But he knew he must leave the service in 1935, ‘and after that I shall feel very lost’.³⁰ The next month he wrote to acknowledge JB’s request that he might dedicate Julius Caesar to him.^* ‘A kindness, you call it! What you should have written is … I was wondering whether to do you a great honour? I might perhaps dedicate my little monograph on Julius Caesar to you, and wonder if you are worth it?’^*

In July 1931, Hodder and Stoughton published another of JB’s historical novels, The Blanket of the Dark,^** set at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is a tale about an Oseney Abbey clerk who discovers he is the son of the executed Duke of Buckingham, and bids fair to lead a challenge to the throne of Henry VIII. It is one of JB’s very best novels, showing starkly the power of his historical imagination. One of the most compelling examples of that is the description of where the London–Worcester road is crossed by that from Elsfield to Beckley, as it would have looked in 1533. JB knew the place well, since it was less than a mile from his house, and anyone who knows it can only marvel at his ability to cast his mind back four hundred years and convincingly people that road – then ‘a mere ribbon of rutted turf, with on each side the statutory bowshot of cleared ground between it and the forest fringes’³¹ – with mendicant Franciscan friars returning from begging money on Otmoor, a wool convoy, a troop of gypsies, and a cavalcade of King’s Commissioners, on their way to enquire into the state of the religious house at Eynsham. He describes their clothes, their animals, their accoutrements, their behaviour, and we can almost hear the clink of harness and the slap of a monkish sandal, and smell the matted coat of a gypsy donkey. Moreover, anyone who thinks that JB never wrote about sex, or sexual temptation at least, should read in this book his account of the hero facing the agonising dilemma between bedding the beautiful, worldly girl or saving his monkish soul.

The seeds of why JB could not quite keep up the same impetus as a politician after that first year in the House of Commons were, paradoxically, sown at the time of his maiden speech. His intellectual, highly reasonable but sometimes rather Olympian approach to problems and difficulties, with all those quotations from historical precedent rather than contemporary allusions, did not particularly appeal to the stupider and more emotional of his colleagues, of which there were many. The admittedly clever Lord Birkenhead, whose plan for reform of the Parliament Act JB had criticised so successfully in his maiden speech, said of him, ‘there was a suggestion of the lecturer, a hint of the dominie, and a whiff of some by-gone Calvinism in his speeches which was alien to the House of Commons’.³² According to Lord Stewartby, who was a Conservative minister as well as JB’s grandson-in-law, his lucid, beautifully composed, lofty, outward-looking, historically literate, romantic speeches ‘were profoundly different from most of the speeches which were made by his contemporaries or indeed by his successors in Parliament’.³³

What is more, those who had had a hard graft in unwinnable constituencies before ever they arrived in the House of Commons were not inclined to admire someone who seemed to have had an altogether easier ascent, and who demonstrably had irons in other fires. Nearly all members of Parliament had other occupations at that time, but few were so famous in such a very different field. How could you take a man entirely seriously if he talked in Ciceronian periods, yet your children were snatching his latest thriller out of your hand as you came through the door? And, although university MPs have sometimes made a great impact – A. P. Herbert with his Divorce Bill being a good example – some Members of Parliament from grittier constituencies had an instinctive prejudice against them.

Moreover, JB did not enjoy the really knotty committee work, when hours might be taken poring over a word in an amendment, the grinding dullness (and often fatuity) of so much of Parliamentary business, which was bread and butter to less gifted but more tenacious men. He skewers such a politician in his contemporary novel, The Gap in the Curtain, published in 1932. Any MP who read that will not have been well disposed towards its author.

The greatest impact he made, while in Parliament, was as friend and confidant to both his party leader, Stanley Baldwin, when Prime Minister, and then the Socialist Ramsay MacDonald, once the National Government was formed in 1931 and he became premier. At least once each week, when the House was sitting, Baldwin and JB would breakfast together and then walk around St James’ Park afterwards. Baldwin valued these occasions. After JB’s death, he wrote: ‘… looking back through many difficult years, I never failed to find in him complete understanding and sympathy, and his approval of any particular course of action was a greater source of strength than he could ever have known’.³⁴ The Sunday News was of the opinion that ‘it would be difficult to overestimate the influence of the quiet Scotsman and novelist M.P., Mr John Buchan. He is the closest friend of Stanley Baldwin, his advisor as regards all his more important speeches, and his confidant on all occasions.’³⁵

Lord Davidson, Chairman of the Conservative Party, remembered that he and Baldwin would often be joined by JB in the Smoking Room of the House of Commons and they would immediately settle down to talk politics as ideas, rather than the usual fare of ways and means to manipulate people and votes. JB would develop some thought process and it was likely that it would end up in a Baldwin speech a few days later. In Davidson’s words, JB was ‘a fertilising influence’.³⁶

The big foreign-policy issue at the time was India, and how it could progress in time and in an orderly fashion to become a self-governing Dominion. JB had swung behind the idea of self-government for India rather earlier than many. Maturity, and the lessons of the war years and after, seem to have tempered his youthful enthusiasm for ordering other peoples about: ‘Self-government is the ideal for every unit: with many it has been realized; with some it may take generations before the ground is duly prepared; but the same goal is at the end of every road.’³⁷ To this end, he had a hand in drafting the 1934 joint select committee report on Indian constitutional reform.

In 1931, when the National Government’s Cabinet was in the process of formation, JB’s name came up as a potential Secretary of State for Scotland or, failing that, President of the Board of Education. But the first job went to the Liberal Sir Archibald Sinclair, while JB’s old Peebles adversary Sir Donald Maclean got ‘Education’.

There were misgivings about JB, arising partly from anxiety over his chronic illness, which had kept him away from London for most of the second half of 1929 and about which his colleagues knew nothing that was not alarming. There were those who saw clearly his virtues, but they tended to be outside Parliament. For example, in the summer of 1932, after Maclean’s death caused a vacancy at the Board of Education, the Buchans’ old friend Violet Markham was moved to write to Tom Jones, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, to plead JB’s cause with Stanley Baldwin:

I think it is a real misfortune in the national interest that he [John Buchan] is not in the National Government. I also think he would make an admirable President of the Board of Education. Is there no chance of this being considered? It would be a thousand pities if that appointment is made on the rigid lines of party spoils, [for] John has vision and imagination … He would bring vigour and enthusiasm to that dreary department and I believe might make a great success of the post. It never seems to me that his services and very real abilities have received adequate recognition so far. He never pushes or clamours and so he seems to get left aside – greatly so I think to the public detriment … There are so many mediocrities in the Cabinet. John would reinforce the very moderate values of distinction not prominent at this moment.³⁸

Jones passed the message on to Baldwin who told him that ‘John Buchan would be no use in the Cabinet. Ramsay has written to me saying he must keep up the numbers of the Samuelites [Herbert Samuel was temporary leader of the Liberal Party] and proposing [the Marquess of] Lothian.’³⁹ In the end, the job went to Lord Irwin, who became the Earl of Halifax.

Later that year, when the Samuelites and Simonites (‘Liberal Nationals’ who followed Sir John Simon) in the Cabinet resigned over some aspects of the 1932 Ottawa Agreement, the post of Secretary of State for Scotland was given to another Liberal, Sir Godfrey Collins. JB wrote to Baldwin about his lack of preferment and one senses the words were squeezed painfully out of him:

I feel that somehow I have managed to acquire the wrong kind of political atmosphere. Most of my friends seem to think that I am a busy man whose life is completely filled with non-political interests. But that is not the case. I gave up business three years ago in order to devote myself to politics. I do not speak overmuch in the House – there is no need for it – but I do a great deal of speaking up and down the country, especially in Scotland, where I think I have a good deal of influence. Politics have always been my chief interest and I have had a good deal of administrative experience … I am a free man and really anxious for definite work.⁴⁰

It was not to be and the key is probably to be found in a letter that JB wrote from Canada to Leo Amery in 1936 about Baldwin:

It is wrong to say that S.B. has no capacity for friendship. The truth is almost the opposite! I had a most emotional parting from him last October. What is true is that he intensely dislikes the political game, and he has schooled himself to a kind of hard objectivity about his colleagues in it, and has tried to sink all personal feeling. He is a bad party leader so far as persons are concerned. The personal relationships in a party need careful cultivation, and S.B.’s curious moods of apathy and idleness prevent him from doing this most needful work. Only a perfectly first-class private secretary could have saved him. The result is that he has constantly been, apparently, guilty of harshnesses and disloyalties of which he was completely unconscious.⁴¹

Who knows if JB would have got further if he had been a man more assiduously looking out for his own advantage? It is not necessary to be one of those to achieve high office, but it certainly helps. JB never formed a group of supporters round him, and therefore did not need to be appeased by office. As Violet Markham made clear in her letter, he was not a squeaky wheel.

Needless to say, Baldwin’s refusal to give him preferment made no difference to their friendship; they worked happily together until JB’s translation to Canada in 1935, and remained friends thereafter.

He performed something of the same service of companion and sounding board for Ramsay MacDonald as he had done for Baldwin, after October 1931, when the National Government was formed. MacDonald was Prime Minister of a coalition comprising mainly Conservatives (many of them graduates of Ashridge College, incidentally), having been disowned by the members of the Labour Party, which he had helped to found. MacDonald was a long-widowed, lonely, difficult, humourless man, whose mental and physical powers were slowly on the wane, but JB’s kindly feeling for any fellow human being in a fix, as well as his conviction that the Labour Party was a more natural opposition to the Conservatives than the Liberal Party, made a bond that crossed party lines. They had met first in 1925, and found common ground in discussions of Scots poetry and history. So in 1931, JB took to meeting and talking to him about his day-to-day commitments, suggesting points for his speeches, even sometimes drafting them, and giving his opinion on people and policies.

Generally, amongst the Conservatives he led in the coalition government, MacDonald was not well liked, being thought to be vain, conceited and snobbish, thrilled by the pageantry that so disgusted his left-wing colleagues, yet finding it difficult to find common ground with people who were not of his ilk. He was also often very hard to cheer up. JB’s kindness was often tested sorely in the early-morning walks around St James’ Park, before breakfasts at No. 10, but he stuck by him, aided by Baldwin, another kindly man, living next door at No. 11. MacDonald had qualities that JB admired; for all his faults, he was courageous, courteous and decisive. But he admitted that MacDonald lacked the ‘kindly affection for the commonplace, which may be called benevolence, or, better still, loving-kindness, the quality of Shakespeare and Walter Scott … He was too ready to despise. He loved plain folk, but they must be his own kind of plain folk with his own background.’ Nevertheless, JB thought his alleged vanity to be largely sensitiveness, the result of his difficult early struggles. ‘The whole man was a romance, almost an anachronism. To understand him one had to understand the Scottish Celt, with his ferocious pride, his love of pageantry and poetry, his sentiment about the past, his odd contradictory loyalties.’⁴² No wonder he clung to JB as to a solid spar in a stormy sea. MacDonald considered making him a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet in early 1934 but, although that never came off, in effect he did the job informally for about eighteen months, until Baldwin became Prime Minister once more in May 1935.

MacDonald’s isolation made him vulnerable to pushy, confident individuals such as the Marchioness of Londonderry, the society hostess, who called herself ‘Circe’. A Tory, she entertained at Londonderry House, at the south end of Park Lane, on a scale that would have seemed lavish before the Great War, and must have seemed positively obscene to some in the lean years of mass unemployment. She took up Ramsay MacDonald, and he became part of her inner circle, known as ‘the Ark’. JB accepted invitations from her, at least partly to keep an eye on MacDonald, but he was never so drawn in as the latter, probably because Susie didn’t care for her.

*

JB finally found his name on the New Year’s Honours List in 1932, as a Companion of Honour. This Order was established by King George V in 1917; there are only ever sixty-five Companions at one time, plus the Sovereign. JB told Lord Beaverbrook in reply to congratulations on this highly prestigious honour, that he preferred a suffix to a prefix.⁴³ Whether Beaverbrook believed him is another question.

In 1932 there was agitation in some quarters in Scotland for Home Rule and, in the debate on the King’s Speech on 24 November the issue of a Scottish parliament was raised. In a speech that contemporary Scottish Nationalists, who want independence from the rest of the United Kingdom, have fallen upon with glee, JB said

I believe that every Scotsman should be a Scottish Nationalist. If it could be proved that a separate Scottish Parliament were desirable, that is to say that the merits were greater than the disadvantages and dangers, Scotsmen should support it.

However, he went on to say that, although a certain measure of devolution was desirable, and the Scottish Office really should be in Scotland, a parliament in Edinburgh was a ‘top-heavy structure [which] would not cure Scotland’s ills; it would intensify them. It would create artificial differences, hinder co-operation, and engender friction if we attempted to split up services which Scotland has had in common with England for 200 years … I believe as firmly as ever that a sane nationalism is necessary for all true peace and prosperity, but I am equally clear … that an artificial nationalism, which manifests itself in a barren separatism and in the manufacture of artificial difference, makes for neither peace nor prosperity.’⁴⁴ There is no support for the SNP there.

The truth was that he was a ‘unionist nationalist’, with concentric, not warring, loyalties. As he wrote in his dedication to Vernon Watney at the beginning of Midwinter:

We two confess twin loyalties –

Wychwood beneath the April skies

Is yours, and many a scented road

That winds in June by Evenlode.

Not less when autumn fires the brake,

Yours the deep heath by Fannich’s lake,

The corries where the dun deer roar

And eagles wheel above Sgùrr Mòr.

So I, who love with equal mind

The southern sun, the northern wind,

The lilied lowland water-mead

And the grey hills that cradle Tweed,

Bring you this tale which haply tries

To intertwine our loyalties.

He was well aware of the potential for comedy in politics, particularly in constituency speech-making, and a number of his novels and short stories deal with the subject in a decidedly amused way. The Radical (Liberal) candidate he encountered a lot in Scotland before the war finds his way memorably into The Thirty-Nine Steps, while in The Three Hostages, Sandy Arbuthnot recalls a speech that he had made on Irish Home Rule:

Has it ever struck, Dick, that ecclesiastical language has a most sinister sound? I knew some of the words, though not their meaning, but I knew that my audience would be just as ignorant. So I had a magnificent peroration. ‘Will you men of Kilclavers … endure to see a chasuble set up in your market place? Will you have your daughters sold into simony? Will you have celibacy practised in the public streets?’ Gad, I had them all on their feet bellowing ‘Never’.⁴⁵

Since no one wanted to give him a government post, JB spent his time in ferocious literary activity. In 1932 he published a major biography, a novel and a children’s story.^* First there was Sir Walter Scott (Cassell, March 1932), dedicated to ‘two friends, lovers of Sir Walter, Stanley Baldwin and George Macaulay Trevelyan’. It was the only literary biography he ever wrote, but he told friends he was bound one day to do it, for he had been born and bred under the shadow of Scott’s great tradition. The book reveals much about himself, his own writing method and attitudes and, for many people, it is his finest biography.

Sir Walter Scott shows what a very good literary critic he was: careful, judicious, with a close ear for the music of words, and an educated eye for their texture. Here he is on the subject of Scott’s poetry, for example:

He adapted the old ballad form so as to fit it for a long and often complex narrative. Scott’s octosyllables embrace, if carefully studied, surprising varieties of manner, and they are far more artful than they appear … They can gallop and they can jig, they can move placidly in some piece of argument, and now and then they can sing themselves into a lyrical exaltation.⁴⁶

This book is one of the very best guides to Scott’s novels, those great but now, with the passing of time, sometimes problematic works of fiction. JB encouraged the reader to think them worth the effort of learning some of the Scots language, and ploughing on through the tedious scene-setting at the beginning of, for example, Rob Roy.

There was so much that he knew of Scott’s Borders and also of Edinburgh, and he used his knowledge and imagination to describe ‘Auld Reekie’ in 1771 (the year Scott was born), which can hardly be bettered:

Scotland had recovered her confidence. But in the process she was shutting the door upon her past. There were two strains in her history – the aristocratic and Cavalier; the Covenanting and democratic; and both were so overlaid by novelties that they were in danger of being choked and forgotten. The first, having suffered downfall with Jacobitism, survived only as a dim sentiment, the inspiration of songs when the claret went round, a thing of brocades and lace and twilit windows. The second had lost itself in formalism or eccentricity, and its stubborn democratic tradition was half forgotten. There was a danger lest the land, setting out confidently on new paths, might condemn as provincial and antiquated what was the very core and essence of her being. She was in the van of the new enlightenment: was her progress to be that of the rocket which shoots from earth into high places and then falls, or like the slow growth of a tree, deep-rooted by ancient waters?

In 1771 Scotland stood at the parting of the ways. That she chose rightly was due to two children who were then alive on her soil.⁴⁷ [Burns and Scott].

JB also experienced, and could empathise closely with, many of Scott’s difficulties, especially indifferent health. He could have been writing of himself in 1932: ‘The reaction of a man to the ebbing of bodily strength in middle age is a certain proof of character, and Scott revealed that tough stoicism which can laugh even when the mouth is wry with pain.’⁴⁸

He could also have said of himself what he said of Scott:

He had mingled intimately with every class and condition of men; he had enough education to broaden his outlook but not enough to dim it; he was familiar alike with city and moorland, with the sown and the desert, and he escaped the pedantry of both the class-room and the drawing-room…⁴⁹

Trevelyan, the dedicatee, called it ‘the best one-volumed biography in the language’.⁵⁰

In the summer The Gap in the Curtain was published, the only full-length supernatural novel he ever wrote. (Most of his tales of the uncanny are short stories.) Sir Edward Leithen is the narrator/onlooker and the gap in the curtain of the title refers to a moment when members of a Whitsun house party catch a glimpse of a page of The Times one year hence. How five of them deal with the foreknowledge forms the basis of the story. This novel contains, in the account of one of those who catch that glimpse, a brilliant, lengthy and disillusioned description of British politics at that time. It may well indicate how disappointed the high-minded JB had become with the manoeuvrings of contemporary politicians. Baldwin and MacDonald are, however, exempted; there are sympathetic portraits of them both.

A typical couple of days for JB in London, as he told his wife, included entertaining ‘some University professors to lunch, and then … successively Edward Irwin’s education meeting, the Ashridge Governors, and a very long meeting of Scottish Members on Scottish Home Rule, where I had to speak at length … Today I have to lunch with the English Review Club, and then have meetings of the Film Institute people and the British Philosophers, and finish with a long meeting at the House on the Everest flying scheme.’⁵¹ The only aspects of his public life not crammed into those two days were the Pilgrim Trust and his local involvement in the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Oxford University Chest and the Oxford Preservation Trust. These worthy and various projects gave him satisfaction and, in the case of the daring (and successful) Houston Mount Everest Flying Expedition, which he helped to promote, some intense, if vicarious, excitement.

Excitement of another kind came in May 1932. He wrote to his wife from London:

Now, here is something important which I want you and Alice to talk over before I come back on Friday. They are going to separate Burma from India, and make it a separate Dominion under a Governor-General, and, since the Burmese are a reasonable and docile people, they believe that if self-government succeeds there, it will be a model to India. I was sent for last night, and they asked me to be the first Governor-General. I have been whistling ‘Mandalay’^* whilst shaving for some weeks, and that seems to have been an omen. What do you think about the old ‘Moulmein Pagoda’? This would not be like Canada, a quasi-royal affair, but a piece of solid and difficult work. There is no hurry about a decision, for I have only been sounded, but I wish you would turn it over in your mind. Are we too old for a final frisk?⁵²

It is interesting that, at fifty-six, he thought himself towards the end of his useful public life and that being Governor-General of Burma would be a more taxing task than Governor-General of Canada. The question came to nothing in the end, since the idea of creating a separate country fizzled out for the time being, but it resurrected thoughts JB had had about representing the King overseas, ever since Mackenzie King’s abortive proposal that he should be Governor-General of Canada in 1926.

One of the most pressing issues that concerned JB in and out of Parliament in the early 1930s was the plight of European Jews, and the development of Palestine as a homeland for the persecuted. And in the light of the work he did in this field, we must consider the charge of anti-Semitism, which surfaces from time to time, mainly as a result of about half a dozen unfavourable comments by fictional characters, mostly to be found in the Hannay books.

If the question is whether JB was, himself, anti-Semitic, it is important to avoid anachronism. Racial and national stereotyping, favourable and unfavourable, was commonplace throughout all society during his entire lifetime. It is hardly surprising that characters in JB’s novels should engage in it, in ways that both commend and criticise. As it happens, there are favourable depictions of individual Jews in the short story, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, in A Lodge in the Wilderness and, in particular, A Prince of the Captivity. In any event, great care should be taken to avoid attributing to an author the views of his fictional creations. For example, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the anti-Semitic comments of the freelance American spy, Scudder, are explicitly denounced by Sir Walter Bullivant, as well as Hannay (who thought them ‘eyewash’); both of them, of course, are also products of JB’s imagination. (Scudder believes in a conspiracy of Jews seeking war for profit and to get back at Russia for the pogroms, which turns out to be completely wrong; the enemies in the book are in fact Prussian-led.) In any event, the case can be made that distinctions expressed by his characters and those made by JB outside his novels were really to do with nationality and culture, rather than genetics. JB was no cultural relativist. If he was not personally anti-Semitic, it would be hard to argue that he intended to be so in his writing. If anti-Semitism were found in his work, that would be the result of the reader’s perception and not JB’s intention.

The evidence of his close personal relationships with Jews and his support for the Jewish people – at a time when Tory politicians were thought to damage their chances of preferment by such support⁵³ – suggests that, if anything, JB was a philo-Semite. How could it be otherwise for a man deeply imbued in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in Jewish historical culture? As Allan Massie puts it, ‘I think it well nigh impossible for a Presbyterian Scot to be hostile to the Jews and Israel.’⁵⁴ It is no surprise, therefore, that one of his most long-standing friends was the Jewish economist Moritz Bonn, who fled from Germany in 1933. Hermann Eckstein, a Rand magnate and banker, threw JB’s engagement party. He dedicated Prester John to the Jewish financier Sir Lionel Phillips, in whose house he and Susie spent the first week of their honeymoon. He and Dr Chaim Weizmann, later the first President of Israel, were good friends. All of which at the very least suggests that there were prominent Jews who did not consider JB anti-Semitic. He supported the Balfour Declaration, which endorsed a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. A Prince of the Captivity has been called ‘almost certainly the first major anti-Nazi popular novel’.⁵⁵ In 1933, as Chairman of the Parliamentary Pro-Palestine Committee, JB received a deputation from ‘the leaders of the synagogue’ concerned with the persecution of German Jews; sitting at dinner that evening next to ‘my beloved Mrs. Jimmy’ (de Rothschild) he was so moved by singing the Hymn of Exile ‘that I made a really good speech’.⁵⁶ On 5 April 1933, less than three months after Hitler came to power, JB was one of only fifty MPs who signed an Early Day Motion deploring the treatment of Jews in Germany. In the spring of 1934 he spoke at a rally in Shoreditch organised by the National Jewish Fund, describing Zionism as ‘a great act of justice. It was reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong, which had stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.’⁵⁷ His name was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund of Israel. It also appeared in a Nazi publication, Who’s Who in Britain (Frankfurt, 1938), the entry reading: ‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity.’⁵⁸

In 1933, Ramsay MacDonald invited JB to fulfil the role of Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (with which the Free Church had merged in 1929). Ever since the sixteenth century, this body had met every year in the spring to discuss church matters. The Lord High Commissioner was the King’s representative – ‘a kind of stage sovereign’⁵⁹ as Robert Louis Stevenson put it – so the royal standard waved from the roof of the Palace of Holyroodhouse while he was in residence, and the whole procedure was hedged around with the conventions of (almost) kingship.

There would be much entertaining of worthies, grandees and friends of the Buchans at levées, receptions, luncheons, dinners and a large garden party. (On being told, Susie immediately began to worry about what she would wear.) However, the allowance for entertainment was not munificent, and initially JB told MacDonald that he would only accept the invitation if they could agree on how much, or rather how little, entertaining he was expected to pay for. Fortunately, before this became an impasse, Sir Alexander Grant came to his rescue by offering to help out financially, if need be, so JB agreed to do it.

His acceptance of the invitation was, at least in part, a homage to his father as well as an obvious fillip for his mother. Moreover, he had loved heraldry, ancient arcane Scottish chivalry and, by extension, formal ceremony ever since he was a boy, and he had always enjoyed dressing up. He often quoted Dr Johnson: ‘Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us therefore be cautious how we strip her.’ He knew that Susie would rise to the occasion as a hostess, that it would mean they could see and entertain a number of their Scottish friends, and that Alice, aged twenty-four, an aspiring novelist and sometimes underemployed actress, would enjoy being a lady-in-waiting.

The task of the Lord High Commissioner, addressed as ‘Your Grace’, was to open and close the Assembly, and attend some of its deliberations, although, since the Kirk was not established (as the Church of England is), he could not speak or vote, the proceedings being presided over by the Moderator. He also had to report on the events afterwards to King George V. The ceremonies had all the panoply of a medieval pageant: military guards of honour; a Purse-bearer; the Lord Lyon King of Arms, together with his heralds and pursuivants; the Royal Company of Archers in their dark green tunics; the Holyrood High Constables in blue and silver. JB, who was already a Deputy Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, was swiftly appointed one for Peebleshire as well, so that he could wear a scarlet uniform and a plumed hat. He told a friend that he looked like a blend of General Moltke and ‘Lord’ George Sanger, the circus owner.

The ceremonies began on the evening of 22 May, when the Lord Provost of Edinburgh solemnly handed over to JB the Keys to the City, as the symbol of the city’s allegiance to the Crown. He settled into Holyrood Palace with his wife, mother, mother-in-law, sister and daughter, and they were attended by aides-de-camp, who included the Marquess of Clydesdale, fresh from flying over Everest, and Captain Brian Fairfax-Lucy of the Cameron Highlanders. The Lord High Commissioner requires a chaplain, so Charlie Dick was invited down from his Shetland fastness to say daily morning prayers and stand by his friend’s side.

The following day, the Buchans hosted a levée of judges, members of the armed forces, the town council and church leaders in the Throne Room, and then inspected the guard of honour of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the courtyard. There was much blowing of trumpets and playing of band tunes, which mingled with the jingling of the harness of the mounted escort, and the barked commands of their officers. They then drove, in an open landau, accompanied by a mounted escort of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, to St Giles’ (Presbyterian) Cathedral, through streets pressing with people, to the accompaniment of a twenty-one-gun salute from the Castle. After the service in the Cathedral, they removed to the packed Assembly Hall on the Castle Mound where, after a message from the King, JB addressed the Assembly: ‘I come before you to-day with a full heart, for I am one of yourselves. I have in my bones the traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism.’⁶⁰ He paid tribute to the men of the Kirk whose memory was still a living thing to him, including his father. ‘From their teaching and their lives I learned the meaning of the beauty of holiness and the grandeur of Christ’s Kirk in Scotland.’

During the many receptions the ADCs would bring people up and introduce them to Their Graces, just as if they were the King and Queen; the stately Caroline Grosvenor, used to Court life at the end of nineteenth century, was not too grand to confess she was mightily impressed. She told her daughter, Marnie: ‘The whole thing has a sort of fairy-tale touch about it … When I see people being led up to Susie and curtseying nervously to her, and when I have to curtsey myself I feel as if I must wake up and find it a dream … I must say I am very proud of John and Susie. They both do it with much dignity and simplicity.’⁶¹

Most of the Scottish aristocracy, together with every senior civic officer, serviceman and legal luminary, found themselves at Holyrood Palace at some point over the ten days.^* Among the personal guests were the Baldwins, Sir Alexander Grant and his family, and the Gillons. Not surprisingly, Mrs Buchan was in her element. She had been attending the Free Kirk assemblies for many years, and the Church of Scotland ones since Unification in 1929, listening intently to debates, knitting needles in her hand. She had a broad acquaintance amongst church people and an excellent memory for ecclesiastical disputes, so she was very helpful to JB.

Violet Markham, who was invited to stay at Holyrood (and gave a long account of the visit to Mackenzie King), remembered that JB, with his considerable entourage, made a point, after opening the Assembly, of visiting the other assembly, that of the Free Kirk, known as the ‘Wee Frees’, the numerically small sect that had stood out against all amalgamations:

As our party clattered in, we seemed to fill up half the space of a thinly peopled hall. This was a gathering which might have been a persecuted remnant, meeting in the catacombs, mostly ageing men and women with here and there a child who looked on wide-eyed at this sudden influx of pomp and colour – soldiers in their brilliant uniforms, ladies in their gay frocks, and officials in dignified garb. [The Moderator told him that they had never before been visited by the King’s Representative. JB talked to him of the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, whom he admired] with a fluency and knowledge above the heads of his guests. Then with mutual expressions of courtesy and good will, we clattered out again to engage in the festivities and the ceremonies of the day. But I remember I was very near to tears.⁶²

At the end of the ten days, JB handed back the keys to the Lord Provost and the family climbed into a first-class carriage at Edinburgh Waverley, changing at Paddington Station into a third-class carriage to travel back to Oxford. It had all been a howling success, with the added bonus that Alice and one of the ADCs, Brian Fairfax-Lucy, had fallen in love. The Buchans were pleased, JB calling him ‘the best of good fellows’. By the end of the following month the couple were engaged, and they married in St Columba’s Church in Knightsbridge on 29 July.

After the Assembly, Sir Alexander Grant sent JB a cheque to help defray the substantial expenses; in strictly utilitarian terms – which this was not – a very generous return for a novel dedication. JB replied: ‘I wish there were any words in the English language in which I could express how much I feel about your kindness.’⁶³ Grant also insisted on providing Alice’s wedding cake, which must have been a magnificent confection.

The following spring, JB was asked again to be Lord High Commissioner. This time he did not hesitate. It took the same pattern of ceremonial, large-scale entertaining, and a great deal of visiting of worthy institutions. The weather was again sufficiently clement for the Buchans to be driven to St Giles’ Cathedral and the Assembly Hall in an open carriage, this time escorted by men of the Royal Scots Greys on their bright white horses. JB told the General Assembly that the Kirk had always laid emphasis on the freedom and responsibility of the individual soul and that in the difficult times they were passing through there was a danger of revolt against freedom from a failure of nerve. ‘To oppose to-day a weak craving for servitude is as sacred a duty for this Church of free men and free women as any that it has faced in its stormy history.’⁶⁴ It is not difficult to see where his thoughts were tending, with the disquieting rise of dictators in Europe. The newspapers picked up on the theme and Gilbert Murray, who had by this time been awarded the Order of Merit, wrote to JB to thank him and to tell him that what he said needed saying. What JB had proved, not for the last time, was that he could make something meaningful and worthwhile out of an occasion that might otherwise have been not much more than flummery.

The year 1934 saw the publication of a novel and two biographies. The Free Fishers, his last historical novel, took him back to ‘the windy shores of Fife at a time when smuggling and vagabondage were still rife’.⁶⁵ It is a rollicking, exuberant story, set in Regency times, and concerns a scholar/gipsy of St Andrews and some dubious old friends, who find themselves caught up in a bid to thwart a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval. JB seemed to be able to evoke the early nineteenth century almost as well as the seventeenth, being at home, crucially, with the apparatus that attached horses to a coach. It is meant as a high compliment to say that this is a Georgette Heyer novel, but written by a man.

That summer, Johnnie Buchan successfully applied to be an Assistant District Officer in Uganda, and left for Africa in July. In the autumn, Oliver Cromwell was published on the anniversary of the Lord Protector’s death, 3 September, having been first serialised in The Sunday Times. Montrose had concentrated JB’s mind on the War of the Three Kingdoms from the point of view of the King’s party, and it was now time to look at the story from the other side. This time he depended more heavily on secondary sources; it was a piece of reinterpretation rather than original research, Cromwell having attracted much more interest from historians than Montrose.

The story of how Oliver Cromwell went from fenland country squire and Member of Parliament to military commander and regicide is told with lucidity and great sympathy for Cromwell, a man whose reputation will ever divide people but who, like Montrose, was ahead of his time. JB was by this stage so steeped in the language of the seventeenth century, and at home with both the politics and the religious struggles of the period, that the story flows smoothly and the tale unfolds with all the inevitability – taking into account the character of the main protagonists – of a Greek tragedy. And the characterisation is perceptive and written in pellucid prose. This is JB on Charles I:

His gentleness and charm might attach his friends to him, but his public conduct had been in the highest degree fantastic, disingenuous, and uncertain. He had no gift of resolute purpose or single-hearted action; the prominent velvet eyes under the heavy lids were the eyes of an emotional intriguer. They were the eyes, too, of a fanatic, who would find in the last resort some curious knuckle of principle on which he would hear no argument … The old monarchy could only survive if its representative had those qualities of plain dealing and sturdy resolution which were dear to Englishmen; and it was the irony of fate that this king should be part woman, part priest, and part the bewildered delicate boy who had never quite grown up.⁶⁶

And on Cromwell:

Paradox is in the fibre of his character and career … a devotee of law, he was forced to be often lawless; a civilian to the core, he had to maintain himself by the sword; with a passion to construct, his task was chiefly to destroy; the most scrupulous of men, he had to ride roughshod over his own scruples and those of others; the tenderest, he had continually to harden his heart; the most English of our greater figures, he spent his life in opposition to the majority of Englishmen; a realist, he was condemned to build that which could not last.⁶⁷

And is there a shorter or clearer exposition of the constitutional dilemma inherent in the Protectorate than this? ‘He was to be a prince, but a prince who must remain standing, since he had no throne.’⁶⁸

In November 1934 the Buchans sailed to New York, where JB had been invited to open the Harkness Library at Columbia University. He spoke to a large audience, and the speech was broadcast. While in New York, he met the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, for the first time, Ramsay MacDonald having ‘entrusted me with some very confidential things to say to the President of the USA’.⁶⁹ We do not know what those were, but this was the beginning of a connection that bore fruit in later years.

They came home after ten days, enduring an extremely rough voyage on RMS Berengaria. Also on the ship were Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley and Beverley Nichols. Walpole was ill in bed, and his fellow writers kept him company, Walpole remarking to JB: ‘Do you realise that if this ship goes down tonight four of Britain’s best-selling writers will be lost, and that all the non-best-selling writers will probably have a party to celebrate the event?’⁷⁰

In January 1935 the family went to Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush to watch The 39 Steps being filmed. ‘They have altered the story in parts, but very cleverly, and they have got a first-class man for Hannay,’ JB told Johnnie.⁷¹ That first-class man was Robert Donat, the handsome English actor with the beautiful voice who had come to prominence the year before in the Hollywood film The Count of Monte Cristo.

In 1934, Gaumont-British had bought a seven-year option to film The Thirty-Nine Steps for a very modest £800 and it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, at a cost of £60,000. Hitchcock owned copies of all JB’s novels and told François Truffaut that he had been ‘a strong influence [for] a long time’.⁷² (Hitchcock had originally thought of filming Greenmantle but concluded that The Thirty-Nine Steps would be easier, as it was on a smaller scale and usefully episodic.) The screenplay was mainly written by Charles Bennett, who thought the book ‘awful’.

The 39 Steps (replacing words with numbers must have made things easier for the poster artist) was one of the first ‘man-on-the-run’ thrillers ever filmed and it made Alfred Hitchcock famous in America for the first time, breaking box-office records there. Much of the plot was changed to reflect the different international situation, twenty years on from 1915, as well as the fact that the book’s plot turned on the clever disguise of the Black Stone gang, something very difficult to film successfully back then. Hitchcock retained the suspense produced by the twin pressures of pursuit by both police and foriegn agents, but played up the comedy, especially at the political meeting. And he famously introduced a love interest. In the film, the nationality of the international spies is not specified – since the Foreign Office had told film-makers in the mid-1930s not to be beastly about the Germans. So ‘The 39 Steps’ becomes a foreign organisation trying to steal the details of an aircraft’s production. Richard Hannay, now a Canadian, acquires a reluctant female companion, Pamela, played by the beautiful Madeleine Carroll; she initially tries to deliver him into the hands of the police but comes to believe his story. The scene when they have to share a room in a Scottish inn and she removes her stocking, while handcuffed to him, still gives off an erotic spark, and is one of the most famous romantic scenes in pre-war British cinema.

In early 1935, JB finished The King’s Grace 1910–1935, telling Johnnie in Uganda that ‘It was a most ticklish piece of work, but I could not get out of it.’⁷³ In 1934, Hodder and Stoughton had asked him to write a book to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of King George V, due the following year. JB did not feel he could refuse (he was also to write the House of Commons welcome speech for the King in 1935), but the task had to be done at high speed.

Although King George V is not a completely remote figure in the book, and something of the affection that JB felt for him comes through, The King’s Grace is really a potted history of the preceding quarter-century. It is also a digest of his war books, and it gave him the opportunity to revise some of his judgements from A History of the Great War. For example, he was more magnanimous to David Lloyd George than the latter had been to him the year before, reserving some mildly waspish comments about him for his reminiscences, Memory Hold-the-Door.

He had had time to reflect, in tranquillity, on what the Great War had been, and what it had led to, and his sympathy encompassed much of the world:

Little farms in Touraine, in the Scottish Highlands, in the Apennines, were untilled because there were no men; Armenia had lost half her people; the folk of North Syria were dying of famine; Indian villages and African tribes had been blotted out by plague; whole countries had ceased for the moment to exist, except as geographical terms. Such were but a few of the consequences of the kindling of war in a world grown too expert in destruction, a world where all nations were part one of another.⁷⁴

The book was rushed through production, appearing on 4 April. At the Elsfield Silver Jubilee party, held in the Manor gardens that June, every child in the village was given a copy as a souvenir of this historic occasion.

One day in March 1935, JB wrote to Johnnie in Uganda:

I am in the throes of a great decision, and I won’t be able to wait for your views. I was sent for to Buckingham Palace to-day and given a private letter from the King. Both Bennett, the Prime Minister of Canada, and Mackenzie King, his probable successor, have asked for me as the new Governor-General, and the King adds that it would give him very great pleasure if I would accept…

I told the Court people^* that I would much prefer either the Washington Embassy or South Africa. About the latter there is the difficulty that they may very likely want a South African,^** and about the former that the Foreign Office will fight for a recognised diplomat. Anyhow, I can scarcely refuse Canada on the chance of these other things.⁷⁵

The year before, discussions had begun in exalted circles in Canada as to who should follow the Earl of Bessborough as Governor-General. That July the President of the University of Toronto, Dr Cody, had told JB at a dinner in London that everybody in Canada was hoping he would succeed Bessborough, prompting JB to tell his wife ‘Not for me!’⁷⁶

As a result of the constitutional changes brought about by the Statute of Westminster of 1931, the choice of Governor-General was now made, not by the British government but by the Canadian Prime Minister, having consulted widely, with the King informed of the conclusions, which he would then ‘rubber stamp’. In 1934 the Prime Minister was R. B. Bennett, leader of the Conservative Party, but he was tired and sometimes ill and, after sustaining a series of by-election losses, was almost certain to lose his majority at the next election that autumn and be replaced by the Liberal Party, with Mackenzie King becoming Prime Minister. Mackenzie King ideally wanted the decision to wait until after the election but, since Bessborough was anxious to be gone, he and Bennett put their heads together. A number of candidates were canvassed but they agreed finally on JB. His name was put forward to the King and accepted.

The offer of Governor-General made more sense than it had nine years before. JB now had experience in politics, he appeared frequently in the newspapers, had been a model Lord High Commissioner, was now a Companion of Honour, and had been given a number of honorary degrees (an LLD, Doctor of Laws, from St Andrews in 1930 and the DCL, Doctor of Civil Law, from Oxford in 1934, to go with the LLD from Glasgow). He was known to be an excellent public speaker, as well as hard-working and discreet, and both he and his wife spoke French, important because of the presence in Canada of the substantial minority of French Canadians, mainly in Quebec. He had a reputation for solid, although not spectacular, public work, and there had never been a whiff of scandal attached either to his private or financial life. King George V had known him since the Great War, enjoyed reading his fiction, and called him by his first name.

He was by no stretch of the imagination aristocratic, as most earlier incumbents – the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl Grey, the Marquess of Lansdowne, the Duke of Connaught and so on – had been. His appointment would be a real departure. However, JB knew rather more about Canadians than most British politicians and, what is more, was not tempted to patronise them. As a young man in South Africa, he had bothered to read the Durham Report on Canada, and as early as 1901 had written that ‘Canada is essentially a country of the larger air, where men can face the old primeval forces of Nature and be braced into vigour, and withal so beautiful that it can readily inspire that romantic patriotism which is one of the most priceless assets of a people.’⁷⁷ In 1908 he had helped raise money for the Montcalm/Wolfe memorial in Quebec City and later wrote a biography of Lord Minto, who was Governor-General at the turn of the century. He had both friends and relations in Canada.

Although it was no longer the British government’s decision, Stanley Baldwin had already come to the conclusion that JB’s future did not lie in Parliament (which is why he told a colleague that he was not going to give him a Ministry because he was ‘saving him for Canada’).⁷⁸ He watched him closely at Holyrood, when JB was Lord High Commissioner, in 1933, and remarked that his face was ‘fine-drawn, sensitive to every emotion, full of pride in his own country and his own people, and happy that the lot had fallen to him to be the King’s representative in his own home…’ He had, according to Baldwin, ‘the face of one who has heard the Word on the hillside’.⁷⁹ No doubt Baldwin communicated his conclusions to Bennett.

The day of his visit to Buckingham Palace, JB wrote to his wife:

Let me put the Canadian problem in writing.

Against –

1. Too easy a job for a comparatively young man.

2. A week further away from Mother.

3. A country and a people without much glamour.

For –

1. A very easy life for J.B.

2. The possibility of doing good work – redressing Bessborough’s mistakes [unspecified] – closer contact with Washington – the fact that I have been paid the enormous honour by both Bennett and M.K.

3. Only five days from England, so that the boys [meaning William and Alastair] could come out for all their holidays.

4. The right to return when we wanted, so that we could be in England when Johnnie was there. We could also bring him out to Canada and give him a hunting trip.

5. Apart from special clothes and uniforms, we could do it on our salary, and the rest of my income would mount up.

An immediate peerage might revive Mother. All the same, my heart is in my boots. I hate having to make these decisions.⁸⁰

One important aspect missing from the minus side was his health and that of his wife. The list does not address the problems likely to occur as a result of a life led in public, when so often in pain or discomfort: giving speeches to large audiences, travelling long distances, the general stress and strain of office, being pressured into eating both enormous formal banquets in Ottawa or Quebec City and homely tray-bakes in the Prairies.

True, in the past, he had had quite long periods of remission, which can be a feature of digestive illnesses. There were times when he felt quite well and capable of doing anything. Then something would happen – a period of overwork, a long journey or an ill-advised meal – that would cause the problem to flare up once more. This unpredictability made planning difficult. In Britain, he frequently accepted invitations to speak at school prize days, Burns Night dinners, conferences on the Empire or Conservative education, knowing that sometimes they might have to be cancelled. In Canada, where engagements were inked into diaries months in advance, and some of which – like the opening of Parliament every January – had an iron immutability to them, there would probably be moments of acute anxiety.

It is therefore permissible to ask what he thought he was doing, even considering taking on such a public role as the Governor-Generalship in such circumstances? Moreover, with Susie suffering occasional bouts of depression, doing his duty also risked jeopardising her well-being, when detached from the sheet anchor that was Elsfield. She would inevitably be miserable at the thought of leaving England, her mother, her children, and the most pleasant, useful life she enjoyed at home. The trip they had planned for that winter in Africa, visiting Johnnie in Uganda, would have to go by the board, as would Susie’s work for Oxford House in Risca as well as the Women’s Institute, both of which she valued greatly. ‘[Mummy] is in tremendous form and practically running Oxfordshire,’⁸¹ JB had told Johnnie in February.

He was also quite unrealistic about the money. He would not be able to do any journalism, accept film deals or write books that had a political flavour to them, without bringing down the wrath of Buckingham Palace on his head. Just the month before, he had told Johnnie: ‘I am besieged by film magnates just now. The purity crusade in America has driven them all to my books, which combine the decent with the dramatic! I ought to make a certain amount of money before I am done.’⁸² Indeed, two days later he lunched with Alexander Korda, who was keen to film Prester John in Ruwenzori.

JB consulted with his wife and family, by telephone, as well as with Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald, both of whom encouraged him. Badly hustled for an answer by the Palace, he accepted the job in only two days, knowing that his wife did not think it an unqualified good idea for him or, probably, for herself. That said, it is inconceivable that Susie would have stood in his way, however much her own comfort was compromised in the process. And, although he would have agreed with his creation, Sir Walter Bullivant, that Duty was ‘a damned task-mistress’,⁸³ there was probably not much doubt in his mind that She had to be obeyed.

At least his mother was thrilled, since finally her son was appreciated at what she considered his true worth. Characteristically, she wrote, ‘I am sure you are right to go – you are not young and there may not be more chances. I am sure the King is fortunate to get you. Walter is afraid you do not mention a Peerage but surely the King cannot go back on that for this appointment … I must say I would like to live to see you a Peer. I wonder at myself being so vain.’⁸⁴

He took the job at least partly because of his growing disillusionment with British politics, and especially with the mediocrities that the National Government seemed to have fostered rather than avoided. This disillusionment can be traced from the early 1930s in his articles in The Graphic, his speeches and his novels; he was distressed that he could discern no great man to protect democracy at such a crucial moment, for it was hard at that moment for him (or indeed many people) to see the quality in Winston Churchill. A Prince of the Captivity (1933) is, in part, about the search for a leader who could see the way in the fog, without succumbing to the destructive egotism exhibited by the Dictators. JB needed a fresh start, somewhere where the air was, as he would put it, ‘tonic’, and where he might have a chance to make a difference.

Canada would bring together two of his main preoccupations in foreign affairs: the evolution of the imperial possessions into dominions, autonomous and equal in status to each other and Britain, but all under the sheltering umbrella of the British monarchy; and his conviction that the United States was, and would continue to be, the leader of the democratic world, with whom it was strikingly in the Commonwealth’s interest to connect. If he were to situate himself just across the border from the United States, and with the advantage of speaking the same language, there might well be an important behind-the-scenes role for him to play as a link between the British government and those in Washington and Ottawa. It is indicative that such a perspicacious politician as Lord Robert Cecil [now Viscount Cecil of Chelwood] should write to say that he thought the post would satisfy JB’s long-standing ‘hankering after Transatlantic work’, and that Ottawa was ‘a much more interesting and important job than Washington’.⁸⁵

In the end JB agreed to take the job for a variety of reasons: a respect, bordering on devotion, for the idea of monarchy, together with a loyalty to, and friendship with, King George V that stretched back twenty years; his sense of public duty, which had ever spurred him on to expend his strength on worthy projects of many kinds; the fillip it would give to his flickering vanity; to cheer up his mother, who was now quite frail; and a recognition that he was not going ‘all the way’ in politics. His acceptance of the Governor-Generalship was certainly partly due to his inability completely to discount flattery, but as much because of an adventurous spirit and buccaneering optimism, which overestimated the rewards and underestimated the costs. He told his eldest son: ‘Like you, I am a hopeless adventurer and cannot resist the challenge of a new thing.’⁸⁶

He knew and liked, if he didn’t entirely trust, the Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. The Byngs, husband and wife, had separately left him in no doubt of the substantial difficulties the man had raised in 1926, but JB was an experienced politician, which Byng never was, and probably assumed – rightly as it turned out – that, although there might be turbulence at times, he and Mackenzie King could work together. He thought him an astute politician, a skilful diplomat and, perhaps most importantly, an adroit manager of his Liberal Party colleagues, not many of whom could match him for brains or drive.

One of JB’s great virtues, as far as Mackenzie King and indeed many Canadians were concerned, was that he was a commoner, since the Canadian Prime Minister abominated the British obsession, as he considered it, with titles and honours, a position probably reinforced by the lofty stance taken by Willingdon and Bessborough. (Mackenzie King was mightily miffed the day that Bessborough placed him between his young daughter and her governess at lunch at Government House.) North Americans generally couldn’t see the point of titles. Time magazine in the United States opined: ‘Britain hoped King George V would make his man a peer before John Buchan goes to Canada in the early autumn; Canadians fervently prayed he would not.’⁸⁷

Sending a commoner to Canada would be setting a precedent and it was never an idea to appeal to King George V. Moreover, both Bessborough and Bennett respectfully suggested to the King that JB be given a peerage, for otherwise the people of Canada would wonder why a Canadian had not been chosen. The King invited the Buchans to stay the night at Windsor Castle after the announcement was made, when the subject was broached, and JB was in no position to gainsay him. In any event, a peerage inevitably appealed to JB’s sense of being a Scotsman who had made good, and pointed up how far he had come by his own efforts from Smeaton Road, Pathhead.

Despite worries that no one would know who he was, once he lost the fine, simple and famous name of John Buchan, his family all joined in the discussion as to what the title should be. Lord Buchan was out, since there was already an (unrelated) Earl of Buchan. Lamancha and Manorwater were both candidates but, in the end, he settled on Tweedsmuir, after the village near the source of the Tweed where he had fished and walked as a boy. His uncles owned land at Fruid in Tweedsmuir parish, which he would inherit, so that he would own acres in his ‘barony’.^* A Covenanter, murdered nearby, was buried in Tweedsmuir churchyard, and the Crook Inn (owned by his uncles) had been an important staging inn, a place around which JB spun several short stories about Border reivers and benighted shepherds. All in all, he was happy to be gazetted ‘The First Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield’, which neatly pointed up his twin loyalties.

On 28 March 1935 he wrote to his wife:

My leaving the House [of Commons] yesterday afternoon was a terribly melancholy affair. At three o’clock, when the official announcement came from the Palace, I ceased automatically to be a Member. I went in at ten minutes to three, and took my old seat behind Baldwin. The Speaker smiled at me and he and I kept our eyes on the clock. At one minute to three I got up, shook hands with Baldwin and Ramsay, bowed to the Speaker, and walked out. The debate suddenly stopped, and Members standing behind the Bar grasped my hand. I could not have spoken without breaking down.⁸⁸

Telegrams and letters of congratulations poured in, photographers and journalists disturbed the peace of Elsfield; even Jimmy Maxton, who usually prided himself on not bowing to bourgeois convention by writing letters of congratulation, wrote to wish him a happy and useful time and told him to write a book or two while he was there. JB will have enjoyed the letter from the soon-to-be Governor-General of South Africa, Patrick Duncan: ‘I congratulate you and Canada. It will be a new experience for them to get a change from the conventional run of aristocratic fainéants [do-nothings].’⁸⁹

There was a lone dissenting voice. T. E. Lawrence wrote to him: ‘I read yesterday in the paper that you have been chosen as next Governor of Canada. A high office, to which I grudge you immensely. It means that for three years you will be spent on public functions, doing them excellently, no doubt, but at the sacrifice of all your private virtue. Also I shall feel that something is missing, round Elsfield way. This is perhaps a queer way of congratulating you on breaking into another preserve of the Lords. Cromwell would approve it; but still I feel sorry. You are too good to become a figure.’⁹⁰ This was a douche of cold water after all the warm shower of congratulations that JB had received from the rest of his friends. But it was characteristic of Lawrence, who had once told JB that he thought public service was a shallow grave.

JB was glad to get away from all the fuss for a short walking tour with Alastair in west Wales, before beginning the task of extricating himself from the mountain of obligations he had piled up over the past few years: all those admirable duties, which had worn down his strength and limited the time he spent writing, undisturbed. He had been ill all winter, ‘dragging his wing’, and he embarked on a regime of no tobacco or alcohol, as he was determined to be well for Canada. Elsfield had never looked lovelier in his eyes that spring: ‘It makes Mummie and me ache with homesickness to think we must leave it so soon,’ he told Johnnie.⁹¹

Some time in early summer, Beverley Baxter, a Canadian-born journalist and a director of Gaumont-British, took JB to a private viewing of The 39 Steps and remarked that, whenever the plot deviated from the book, which was often, JB would say: ‘First rate. Much better than my way.’⁹² He told the projectionist that it was an immense improvement on the book, which electrified Baxter’s fellow directors when he told them, since they had never heard an author say such a thing before. It was also a remark he made to the assembled company when, early in June, Baxter hosted a dinner at the Piccadilly Hotel before the premiere of The 39 Steps. Alfred Hitchcock and many of the cast, including Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, were present, as were Susie, William and family friends, although not Alastair, who was in the throes of his School Certificate exams.

The critics mainly agreed with JB that the film was better than the book, since what Hitchcock had done was new and very clever. One person who remained unimpressed, however, was Susie, who, to the end of her life, could not imagine why Hitchcock had felt the need to change the plot or import a female character.

While preparing for Canada, JB was substantially helped by Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, who was Private Secretary to the Earl of Bessborough. While in Ottawa, Lascelles had written a ‘Green Book’ – so-called because it had green leather covers – which was simply entitled Government House Ottawa. Although JB had some knowledge of how things operated at Buckingham Palace, and had stayed with the Byngs at Rideau Hall, this was nevertheless invaluable for all the tricky little pieces of organisation over appointment of staff, size of household, accommodation arrangements, invitations to levées, table plans, precedence, mayoral addresses, dress for particular occasions, the traditions that had grown up as to what functions ‘Their Excellencies’ did and didn’t attend; as well as the more weighty aspects concerning the division of labour between Secretary, Comptroller and ADCs, and the protocol involved in ceremonial, entertaining and the conduct of tours. Studied conscientiously, as the book plainly was, would mean avoiding many opportunities for friction and muddle.

It also detailed the finance. JB’s salary was $49,000 a year, but this would be augmented by an allowance for the salaries of the ADCs of $10,000, $19,000 for fuel and light, and $50,000 for travel. The average annual expenditure on the household was $84,000 in Bessborough’s time, so it was obvious that, with all the necessary initial outlay, this was not a money-making exercise for the Governor-General.

Almost as important as the ‘Green Book’, was the highly confidential fourteen-page addendum, which Lascelles called an ‘Apocrypha’, written for JB’s eyes only, to help to ensure that he did not make the more obvious mistakes of his immediate predecessors. Open, yet never breaching the bounds of propriety, he usefully told JB that he didn’t need to do things on the grand Bessborough scale (‘… their standards in such matters as dress, food, wine, travel etc would appear fantastic in London, and do appear positively astronomical in Canada! Such standards are not necessary here; they are not even advisable’).⁹³ The Comptroller of the Household, Colonel Eric Mackenzie,^* ‘by nature an extremely practical and economical Aberdonian!’ reckoned, according to Lascelles, that ‘a G.G. with no young family can reasonably expect to re-imburse himself out of his salary, by the end of 3 or 4 years, for the round sum he has to provide for initial expenditure’.⁹⁴ He ended the letter by assuring JB that Eric Mackenzie would help in every way to tone down the scale of living. All this will have been a substantial relief to JB, who was not a rich man, and was still educating two children. He was also giving an allowance to the married Alice, whose husband Brian, having left the Army as a result of recurrent bouts of malaria, was having difficulty finding permanent employment. Furthermore, JB would need to pay back a £3,000 loan to help with initial costs, which he had accepted from the ever-generous Sir Alexander Grant. (Grant also gave him £1,000 as a present.)

Lascelles, who did not want to stay, also gave invaluable advice to JB about who to choose as a Private Secretary, warning against a really obviously military man, since this could go down badly, not only with civilian Members of Parliament but also small-town mayors and dignitaries – who ‘must be treated as men and brothers, or one gets that dread label “high hat” which has damned so many Englishmen in this country’.⁹⁵

JB scouted around for a suitable successor and found a youngish Colonial Service official, recently made Governor of the province of Kassala in the Sudan, who, it turned out, was prepared to exchange the heat of equatorial Africa for the cold and snow of Ottawa. Arthur Shuldham Redfern, known always as Shuldham, was twenty years JB’s junior, educated at Winchester College and Cambridge. He was tall, thick-set, with a toothbrush moustache, and walked with a limp from a wound sustained as an RFC pilot during the Great War.

He turned out to be well-nigh ideal. He was hard-working and careful, perceptive, worldly, with a excellent sense of humour, distinctly subversive in private but never in public, and able by training and temperament to think on his feet. With his pretty, intelligent and stylish wife, Ruth, and young son, O’Donnell, he sailed to Canada in the autumn of 1935, and took up residence in Rideau Cottage (which was definitely a house) on the Rideau Hall estate. So began nearly five years of very cordial cooperation. JB found him very easy to get on with, responsive, keen to uphold the dignity of the Governor-General without being a blinkered, defensive courtier.

Much to the Buchans’ sorrow, T. E. Lawrence was killed on 19 May 1935 in a motorcycle accident in Dorset. JB had last seen him in early March, when he had finally retired from the RAF and had travelled back to his home at Clouds Hill in Dorset from Bridlington in Yorkshire on a bicycle, and stopped off at Elsfield on the way. JB had described the visit to Johnnie: ‘On Sunday morning Lawrence of Arabia arrived on a push bike. He has finished with the Air Force and is moving slowly down to his cottage in Dorset, a perfectly free man, and extraordinarily happy. We had him for the whole day, and he has become one of the most delightful people in the world. He has lost all his freakishness, and his girlish face has become extraordinarily wise and mature. He relies a good deal on my advice, but I don’t know what can be done for him, for he won’t ever touch public life again, and yet he is one of the few men of genius living.’⁹⁶

Lawrence came back one more time to Elsfield. On 10 May he drove to Elsfield on his motorbicycle. JB was in London, but Lawrence was entertained by Susie and William, by then nineteen years old. The visit had a great impact on the young man; he recalled very clearly the visit many years later:

I see him standing by the tall window in the library, facing me as we talked and giving me every strand of his attention. He was not a tall man, indeed decidedly short … Yet, like my father who was also short, he possessed the ability to dominate his surroundings by a combination of powerful controlled energy, poise and eager interest in what was being said. Then there were his fair good looks and, of course, his extraordinary eyes, eyes blue as the sky, brilliant, oddly innocent and yet penetrating … He was full of an enthusiasm which was almost boyish, an excitement which clearly possessed him completely and gave him a youthful, a holiday air … When that unforgettable visit was over, Lawrence mounted his fearsome machine and was off with a roar up the village street, leaving behind, for memory to lay hold of, the dying growl of a powerful motor and a whiff of castor oil.⁹⁷

Not long after, William sat his first-year examinations at New College and failed them. He had enjoyed his year at Oxford, and made one or two good friends, but his activities had not extended to studying, and his parents had worried a lot as the exams approached. After the results were published in early July, JB went to see the Warden, his long-time friend H. A. L. Fisher, and the two men agreed that William should leave Oxford voluntarily, to avoid the embarrassment of being formally ‘sent down’. It takes little imagination to divine how this divergence from his own experience of Oxford will have struck JB, nor that any exasperation with his son’s idleness (for no one could doubt his brains) must have been tinged with self-reproach. But there was no use repining, for this undesirable turn of events meant that something interesting and worthwhile had to be found for him to do. He had evinced a keen interest in learning about film lighting, having been fascinated by the technicalities of The 39 Steps set, so JB used his influence with Beverley Baxter to get his son a job at Gaumont-British. He became an apprentice, paid 5 shillings a week. His parents did not wish him to be cast adrift and alone in London at such a tender age so they arranged for him to live in the house of their friends, the writer Elizabeth Bowen and her husband, Alan Cameron, with his grandmother keeping an eye on him. His Scottish grandmother was highly dubious, writing to JB: ‘The atmosphere in the 39 Steps made me very unhappy. I think you would be miserable in Canada leaving him amongst people who are so entirely without religion.’⁹⁸

The summer of 1935 was frenetic; it was filled with formal dress fittings, sittings for a bust by the Scottish sculptor Thomas Clapperton^*, farewell dinners (Brasenose College gave him a royal send-off at Claridge’s), and the hiring of staff, such as footmen, for Canada, as well as the letting of Elsfield Manor to Oxford friends called Askwith, who paid a peppercorn rent on the understanding that they keep on the outdoor staff. Mrs Charlett stayed at home,^** but Lilian Killick agreed to accompany her employer to Canada as his correspondence secretary, James Cast as his valet, Annie Cox as Susie’s lady’s maid and Amos Webb as a chauffeur. It is not unremarkable that four of JB’s Elsfield/London staff were so devoted to him (there is no other word for it) that they were prepared to leave hearth and home for five years in order to continue to serve him. Lilian Killick was a widow, James Cast and Annie Cox were unmarried, but Amos Webb left a wife behind in Elsfield.

One pressing task was the choice of a suitable coat of arms now JB was a peer. This required visits to Edinburgh to consult with the Lord Lyon. JB told Johnnie that they had ‘settled the supporters for our arms – a stag out of compliment to me, and a falcon to you – both noble animals. The alternatives were Spider and Duggie.’⁹⁹ In early July he took his seat in the House of Lords, supported by the Lords Macmillan and Strathcona, and went to Buckingham Palace to ‘kiss hands’ and receive the GCMG from King George V.

July saw the publication of The House of the Four Winds, the last in the McCunn trilogy and probably JB’s worst novel. The action has moved from Scotland to the fictional European Republic of Evallonia, which is Ruritania without the charm. It is notable, however, for the use of the word ‘mole’ to mean an undercover agent, forty years before John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The book includes a masterly dissection of 1930s angst about the growing menace of authoritarian regimes, but that is unlikely to have appealed much to the general holiday reader.

He also made sure that he finished The Island of Sheep, the last of the Hannay novels, which was published in July 1936. It was dedicated to his eldest son ‘who knows the Norlands and the ways of the wild geese’, and it contains a child hero, Peter John, who bears a marked resemblance to Johnnie and who, with an equally resourceful girl companion, confounds a criminal gang, some of whom had not been dealt with completely in the earlier The Courts of the Morning.

That summer, Susie entertained Virginia Woolf to stay, so that they could visit the so-called ‘Necromancer of Snowshill’^* in the Cotswolds. This may have been a thank-you for the Hogarth Press publishing her Funeral March of a Marionette, although they had known each other a long time. Woolf’s account of the visit is characteristically waspish. She wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell:

At first I thought it was going to be a complete frost – Susie awaited me in a typical shabby but large country house drawing room, alone, with a dog. She has grown very ample, and carries a faint flavour of Lushingtons. But by degrees we got warmer; and there was a dinner party – the Camerons, Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford undergraduate, a son, a daughter, and the daughter of Marnie – if you remember Marnie. Happily John was in London being given a dinner, or seeing the King, and it wasn’t so bad. They’re rather out of elbows, and have holes in the carpet and only one family W.C.

She twitted Susie about her grandeur, argued with Isaiah Berlin, and talked about films and modern poetry with William, ‘who is a simple, and rather shaggy’, a description of him that none of his family would have recognised.¹⁰⁰ William remembered the occasion as the only time he had ever seen Virginia Woolf roar with laughter – when he almost fell out of the car.

The departure from England was delayed by the Canadian election, which had been called for 14 October, so they did not sail before late October, almost the last moment to get to Quebec before the St Lawrence River froze for the winter. This delay made life harder for the Tweedsmuirs, who were suffering a severe bout of Heimweh, and it also gave Mrs Buchan the opportunity to write a number of rather lowering, if characteristic, letters:

‘I wonder when exactly you leave for Canada. I must try to be brave. I don’t know what life will be to me without you.’¹⁰¹ ‘I am afraid Walter is going to miss you terribly, he doesn’t make friends [which was plainly untrue, since he was both genial and open-hearted] and you are everything to him and Anna says it is just past words.’¹⁰² ‘The longer I live I regret more and more my lost opportunities of being a good wife to the best of men and a good kind mother to wonderful children. Now I can only be a burden but none of you makes me feel my uselessness.’¹⁰³

On 18 October, JB wrote to her from Upper Grosvenor Street:

Leaving Elsfield was a sad business. It was a lovely autumn morning, but what between weeping maids and choking men I have never enjoyed anything less. Susie wept all the way to London, but recovered after that. Aunt Mamie [the Countess of Lovelace] came to luncheon to say goodbye [going off to govern a colony being something her family were accustomed to doing] and I had a most emotional farewell to Stanley Baldwin in the afternoon. He said he had no words to say what I had been to him in the last eight years. I feel rather solemn at leaving such a grave situation on this side.¹⁰⁴

*Plural voting, where graduates had two votes, one in their home constituency and one in their old university, was not abolished until 1948.

*John Buchan, ‘A Lucid Interval’, collected in The Moon Endureth, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1912.

*Ellen Wilkinson, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough, was introduced to JB by Lady Astor, when he was showing the famous American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, round the House of Commons. ‘Lindbergh was an interesting and charming youth, but I confess that at that moment I was more concerned in taking stock of the Scotchman’s rugged, unusual face. Buchan is delightful to meet.’ ‘Men in the Commons’, Evening News, 8 May 1928.

**Clement Attlee, later 1st Earl Attlee, was Labour Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951.

*Basil Liddell Hart put it on the reading list in his book, The Future of Infantry.

*JB collaborated with the Reverend George Adam Smith in writing The Kirk in Scotland: 1560–1929, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1930.

*A nomadic tribe who persecuted the Israelites – rather an unkind family joke.

*‘To my friend Aircraftman T. E. Shaw’.

*T. E. Lawrence to JB, 25 September 1931, NLS, Acc. 11627/51. Julius Caesar was a short book published in March 1931 by Peter Davies, one of J. M. Barrie’s informally adopted children, after whom Peter Pan was named, and a man much encouraged by JB.

**The phrase comes from a soliloquy by Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Act One, Scene V.

*The Magic Walking Stick, Hodder and Stoughton, 1932.

*A song of 1907, ‘On the Road to Mandalay’, from a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

*This annual Assembly, with its associated pageantry and entertainment at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, survives to this day.

*Much to the surprise of the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Clive Wigram.

**Patrick Duncan, one of Milner’s Kindergarten, who had settled in South Africa, was chosen in 1937.

*The land at Carterhope and Fruid did indeed pass to him on the death of one of his uncles in the late 1930s; it was compulsorily purchased in the early 1960s, so that it could be flooded to make Fruid Reservoir.

*In 1928, Eric Mackenzie had written to JB, whom he did not then know, to correct him on an arcane piece of topography in Montrose.

*Now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

**Mrs Charlett came back to Elsfield Manor in 1940 and went through the Second World War and beyond as the cook.

*Charles Paget Wade, an eccentric collector of treasures.