10

Canada, 1938–1940

Mrs Buchan died the day on which the announcement was made that her son had won the election to be Chancellor of Edinburgh University. In late 1937 he had accepted an invitation from the university, since he thought his was the only nomination, only to find, to his consternation, that the Marquess of Lothian had also entered the lists, so that there would have to be a contest. However, it was too late to back out and, in the event, he won easily. Predictably, it brought down, once more, a rebuke on his head from Buckingham Palace.

The new year opened with rumours in the newspapers that he would be given the American ambassadorship – one of the few diplomatic posts that did not necessarily go to a career diplomat – when Sir Ronald Lindsay finished his time in Washington; certainly Lindsay thought JB would do the job very well. JB claimed to Tommy Lascelles that the rumours were ‘idiotic’, but that ‘there has been this much in them that the President and Cordell Hull keep on saying they want me. But only his Majesty and the Canadian Government can move me, and the Canadian Government certainly won’t agree. I am determined not to desert Mr. Micawber, for my work here is only beginning.’¹ It must have caused him a considerable pang, for Washington was the job he really wanted, and Canada could feel rather out of the way. He told Stanley Baldwin that he sometimes felt like a late eighteenth-century Highland laird, cultivating his estates in Sutherland, while Fox, Pitt and Burke were sparring in the House of Commons, and France was in revolutionary turmoil.

Early in January, Neville Chamberlain coldly rebuffed Roosevelt’s suggestion of an international conference to discuss economic and other international difficulties. Roosevelt had talked at length about this with JB in April 1937 and thereafter, and he wanted British support in advance of any initiative. Chamberlain, who thought he knew better how to deal with the European dictators, turned down FDR precipitately and against the strong advice of Lindsay, and without consulting his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who was unfortunately away on holiday. As a result of Chamberlain’s reaction, Roosevelt retreated and, when Eden found out, his relations with Chamberlain markedly deteriorated and he resigned the following month. The leader of the opposition, Clement Attlee, was never told of this initiative and maintained later that, if he had been in Downing Street, he would have accepted Roosevelt’s invitation, saying: ‘If Hitler had realised that there was also America, and America was going to stand in, he would have thought twice about it, or his generals would.’² Eden and Churchill were of the opinion that such a good opportunity to avert war as Roosevelt seemed to offer never came again.³

In the spring, JB toured the Prairies again to see how the drought-prevention measures were working. Amongst the communities he visited was the small, mainly French-speaking, frontier settlement of Val Marie, close to the American border in Saskatchewan. George Spence, Director of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Agency, wrote a vivid account⁴ of the preparations that the town made for such a momentous occasion: the shooing of cows from Main Street; the painting of the fronts of the buildings; the removal of outdoor latrines; the bulldozing of rubbish into the river; the search for bagpipes and a kilt for the (Norwegian) piper; the prodigious lunch laid on in a tent; the vain efforts on the day to prevent His Excellency from joining the line of men to wash his hands; the cheering of schoolchildren, when the party arrived at the platform in the town park. JB spoke both in English and French, and declared another day’s holiday for the children, which he said he had the constitutional right to do. After the formalities were over, he was told of an elderly Scots couple, originally from the Borders, who had travelled overnight more than 100 miles in an old car ‘juist to get a guid look at John Buchan!’ He asked to be introduced, and talked to them in Lowlands Scots, while the tears rolled down their cheeks.

In late June, he went south to the United States as a private citizen (for which he had had to ask permission from the King) to receive honorary degrees from both Yale and Harvard. These were the only two of many invitations he succeeded in accepting. The President at Yale University said of him that he was as versatile as Richard Hannay and as reliable as Mr Standfast and, in his reply, JB said he wouldn’t talk the usual platitudes about what good friends the United States and the British Empire should be. ‘I believe most profoundly in that friendship, but don’t let’s get self-conscious about it … I think the best way for Americans and Britons to understand each other is not by analysing their feelings, but by doing things together.’⁵ At Harvard, he received a bigger cheer even than Walt Disney, and gave the Commencement Address, on the subject of Henry Adams’ description of himself ‘as a conservative Christian anarchist’, declaring that it was a description that fitted himself. The ‘anarchist’ meant that he was resolute about clearing away rubbish, whether new or old. He wanted his audience to cultivate the three qualities necessary for the times: humility, humanity and humour. ‘Humour is the best weapon with which to fight pedantry and vainglory and false rhetoric … Laughter is the chief gift of civilization.’⁶

Shortly afterwards, he left for England for the first time since 1935, Susie having gone ahead some weeks earlier. He intended to be there for no more than a month or so, just long enough to see his doctor (Bertrand [now Lord] Dawson); be installed as Chancellor of Edinburgh University; meet Chamberlain, Baldwin and the Earl of Halifax in London; and see family and friends.

The idea for a Royal visit to Canada had been mooted as early as November 1936, but plans had scarcely got underway before the Abdication Crisis erupted. However, JB never lost sight of the immense value of a Royal tour, not only for Canada but also the United States, and persuaded Mackenzie King, who mentioned it when he was in London for the Coronation in May 1937. The year proposed was 1939.

The reaction of Buckingham Palace was favourable but, with the European news so unsettling, Chamberlain and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, were at first dubious, until persuaded by JB of the value at such a time of exposing the barely known Royals to the patriotic public gaze of Canadians and to harder-to-please Americans. Roosevelt wrote directly to the King inviting him to the United States, on the grounds that it would be an excellent thing for Anglo-American relations.

JB was installed as Chancellor of Edinburgh University on 20 July. His address was entitled ‘The Interpreter’s House’, a title drawn, of course, from The Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘where we receive our viaticum^* for the road’, and a compliment to the university as a place of both teaching and the advancement of learning. He played on one of his favourite themes, that of the undoubted quality of youth but its particular contemporary challenges. His son, Johnnie, listened to his speech on a ship’s wireless close to Lake Harbour on the shore of the Hudson Strait, having gone to work for a year at a Hudson’s Bay trading post on Baffin Land. In 1980 he could still recall his father’s words: ‘… there are spiritual frontiers, the horizons of the mind. We are still frontiersmen in a true sense, for we are domiciled on the edge of mystery, and have to face novelties more startling than any which confronted the old pioneers.’⁷

Friends and family gathered en masse for the occasion, but the luncheon party, garden party with speeches, dinner party and evening reception made it a very long day, and old friends such as Sandy Gillon, Johnnie Jameson and Violet Markham, who had not seen him for three years, muttered anxiously to each other. (The Earl of Crawford and Balcarres told his brother, after he had seen JB in London that July, that he looked ‘thin, meagre, almost shrunken in appearance’.)⁸

The next day, JB motored with Anna and Walter to Peebles, via the Glasgow Exhibition, which he had promised to visit. Anna recalled:

Partly because it was one of his ‘well’ days, and partly, I expect, because of the relief of getting a big job over, John that day seemed to throw from him every care … He sang songs and told us ridiculous stories. We knew him well in this mood. All his life, after long concentration, writing for hours, he would suddenly take what Mother called ‘a daft turn’ and pour forth a stream of nonsense, which reduced us all to helpless laughter. And hearing him, Walter and I realized how much we had missed those fits of nonsense…⁹

At his doctor’s insistence, he spent time at Ruthin Castle in north Wales, a private sanatorium for those with digestive problems,^* run by a physician called Sir Edmund Ivens Spriggs. In the end he was ‘binned’ for six weeks, from early August to mid-September. ‘I console myself with reflecting how many good men have had to endure a spell in jug,’¹⁰ he told his wife.

Although his time at Ruthin Castle initially entailed some very painful and wearisome examinations, the treatment undoubtedly improved matters, both by helping him to gain a stone in weight (he was no longer El Greco but Rubens, he told Violet Markham) and also by giving him a rest cure, far away even from international anxieties.

Susie stayed on in England so that she could visit JB at Ruthin, travelling up from Elsfield several times to see him and lodging nearby. They would walk together in the gardens or drive out into the hills. In one of the last letters he wrote to her, for they were never apart again, he said ‘I am going to miss you dreadfully, and shall wander about in the Italian Gardens, which I specially associate with you.’¹¹ By this time they had been married for more than thirty years.

The rest of the time he spent resting, reading (‘Henry James’ later style gives me the impression of swimming in spinach!’),¹² and writing his reminiscences. This engendered a period of acute retrospection and a rare mood of sentimentality. ‘My love to every member of the best staff in the world,’¹³ he wrote to his wife, when she was leaving once more for Canada.

Anna and Walter came from Scotland to keep JB company when they could, and William arrived at the end of the month and, not being well himself, was duly ‘binned’ in a room next to his father. JB reported that he was a ‘great support and joy to me’.¹⁴ Other visitors included Moritz Bonn, who was hag-ridden by fears that Chamberlain was going quite the wrong way about dealing with Hitler. JB was still convinced that Chamberlain had no alternative to his course of action, since nothing could be worse than another war, especially with Britain not yet prepared. It was not until the following spring that he told his daughter that ‘now the time has come for a definite stand along with the other Democracies. I am coming to believe that things will not get right without a smash, but I hope that by the time Germany’s outbreak comes, we will be strong enough to squash it at the start.’¹⁵

Susie’s task in Canada, when she arrived back in Quebec in late August, was to hold the fort (almost literally) in the Governor-General’s absence. Like countless others, she was beset with anxieties about what was happening in Europe, especially since she had three sons of military age. ‘The papers here are awful, full of the most sinister rumours and conjectures. I must say I wish I was in England and with you, it is awful being so far away and not knowing and dreading things all the time. You could perhaps calm my fears.’¹⁶ But JB was almost as much in the dark as she was, since the Foreign Office papers were not sent to him at Ruthin. Although she could get little out of him to settle her nerves, Susie was cheered by his reports of how well his treatment was going, and the fact that William was ‘binned’ with him. She ended with ‘If war is declared please come back on an American boat and don’t put me to the torture of thinking you might be torpedoed.’¹⁷

Feeling very fit, JB went from Ruthin to Elsfield for a few days, writing to Susie on 25 September that he hoped it would be the last letter he would write before he clasped her to his ‘meagre bosom’. ‘The situation is now a melancholy diplomatic tangle, when honest men are arguing with rogues – a wretched business, but I still think war is improbable.’ He prowled around his old haunts, dropped in on his farming friends, the Wattses, and attended Harvest Festival in the church, ‘which was charmingly decorated, principally from our garden’.¹⁸

The next day he had an audience with the King at Buckingham Palace, to talk over the proposed tour the following May. JB wrote to Susie: ‘I was enormously affected by our talk – he looked so small and lonely and anxious. He seized both [my] hands when we said good-bye. The Palace thinks the odds slightly on war, I think them slightly against, but no one can forecast Hitler’s mind.’¹⁹

On arrival in Canada on 8 October, he reported to Mackenzie King the gist of his meeting with the King, and the public announcement of a Royal Tour, to last a month, was made that day. Roosevelt told JB in early November that he had been corresponding directly with the King, and had asked the Royal couple to stay at Hyde Park, his house on the Hudson River, so that the formal functions ‘could be supplemented by a peaceful and simple visit to a peaceful and simple American country home’.²⁰ The American leg, although hugely important to JB, was the part that worried him, since it was by no means certain that the American people would take the new British King and Queen to their hearts.

The arrangements for Canada turned out to be time-consuming and difficult, in particular for Shuldham Redfern. He was the Governor-General’s representative on the Royal Visit committee, which mainly comprised rather dilatory officials from the Department of External Affairs, and where he found himself the driving force. The hardest part was agreeing a timetable, for the provincial politicians could not see beyond their own boundaries and the committee had to balance the desire of the entire nation to catch a unique glimpse of serving Royalty – something never before experienced in any Dominion – with the very real anxiety about Their Majesties’ staying power. Redfern and his committee had to ensure that one province did not see more of them than another. In such a vast country, with four different time zones, this was no small difficulty.

However, the man who should have been a source of impartial wisdom raised the most serious problems. It soon became clear to JB and Redfern, if they had not known it before, that Mackenzie King’s amour propre was a matter of supreme importance to him. Although a Liberal, and a quasi-Republican, who refused to recommend the names of Canadians to the Sovereign for honours and was critical of the formality of Government House, he was very keen to be in the forefront of this regal jamboree.

The first dispute that came to a head was over who should meet the King and Queen when they arrived at Quebec. The obvious answer, as far as Government House and Buckingham Palace were concerned, was the Governor-General, since he would be symbolically handing over the country he was representing on behalf of his master, when that master arrived. Mackenzie King was unsuitable on the grounds that he was a partisan political figure. JB would then disappear into the shadows until just before the King went home, when the latter would confer on him the honour of representing him once more. But the Prime Minister was having none of it. He would meet them at Quebec and that was that. Neither the British High Commissioner nor Tommy Lascelles, the King’s assistant private secretary, who came out to help plan the visit in February, could move him. Buckingham Palace continued to believe that Mackenzie King was wrong, since he only represented the majority, at best, of the people of Canada. In the end JB decided to swallow the constitutional irregularity, and advise the Palace that he was happy to meet the King and Queen at Ottawa, once Mackenzie King had greeted them in Quebec.

Worse was to come. On the evening of 11 March, Mackenzie King arrived at Rideau Hall for a conversation with the Governor-General. Their discussions began calmly enough but, at some point, King began a tirade about all his grievances, real and imagined, stumping up and down the room and working himself into a towering passion. The Governor-General had to endure an hour of this and, as Redfern indignantly remarked, exercise all his restraint to avoid taking substantial exception to some of the Prime Minister’s observations.

What was the cause of this unseemly outburst? Mackenzie King had convinced himself that there was a conspiracy by Buckingham Palace courtiers and members of the British government to prevent him, in his role as head of the Department of External Affairs, from accompanying Their Majesties to Washington. There is, extant, the pencil draft of a letter to Tommy Lascelles, dated 13 March, written by Redfern and with some small emendations by his boss. The letter said that they believed that, in some respects, they were having to deal with ‘a mental case’. Redfern told Lascelles that the man was ‘bordering on insanity’, but these words were amended by the emollient and circumspect JB to ‘in an abnormal and unaccountable mood’.

Mackenzie King’s comments were breathtakingly unfair, since JB had consistently made it clear to the British government and Buckingham Palace that it would look better if Mackenzie King accompanied the King and Queen to Washington, rather than the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Halifax’s presence risked spooking the isolationists in Roosevelt’s party. Mackenzie King traded on the fact that JB never sought a fight, and usually tried to deflect unpleasantness. Since he had no such qualms, he was at a definite advantage. Reading between the lines of the Prime Minister’s self-serving account of this meeting in his Diaries, it is plain that he had been a bully.

JB added a P.S. to Redfern’s letter: ‘Please burn this.’²¹ He could trust Lascelles, of all people, to be discreet and to do what he asked. It is hard to imagine the repercussions if it had ever become public that the Governor-General of Canada thought that his Prime Minister was mad.

Colonel Willis-O’Connor, a kindly man, thought that this encounter had made JB look very unwell. He told his boss not to distress himself, to which he replied, ‘Nothing will come of it. There will be no constitutional crisis. I will let him have his own way, and stand on my head if that’s what he wants of me.’²²

Their Majesties therefore had the prospect of four weeks in the constant company of the Canadian Prime Minister, the only politician in attendance all the time, something rather less congenial to them, one supposes, than the society of the Tweedsmuirs. This was probably the worst example of Mackenzie King’s volatility during JB’s time as Governor-General, and it required the latter to exert all the patience at his command to see it through without the kind of row that had erupted publicly between Mackenzie King and Lord Byng.

The year 1939 had opened with see-sawing temperatures and JB’s see-sawing health. When well, he took what exercise he could, snow-shoeing with Susie or skating, but he was now spending at least one day a week in bed. He submitted to frequent massage sessions to help ease the pain. He weighed just over 9 stone. He took morphine. Well or not, he walked every day in the grounds and, when the weather was sunny, he would sit in a chair on the verandah, enveloped in a buffalo hide coat. He had begun to write Sick Heart River, his tale of illness, endurance and self-sacrifice in the Northwest Territories. It was much influenced by discussions with his son Johnnie, who had spent part of a winter near Prince Albert in northern Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, JB had to open Parliament, host luncheons, a state dinner and a ‘drawing-room’, as he had done in earlier years.

As a result of the Royal visit, plans were laid to redecorate both Rideau Hall and The Citadel. JB told Walter: ‘Susie is just back from Toronto, where she has been pilfering things from the Museum to decorate this house for Their Majesties … When you come you will find Rideau a miniature palace!’²³ But, amid this domestic busyness, there were gnawing anxieties about the European situation. On 26 January, JB received a very grave ‘most secret telegram about Germany’s intentions’.²⁴ These telegrams, together with despairing letters from British correspondents, continued to arrive through February. Chamberlain’s gamble of the previous September had failed. JB wrote to his brother Walter in late January: ‘The [Foreign Office] despatches recently, especially the secret ones dealing with the internal conditions of Germany, are horrible reading. The treatment of the Jews has been beyond belief brutal.’²⁵

Once the Royal itinerary had finally been agreed, JB’s main task was to write speeches for the King and Queen to give, while other members of the household wrote them for all the mayors when they met them, as well as the written replies from the King. All the paperwork was then sent to Buckingham Palace for approval.

The Tweedsmuirs set off for another trip to the Canadian west. ‘We shall find an English spring in Vancouver, and the winter will be shortened for Susie,’ JB told Violet Markham.²⁶ There was the usual round of Canadian Club speeches, inspections of new works, experimental farms and so on, with some fishing thrown in, but they also had the chance to go to the Hudson’s Bay headquarters in Winnipeg and send a message to Johnnie, at Lake Harbour, way beyond the Arctic Circle. He was thriving in his northern solitude and finally putting on weight.

The King and Queen embarked on the journey across the Atlantic in early May on the Empress of Australia, and about the same time an article appeared in The Sunday Times entitled ‘Canada and the Royal Visit’. The byline was Alice Buchan and, in this upbeat article, she set out some of the background to the visit, something of Canada’s history, and explained accurately and neatly the constitutional position: ‘He [the King] comes to Ottawa as to his own capital city, and to Rideau as to his own palace.’²⁷ (That cadence is unequivocally Buchanesque.) She also gave British readers a foretaste of what the Royal couple would experience, in particular staying in Rideau Hall, ‘this pleasant rambling house’, as well as the multifarious people they would meet on their travels. A map of Canada, showing the Royal route, accompanied the piece.

JB did not write this article, but he will have instigated it, knowing that he could trust Alice to produce a suitable and readable article if he gave her the background. Experienced publicist that he was, he could not pass up an opportunity to hammer home to the British public the importance of this visit, and to keep the record straight about his constitutional position.

It was inconvenient that he should be thinner than ever at this point, weighing on 7 May a mere 8 stone 4 lbs, his lowest as an adult. He had lost all the gains of the September before. And the imminent arrival of the Royal party did not help matters.

Susie took much of the strain of overseeing preparations, and anyone who has ever had a dream about preparing for the Queen to come to tea will have sympathy for her. She chose new chintzes and curtains for both Rideau Hall and The Citadel, finally expelling the purple that was Lady Willingdon’s favourite colour, and inspected the open landau carriage as well as the Royal train, which shone in its new blue and silver livery, with the Royal coat of arms now attached to the front of the engine. The train was made up of twelve carriages, and would have to accommodate ladies-in-waiting, equerries, maids, dressers, private secretaries, stewards, a chef, policemen, telephone officers, the Prime Minister and his staff, as well as members of the government in their own provinces. There was also a ‘pilot train’, to go ahead, just in case there was an ‘obstruction’ (by which, presumably, was meant either a cow or a bomb) on the line, and to carry RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers, members of the press, broadcasters – this was the first Royal visit to be broadcast on the radio – photographers, postal officials and a barber. This train had its own dark room and post office with a ‘Royal Train’ postmark stamp.

The Empress of Australia, bearing the King and Queen, docked on 17 May at Wolfe’s Cove, two nerve-racking days behind schedule because of fog and the unseasonal presence of icebergs. Mackenzie King greeted the Royal party in his Gilbertian, gold-braided Windsor court uniform. With breathtaking disingenuousness he remarked that he felt particularly sorry for the Tweedsmuirs because, as a result of the delay, they would not have the opportunity of seeing much of Their Majesties.²⁸

The next day, the King and Queen boarded the train to Montreal. The cheering crowds that met them everywhere in Quebec were a great source of satisfaction to Anglophone politicians such as Mackenzie King, although JB never doubted that the French Canadians would take the couple to their hearts. The conquest was made easier by the fact that they thought the Queen wonderfully glamorous, and were charmed by her smile and seemingly indefatigable stamina. The King also pleased the Québécois by speaking in French.

The Tweedsmuirs went to the Union Station in Ottawa to greet the couple, after which the King and Queen climbed into the open landau and were drawn through the streets to Rideau Hall. After the diplomatic corps had had the opportunity to catch a sight of them, there was a private luncheon, then the Royal party went to Parliament in evening dress, where the King signed two treaties with the United States, one of which was the trade treaty. (JB, tactfully, stayed at Rideau Hall, reading in the garden.) Afterwards, the press corps came to Rideau Hall for a sherry party to meet the Royal couple, a shrewd piece of public relations by JB, which ensured glowing testimonials in all the newspapers. He encouraged Roosevelt to invite the press to the White House for the same reason.

In the evening, there was a State dinner of considerable magnificence. According to Susie, ‘Joan [Pape] had surpassed herself. She had bagged silver bowls from everybody in Ottawa, and she had filled them with red tulips. The table was a horseshoe, and she had made a bank of tulips in the centre of it … The Queen had on marvellous jewels, including a necklace that Prince Albert had given Queen Victoria on their marriage.’²⁹ Mackenzie King, who sat on one side of the Queen, told her of his meeting with Hitler in 1937 and of how the Führer didn’t want war. After dinner, the King and JB stayed up talking until 1 a.m.

The next day, the Royal party witnessed, from the East Block of the Parliament buildings, the Trooping of the Colour by the Brigade of Canadian Guards, with the King taking the salute, then the Queen laid a cornerstone of the nearly built Supreme Court Building using a gold trowel. The couple were Mackenzie King’s guests for lunch at Laurier House. He showed them his mother’s ‘shrine’ and all his lares et penates, and surely only long training and good nature prevented the couple from betraying their amusement when presented by Mackenzie King with a framed photograph – of his mother.

That afternoon an enormous garden party of 5,000 guests assembled in the garden of Rideau Hall. At one point the Catholic Archbishop of Ottawa got carried away and shouted ‘Vive La Reine!’ This was followed by a formal dinner held at the Château Laurier hotel, after which the King and Queen went out onto the balcony to wave to the dense crowd who had been waiting patiently all evening to catch a glimpse of them. ‘When the King and Queen appeared,’ JB wrote to Anna, ‘such a shout went up to heaven as I have never heard before. It was one of the great experiences of my life.’³⁰ Back at Rideau Hall, the King again talked with JB late into the night.

The next morning, the King unveiled the War Memorial in Confederation Square, close to Parliament Hill.^* Watching the ceremony were several thousand veterans. The Queen told JB that she would like to go down amongst them. ‘I said it was worth risking it, and sure enough the King and Queen and Susie and I disappeared in that vast mob! – simply swallowed up. The police could not get near us. I was quite happy about it because the veterans kept admirable order. It was really extraordinarily touching; old Scotsmen weeping and talking about Angus [where the Queen came from]. One old fellow said to me, “Ay, man, if Hitler could see this!” ’³¹ Pathé News reported on ‘five riotous minutes of handshaking and surging enthusiasm’. American radio informed its listeners that no President would have dared to have done what the King and Queen did, with scarcely any guard at all.³²

Before they left Ottawa, the King and Queen presented JB with a silver inkstand,^* a copy of the Queen Anne one at No. 10 Downing Street, bearing JB’s arms and an inscription in the King’s handwritng. Susie remembered that, ‘with a twinkle in his eyes, His Majesty handed me a most lovely gold cigarette case with a [Royal] monogram in diamonds’.³³

From Ottawa, the Royal tour travelled to Toronto, then continued west to Winnipeg, stopping variously on the way, and on to Regina, then Medicine Hat, Calgary, and through the Rockies to Vancouver. As they sailed out of Vancouver Harbour on the way to Victoria, 25,000 voices sang ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ which was charming, if unhistorical, considering the King’s Hanoverian ancestry.

At places, the countryside around emptied, as people came to town to see the couple. Melville, a town of 4,000, swelled for the day to 60,000; at Edmonton, 90,000 grew to more than 200,000. At night-time, groups of people would stand on the side of the railway to watch the train go by, remaining silent so as not to disturb Their Majesties’ sleep. It is hard to overstate the impact such an extraordinary entourage had on the disparate communities that encountered it during the tour across Canada. The daylight had not yet been let in on the magic.

Three weeks after they arrived on Canadian soil, the King and Queen travelled to the United States, where King George VI made a deep impression on the President and vice versa. The King considered that the twenty-four hours he spent at Roosevelt’s country home, Hyde Park, was the apogee of the entire tour.^* George VI told Mackenzie King that he felt exactly as though a father had been giving him his most careful and wise advice.³⁴ The mutual regard and trust between King and President were to prove very beneficial during the war years.

The King and Queen arrived back in Canada after their five-day visit to the United States and visited New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. One way and another they had seen parts of most of Canada, except for the far north. After a few days fishing on the Cascapedia River, the Tweedsmuirs travelled, with their staff, by ship from Quebec to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to say goodbye to the Royal party.

At a station at Truro, sixty miles north of Halifax, the Tweedsmuirs boarded the train, where JB was invested with the GCVO (Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order), awarded for distinguished personal service to the sovereign, and in his gift. Shuldham Redfern was knighted. The party received a rapturous reception when they returned to Halifax, and then there were the ‘affecting farewells’ onboard ship. JB described the scene in a letter to Charlie Dick: ‘a golden sunset, something like a hundred thousand people, and a forest of shipping, and the great liner, led by [Canadian] destroyers and followed by [British] cruisers, disappearing in the haze’.³⁵

The rip-roaring success of the month-length tour was not a surprise to its architects, but the way the French Canadians reacted was, nevertheless, a profound relief and a cause for pride. And much of that was due to the personality of the Queen, her smile, unaffected grace and very fashionable clothes. Canadians thought her more beautiful in the flesh than in pictures. The King conducted himself with sincerity, courtesy and friendliness, and the bitter taste left in Canadian mouths by the Abdication was finally washed away. In an age when only newsreels and newspapers had pictures, and those only monochrome, the colourful, warm and distinguished presence of the head of the Commonwealth and his consort had an enormous and enduring impact on Canadians.

As JB wrote to a friend:

When I induced Their Majesties to come out here last autumn I did not realize I was pulling the string of such a shower-bath!…

Our Monarchs are most remarkable young people. I have always been deeply attached to the King, and I realize now more than ever what a wonderful mixture he is of shrewdness, kindliness and humour. As for the Queen, she has a perfect genius for the right kind of publicity…³⁶

The King wrote in his own hand a personal letter to JB averring that the tour had done him ‘untold good’, and in a letter to Susie the Queen wrote, ‘We feel strengthened and encouraged by our trip, and filled with love and pride in Canada and her grand people.’ In the same letter she asked for a Karsh photograph of JB in ‘an Indian headdress’ for, it is said, she wanted to show the princesses what a North American ‘Indian’ looked like. The King told Burgon Bickersteth, a senior Canadian academic, who happened to be in England in the summer of 1939: ‘Well Bickersteth, they [the Tweedsmuirs] are an extremely difficult couple to follow.’³⁷

Violet Markham, on whom no fly ever settled, teased JB about the real reason for the tour, namely the Royal trip to Washington and New York. She praised him for arranging it. She knew he couldn’t openly agree with her but hoped that he would send her ‘a transatlantic wink at the same time. To have engineered that visit to the President was a real stroke of genius on your part and may have incalculable consequences for the world.’³⁸

The tour had also had a substantial impact in the United Kingdom, thanks to the newsreels and the broadcasts of speeches. The nation was so gripped that, when the King and Queen travelled to Buckingham Palace from Waterloo Station in an open carriage, huge crowds turned out to welcome them back. This prompted them to come out onto the balcony, accompanied by Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, to acknowledge the enthusiasm. Pathé News reported that it was like the Coronation all over again.

At the Royal Luncheon given by the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall in the City of London the following day, at which Queen Mary was also present, George VI delivered the last of the speeches that JB had written for him:

[In Canada,] I saw everywhere not only the mere symbol of the British Crown; I saw also, flourishing as strongly as they do here, the institutions which have developed, century after century, beneath the aegis of that Crown; institutions, British in origin, British in their slow and almost casual growth, which, because they are grounded root and branch on British faith in liberty and justice, mean more to us even than the splendour of our history or the glories of our English tongue … For it was not alone the actual presence of their King and Queen that made them [Canadians] open their hearts to us; their welcome, it seemed to me, was also an expression of their thankfulness for those rights of free citizenship which are the heritage of every member of our great Commonwealth of Nations.³⁹

According to George VI’s biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett:

… even to this congeries of connoisseurs both the delivery and the content of the King’s speech were a revelation, and the effect of its import was not lost on the world outside. In Europe it was hailed as a declaration of beliefs and an indication that Britain was prepared to defend her democratic institutions; in America it struck a chord of response, warm and immediate; while from Canada Mr. Mackenzie King telegraphed to Sir Alan Lascelles: ‘I am sure that no Sovereign has ever uttered words fraught with greater good for mankind.’⁴⁰

Tommy Lascelles told Mackenzie King that he had never heard George VI speak so effectively or so movingly. As both King and Queen were to say on more than one occasion about the North American tour, ‘This has made us.’⁴¹ Wheeler-Bennett believed that it was a pivotal episode in the King’s life, giving him self-confidence and assurance, and marking the end of his kingly apprenticeship.

In late July, Violet Markham visited the Tweedsmuirs at Rideau Hall. She found JB in good spirits, full of jokes and stories as in the old days. He told her that he had decided to kill off Edward Leithen in his latest novel. On being told it was the worst literary murder since Trollope killed off Mrs Proudie, he replied, ‘Leithen and the others have been on hand too long and I am getting bored with them and so must other people. It’s time they disappeared.’⁴²

Despite the succession of bleak news stories from Europe, which had served as a counterpoint to the upbeat broadcasts from Canada, Anna and Walter decided to go ahead with their biennial visit and arrived in July, together with Alastair who had achieved a good Second in his ‘Schools’ (Johnnie had managed a Fourth), and wanted to spend the summer in Canada before enrolling at the University of Virginia.⁴³ The family party travelled to the remote port and railhead of Churchill in Manitoba, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, in a train now returned to its usual chocolate-brown livery, to pick up Johnnie who was on his way back in the SS Nascopie from Baffin Island.

Johnnie disembarked, not ‘a wild man of the snows, but a most elegant and civilised young man’,⁴⁴ as JB told Violet Markham. And one who had not even heard of the Munich Agreement. He was completely cured of his illness. The party then travelled to Jasper so that Anna and Walter could see the Rockies, and further to the fertile Peace River district. JB called it ‘a sort of land beyond the North Wind, which the Elizabethan voyagers dreamed of’. At Tupper Creek they met some of the 500 anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans – amongst them a former member of the Reichstag – who had found refuge there, and who touchingly sang the National Anthem.

The news when they arrived back in Ottawa was heart-stopping, Germany having that day signed the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. This piece of treachery on the part of Joseph Stalin sank everyone’s spirits and prompted Anna and Walter to leave earlier than originally planned. It was as well, for they arrived home in Peebles only the day before war was declared. On 1 September the Germans marched into Poland. The British ADCs and footmen prepared to leave Rideau Hall for home. ‘Eheu! “Now is the whole Round Table broken up” ’, reads JB’s diary for that day.⁴⁵

Johnnie and Alastair immediately joined the Canadian Army, Johnnie receiving a commission in the Governor-General’s Life Guards while Alastair, the better horseman, joined the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards. This decision points not just to their father’s commitment to Canada, but also their own. They were based in Ottawa initially, which was some comfort to Susie who was, not unnaturally, anxious about the rest of the family on the other side of the Atlantic. Early in September they received a letter from William saying that he was going to marry Nesta Crozier, the daughter of an army officer who lived near Oxford. Although not even Susie had met her, William’s indifferent health and unsettled ways inclined his parents to think that it would be good for him to be married, with someone to look after him. The couple married at Elsfield in October, Anna and Walter making the journey from Scotland to attend the ceremony. JB told Sandy Gillon: ‘By all accounts William’s spouse is a most charming girl and well-fitted to be a poor man’s wife.’⁴⁶

On 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany, but Canada remained neutral for another week, ensuring that a certain amount of war materiel, aeroplanes and munitions in particular, could be moved across the border from the United States, without violating the latter’s Neutrality Act. (The arms embargo was effectively ended in early November, when a new Neutrality Act was passed that allowed a ‘cash-and-carry’ arrangement with Britain.) Mackenzie King played the political game acutely, jollying along his colleagues, while not frightening the French-Canadian constituency. JB later told the King that the credit for bringing Canada into the war with almost complete unanimity belonged to the Prime Minister, ‘by not asking for premature commitments he prevented people going off on the wrong lines and then being ashamed to retrace their steps’.⁴⁷

Just after midnight on Sunday, 10 September, JB was wakened and asked to sign the proclamation of war for Canada, which was then relayed to London to be approved by George VI. Instead of the King asking Canada to declare war for him, Canada asked him to declare war on behalf of Canada. According to the British High Commissioner, this was ‘the outcome of a deliberate decision of a free people by their own representatives in a free parliament’.⁴⁸ Alastair later recalled that only twice in Canada had he seen the light go out of his father’s eyes – once when endorsing a death warrant and the day he signed Canada’s declaration of war. He was sick at heart. To Anna he wrote, ‘I hate this war as I never hated the last. Then we were fighting with a barbarous and dangerous enemy, but at any rate he was adult. Now I feel that we are contending with diseased and vicious children.’⁴⁹

‘The only duties left to me which matter will be vis-à-vis the United States and consultations with Ministers,’ he told Walter, ‘otherwise any stuffed shirt could be Governor-General. I do not feel too happy at the prospect, but of course I won’t budge unless I am definitely recalled. It is rather a miserable time, because the weather is exquisite and sharpens the contrast between the beauty of nature and the folly of man … In 1914 the Germany we fought had dignity and history behind it; the present régime seems to be a mere oozing of filth from the gutters.’⁵⁰

He entertained Americans – bankers, industrialists, journalists and the like – at Rideau Hall, giving influential people space and time to make fruitful connections. He also met with a number of patriotic organisations, since he was honorary President of most of them. On 13 September he prorogued Parliament, with Alastair acting as ADC. ‘It makes me want to howl to see him in khaki,’ JB told Walter, ‘for he is the living image of our Alastair, only about half a foot taller.’⁵¹

Walter was JB’s most trusted confidant, for he could depend on the Scots lawyer to be completely discreet. Even so, he sometimes wrote cryptically. For example, when severely condemning the anti-Semitic comments of the Peebleshire MP, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay (imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm regulations in wartime), he referred to him not by name but, ironically, as ‘our friend’.

JB nicknamed his brother the ‘Peebles Fuehrer’ since, as Town Clerk, his brother acquired a number of immediate wartime duties, such as organising the arrival and placement of children evacuated from Scottish cities, as well as the turning of the Peebles Hydro into a hospital. For her part, Anna, as a substantial literary celebrity in Scotland, devoted considerable time to speaking in public in aid of war charities.

JB thought much about propaganda to the USA, telling George VI, ‘I am certain that really authentic information of every kind sent by way of news to be the best, indeed the only, kind of propaganda.’⁵² He exchanged a number of letters with his old colleague, Lord (Hugh) Macmillan, who had been appointed Minister of Information as soon as war broke out. He offered him friendly guidance over the British or American personnel in the States that might be helpful, taking into account that the Ministry would have to tread very warily. ‘I have an excellent conning-tower in my position here, for I am not only in constant touch with American friends through correspondence, but we entertain a very large number of them.’⁵³ He warned Macmillan of the mistakes made in the years before the United States entered the war in 1917: ‘Facts are the only argument that matter, and she [America] has a very shrewd eye for facts. She must be allowed to do her own persuasion, and there are many forces across the border working to that end.’

He also warned of battles with the War Office and the Admiralty. ‘As you know well, the minor military and naval mind has a passion for babyish secrecy. Ninety per cent in the last war of what was censored in the first three years could have been published with impunity.’ In the event, Macmillan lasted only four months in office for he was no administrator; moreover, he was dogged, unfairly, by the enormous size of his Ministry, built up in expectation of war in the late 1930s, which immediately attracted a great deal of criticism in Parliament and the country. At the end of 1939 he was replaced by Lord Reith, who famously reintegrated censorship into the Ministry, something that JB deprecated. ‘The idea of mixing up propaganda and censorship in one department is insane,’ he wrote to Walter, ‘for the essence of propaganda is that you have to fight censorship!’⁵⁴

One person who JB encouraged to become, in effect, an agent of influence in the United States was Professor Moritz Bonn. He had worked on German propaganda sent to the United States during the Great War but was keen, for obvious reasons, to do the same for the British this time round. And he was particularly useful to them because he had experience of developing propaganda against them. Bonn crossed to the United States in October 1939 for a few months, staying at Rideau Hall in November. In the end he remained in America for the duration of the war: ‘Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation and to the Institute of International Education, a number of visiting professorships were offered to me. I accepted them on the advice of Lord Tweedsmuir and Lord Lothian; both were of the opinion that such qualifications as I possessed were more useful in the Western Hemisphere than in England.’⁵⁵ He was doing just the kind of propaganda work for the Allies that Gilbert Murray and others had done during the Great War, but his status as a German Jewish refugee was a recommendation to his listeners that Murray could not command.

The best, but by no means the only, example of how JB worked round the fringes of diplomacy was the decisive part he played in closing the negotiations over the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). This has been called, by a Canadian historian, ‘a highly irregular, somewhat surreptitious, but enormously effective intervention in something of great import to the Empire-Commonwealth’.⁵⁶

Just after war broke out, the Canadian and Australian High Commissioners in London, Vincent Massey and Stanley Bruce, had – on their own initiative – met informally with Air Ministry officials to try to work out some kind of plan for training pilots in the Empire to serve in the RAF, since British aerodromes were likely to be vulnerable to German bombers in time of war. They believed Canada was the best-placed country for training aircrew from all over the Commonwealth. They were pushing at an open door, since the British government had also been thinking along these lines; but the government knew how sensitive Mackenzie King was, so Massey himself helped to draft the air-training proposal.

Mackenzie King was attracted by the idea, since such a plan had the advantage of conferring prestige on Canada, without her having to commit large numbers of troops overseas. This would prove impossible anyway without conscription, which he had promised not to introduce. So a British delegation, known as a ‘mission’, led by Lord Riverdale and including a former Governor of Kenya, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who was acting as the chief negotiator for the RAF, arrived in late October; Australian and New Zealand delegations followed soon after.

It soon became apparent that the British mission had very little idea of how Canada (and indeed Australia and New Zealand) had changed and developed since the Statute of Westminster was enacted, both with regard to its image of itself and in its attitude to the outside world. The inclination of British officials to throw their weight about irritated the Canadian politicians, who felt patronised.

Mackenzie King, very much on his dignity, insisted both that Canadians trained under this scheme would serve in the country’s own service, the Royal Canadian Air Force, rather than the British RAF, and that Canada would not have to foot the bill for the BCATP. JB saw his task as smoothing his Prime Minister’s feathers, while simultaneously keeping Neville Chamberlain apprised of Canadian sensitivities. He found himself cast as interpreter and even conciliator with the missions, roles that Mackenzie King seemed happy, just this once, for him to play, since it was in Canada’s interest to do so.

One important sticking point, however, turned out to be the insistence by the British mission that British ground crews at the training establishments should not be commanded by Canadian officers. Time wore on and Mackenzie King became very anxious about this issue. He wrote to JB on 12 December: ‘The delay in reaching a final understanding with the Air Ministry of the UK on the important question of identity and command of Canadian units and formations in the field, which we believed had been settled weeks ago, has been unfortunate as respects the time of the announcement.’⁵⁷

The crunch came late on Saturday evening, 16 December. The Prime Minister wanted to announce the deal in his weekly broadcast the next day, which was also his birthday, a fact he thought highly propitious. More importantly, the Australians had just announced their own agreement, so he could not afford to be behindhand. Moreover, the first Canadian troops (including Johnnie Buchan) would be landing in Scotland that day, and he wanted to announce the plan before, rather than after, their presence in England became known. That evening, Mackenzie King decided to go to visit JB, to put the whole situation before him ‘as the representative of the King, and as one who could give Chamberlain the true story. I felt too that he might be able to assist in bringing the others together.’⁵⁸ He arrived at Government House about 10 p.m., where he discovered the Governor-General in bed, having been there all day, and looking ‘pretty frail’. He asked him to intervene, saying it was the most important matter he had ever had occasion to discuss with him, and impressing on him the urgency.

Thus was Brooke-Popham summoned from an ice-hockey match to attend the Governor-General in his bedroom. When he came out, having received a courteous but firm lecture from the small, fragile man in pyjamas, propped up on his pillows, he had conceded the point. For Brooke-Popham, who had not been on hand to watch the development of the Governor-General’s love for, and commitment to, Canada, his attitude must have come as quite a surprise. JB’s diary entry for that day reads: ‘Sent for Brooke-Popham and had long difficult talk with him. I thought his arguments far-fetched.’⁵⁹

Brooke-Popham proceeded to the Prime Minister’s office where the agreement was signed, a few minutes after midnight. Mackenzie King, triumphant, said he had never seen a man more deflated than Brooke-Popham; he looked as if he had been ‘spanked’. ‘His face was very red and his manner very crushed.’⁶⁰ Sir Gerald Campbell, British High Commissioner in Ottawa, said that he ‘looked a broken man and bewailed the fact that, in yielding to the Governor-General’s pressure, he had been false to the traditions of his service’.⁶¹

Mackenzie King later mused that he did not believe any more significant agreement had ever been signed by the government of Canada. The reason for this, as he said in his broadcast the next evening, was that the ‘United Kingdom government has informed us that … the air training scheme would provide far more effective assistance towards ultimate victory than any other form of military co-operation which Canada can give’.⁶²

It seems that the part JB played in the genesis of this plan, which during the Second World War trained 130,000 pilots and aircrew, was absolutely crucial. And he succeeded because he understood, as indeed did the Prime Minister, if intermittently, how useful informal, non-diplomatic channels of communication and operation could be, when exploited in the right way.

At the same time, he was facilitating contacts between the ‘British Supply Board in Canada and the United States’, under its highly effective head, Colonel Greenly of the engineering firm Babcock and Wilcox. JB’s personal diary indicates that he entertained Greenly many times in those weeks, since the man was plainly very open to suggestions from the Governor-General, with his very wide acquaintance and lofty status among Canadian businessmen. JB’s contacts were second to none and he could open doors otherwise firmly shut.

It seems that JB’s personal connections with at least three British Prime Ministers, as well as Lord Halifax, the Foriegn Secretary, meant that, in the words of one modern Canadian historian, ‘his ideas about policy were considered at the highest political levels and that the information he sent reached these men unfiltered by departments’.⁶³ His influence didn’t end there, for he was on such good personal terms with Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, as well as with successive British ambassadors in Washington – Sir Ronald Lindsay and the Marquess of Lothian – and bankers, politicians, soldiers, journalists and businessmen, that his views became common currency amongst senior opinion-formers in the United States as well.

We shall never know the precise extent of his influence over American, Canadian and British foreign policy, but Professor Neilson has maintained: ‘By dint of personal prestige, widespread connections and an unwavering view of the importance of and functioning of empire, Tweedsmuir provided a framework for cooperation among these three states that proved its worth in the Second World War.’⁶⁴ Neilson goes on to write, intriguingly if unverifiably, that the creation of the post-war condominium centring on the North Atlantic world owed much to JB’s work. What is incontrovertible is that he played a significant role in the development of Canada as a self-governing (and self-respecting) dominion – perhaps the pre-eminent one – in the post-war Commonwealth of Nations. That is not bad for someone who Lawrence of Arabia feared would be just ‘a figure’.

The only extant private diary of JB’s is that for 1939, and it is instructive. In it he noted weather and temperature, who came to see him and at what times, the principal guests at luncheon or dinner, how he felt about his health, the bare details of his travels, occasionally news on the impending war, and its progress once begun, and regularly his weight in stones and pounds. Careful reading of this diary shows just how ill he was at times in 1939; it is easy to see how he had to steel himself to perform his duties. There is only one entry when he admits to feeling sorry for himself.

In October 1939 he gained Royal permission to make a private visit to New York, in order to consult a well-known physician at the Rockefeller Medical Center, Dr Miller. At the weekend he travelled to Tom Lamont’s country house in New York State, where his fellow guest was the Marquess of Lothian, the newly arrived British ambassador. On Monday he lunched with the Morgan partners and a host of businessmen in New York, on Tuesday with journalists from the New York Times, leaving for Canada once more that evening.

JB had an ulterior motive for seeking a second opinion from an American doctor. Much as they would have liked to meet, both he and Roosevelt knew that the time was not opportune, since the isolationist wing of the Democratic Party would kick up an unholy fuss and might jeopardise the President’s efforts to encourage Congress to rescind the Neutrality Act. Roosevelt told him that the ‘bill [had] a good chance of going through’ but that he was ‘almost literally walking on eggs … saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing’.⁶⁵ However, Lothian, as the British ambassador, was a conduit to Roosevelt. In his turn, Lothian wanted advice from JB about the first public speech he was to make, a very important one to the Pilgrims of the United States at the Plaza Hotel in New York, and indeed the speech he gave has JB’s fingerprints all over it.⁶⁶

JB received the same diagnosis and much the same advice – one day a week in bed – from Dr Miller in New York as he had had from his Canadian doctors. It cannot have come as any great surprise. However, he went again in early November to New York for treatment (he was told his gastritis was ‘serious but not dangerous’) and took further opportunities to listen and talk to opinion-formers, lunching again with New York Times journalists and spending an evening this time with John D. Rockefeller. These occasions made their way in fictional form into Sick Heart River.

His extraordinary stoicism did not go unremarked. The novelist David Walker recalled about his time as one of JB’s ADCs in 1938: ‘There are so many things of praise to say about him. It was almost the last year of his life, spent in constant discomfort with an ulcer and other ailments. His diet was entirely bland, things like scrambled egg or slops, and after meals he would have to prop himself lopsidedly along the sofa. He said to strangers, “The doctor makes me stretch out like this”, but beyond that necessary explanation he never mentioned his health, or he never did to me, not once in our many walks and other times together.’⁶⁷

Sleep no longer refreshed him, his blood pressure was too low, he suffered from headaches, and his eyesight was failing, particularly the left eye below the bump on his forehead from the childhood carriage accident. But the only time that Susie’s lady-in-waiting, Joan Pape, ever heard him raise his voice was when luncheon was delayed during the Royal visit in May 1939, when tensions must have been running very high.⁶⁸ Lilian Killick remembered that ‘the older he got, the kinder he got’.⁶⁹ The wonder is how he could so often be good company in social situations, when he was, perforce, the centre of attention, while he felt so awful. And it must have often hurt to be pushing a piece of steamed fish around his plate, and sipping a glass of water, while his guests enjoyed a multi-course banquet.

Meanwhile, he continued to write Sick Heart River, as well as his book of ‘reminiscences’, Memory Hold-the-Door, and what he called ‘a Canadian Puck of Pook’s Hill ’ children’s story (published as The Long Traverse in 1941), to try to acquaint children with their history, since he thought the school textbooks were so dull. He also wrote two chapters of a book on fishing, which were appended to Memory Hold-the-Door and entitled ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’. The writing is lyrical and precise, as he relived his youthful fishing expeditions in Tweeddale. (The last page of all is a digression, strangely, on ‘the prose of mortality’ and it ends with Lockwood’s famous and comforting reflection over the graves of Catherine, Healthcliff and Edgar in Wuthering Heights.) George Trevelyan reckoned that the first chapter, ‘The Springs’, was the best thing JB ever wrote.⁷⁰ The flame was still bright. Meanwhile, Susie had never been busier in Canada, going off on her own to complete engagements with women’s groups in particular, and organising a Red Cross work party, making ‘comforts’ (socks, gloves, blankets and so on) for Poles at Rideau Hall.

JB had gone to Canada on the understanding that his tenure would be for five years. His time was therefore up in the autumn of 1940 and, after war broke out, he began to consider how best to refuse a second term of office. The Canadian government requested him to stay on for another five years and, when he refused, Mackenzie King asked whether he might remain for the duration of the war, or even just for one further year. But their entreaties were unavailing.

‘Roosevelt has unwittingly done me an unfriendly act,’ JB wrote to Walter, ‘and told the press that he would regard my refusal to accept a second term of office as a disaster both for the U.S.A. and for Canada! I can only reply in the words of my favourite quotation – “Not Ferdinand”!’^* He was ‘dragging his wing’ and only a good long time at Ruthin Castle, he believed, would restore him to better health. Moreover, he did not feel he could subject Susie to another Canadian winter, and the war had made it worse: she had two sons in uniform, one of whom was already on the other side of the Atlantic in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, as well as one trying to get into the RAF,^** and an elderly mother who had taken refuge at Elsfield.

He wrote to Walter in late November with all the reasons why he wanted to go home: ‘But my case is not very strong. The case I put to the King, and with which he agreed – that I had had a very individual kind of term of office, and that I did not want my own idiosyncracies to be hardened into precedents and embarrass my successor – is unanswerable. But the argument falls to pieces in war, for the work I am now doing is that which anyone could do. I will plead my health and Susie’s sanity for all they are worth, but I am always liable to be met with the argument that everyone has to sacrifice a good deal in war, and that we are not being asked to sacrifice more than other people. I also have no notion what the King may say. He is my master, and he may simply tell me to get on with it.’⁷¹

One thing JB achieved that autumn was to persuade the Queen to broadcast encouraging remarks to Canadian women, which could of course be heard in the United States as well. This was his initiative and he wrote the words she spoke. He told Walter: ‘I am very glad I have got the Queen to broadcast on November 11th. She is a legendary figure on this side of the water. The ordinary French-Canadian says, “Well, if She wants us we’re ready!” ’⁷² He spent much of his time reviewing troops, wearing the uniform of Commander-in-Chief as King George VI did in Britain. The last entry for 1939 in his diary reads: ‘What a year! God send that 1940 gives victory and sees our family safe!’⁷³ It was rare indeed that he invoked the Almighty.

The first official event of 1940 was his last New Year’s ‘levée’ at Government House. ‘There is always something melancholy about doing something for the last time, even when you are glad. Susie keeps on saying, “Never again” about things, and then feeling regretful.’⁷⁴ He said that leaving Canada was like pulling up mandrakes. ‘The appeals I get from humble folk, Prairie farmers, habitants, etc are really rather heart-breaking. They all say they feel so “safe” with me here – whatever they mean by that!’⁷⁵

By the beginning of 1940 he had finished Memory Hold-the-Door and invited Yousuf Karsh to help him sort photographs for it. He wrote to Sir Alexander Hardinge, asking whether the King would mind if the book were published in serial form before he left Canada, George V having said he could publish, provided that the subject was not current politics. He read John Morley’s Gladstone and told Sandy Gillon that he had become, late in life, a Gladstonian Liberal: ‘I was in revolt in my early political days against Gladstonianism, for it seemed to preach only platitudes which had become generally accepted. But now it is just these platitudes which are at issue, and they have become living things for us.’⁷⁶ He was feeling surprisingly well, a source of particular satisfaction to his wife.

Memory Hold-the-Door (the title, with its curious hyphenation, is a quotation from Stevenson) was published in the summer of 1940 in Britain and as Pilgrim’s Way in North America. Hodder and Stoughton called it an autobiography but Houghton Mifflin, under the influence of Ferris Greenslet of course, subtitled it ‘An Essay in Recollection’, which is what it is. JB wrote about it: ‘This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory.’ He went on to say about experiences in youth being overlaid but not lost. ‘Time hurries it [an experience] from us, but also keeps it in store, and it can later be recaptured and amplified by memory, so that at leisure we can interpret its meaning and enjoy its savour.’ He wrote that at first he had thought the chapters were so brazenly egotistical he should have them privately printed. ‘But I reflected that a diary of a pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life, might interest others who travel a like road.’⁷⁷ There were certainly many fellow travellers, for after its very lucrative serialisation in The Sunday Times, the hardcover book had a print run of 46,000, which almost immediately sold out. In wartime, between August 1940 and the end of 1945, despite paper shortages, there were twenty-eight reprintings.

The chapters take the conventional linear course of an autobiography: childhood, youth, Oxford, London, South Africa, London again, the Great War, Elsfield, Parliament. But only up to 1935; there is almost nothing about Canada in it, for obvious reasons. He wrote about his father, his mother, his dead brothers, but scarcely a thing about his living siblings, his wife or children. Along the way there are portraits of dead friends, such as Lord Milner and Raymond Asquith, some of the passages plucked straight from the privately printed These for Remembrance. There is a chapter on ‘My America’ and then a final passage in which he looks at civilisation and the challenges of the future. It is an unusual mixture of preoccupations, only really comprehensible if understood as the musings in late middle life of a highly intelligent, reflective, private and discreet man, hampered by the confining circumstances in which he finds himself.

In his early life, he had been concerned with the promotion of civilisation, and the part-terror/part-attraction he felt for the primeval and savage. By 1940, in a passage that may give the modern reader pause for thought, he voiced his fears of what he called ‘de-civilisation’. Although he categorically did not reject increased mechanisation and scientific discovery, he did worry about what would happen once science had gained its major victories and all the globe was explored and exploited. In a nightmare scenario:

Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia … What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement…

It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart … Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul…

This passage was written just after the Second World War had broken out, and he continued:

But something has happened. A civilisation bemused by an opulent materialism has been met by a rude challenge. The free peoples have been challenged by the serfs. The gutters have exuded a poison which bids fair to infect the world…

And the result? The free nations now valued freedom, as they had ceased to value it in the comfort of peacetime:

We have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvellous service in reminding us of the true values of life.⁷⁸

This quirky book of reminiscences had a substantial impact, not only with the ‘ordinary’ reader, but with policy-makers and statesmen as well. None more so than John F. Kennedy, who numbered Montrose and Pilgrim’s Way among his twelve favourite books. He quoted the latter in a number of speeches. According to his widow, Jacqueline, JB’s views on democracy and the profession of politics profoundly shaped her husband’s thinking. Three years after JB died, the King broadcast to the nation on Christmas Day in wartime. The last sentence, before the National Anthem sounded, was this: ‘In the words of a Scottish writer of our day, “No experience can be too strange and no task too formidable if a man can link it up with what he knows and loves.” ’ This is a quotation from Memory Hold-the-Door.⁷⁹ Perhaps the King did not give the Scottish writer a name for fear he might stumble over the ‘B’ of ‘Buchan’. But plenty of people will have known that these are the words that follow one of JB’s favourite true stories, of a Scottish soldier in Mesopotamia who, when asked where he got his wound, replied that it was two miles on the Rothiemurchus side of Baghdad.

JB professed himself happy for the United States to stay out of the war for the time being, for American industrialists were proving extremely helpful, fulfilling Allied orders for materiel on favourable terms. ‘The situation,’ he told Walter, ‘in [the States] is curious. America is confirmed in her isolationism, which is all to the good, for we could make no use of her infantry at present; while all the big industrialists are being extraordinarily helpful in our munition work, and the aeroplane people are quite excellent.’⁸⁰ His anxiety was over whether Britain could finance these purchases, since the Johnson Debt Default Act forbade any loans from America to the Allies. He wanted to talk to Roosevelt about this but thought it too dangerous at the time to suggest it.

To JB’s relief, the King agreed to him leaving Canada in September 1940. He was aware that he had put his Sovereign on the spot, for it might be difficult to find a successor in wartime. In the event, Queen Mary’s brother, the Earl of Athlone, agreed to cross the Atlantic in wartime to replace him; Athlone had already been Governor-General in South Africa, so he knew the ropes. He and his wife, Princess Alice, would turn out to be very popular and hard-working in Canada, although it must be said that Redfern wrote Athlone’s speeches for him.

JB opened Parliament in the last week of January 1940, and proclaimed an immediate dissolution at the request of Mackenzie King, since the time for an election was drawing near, and the Prime Minister had no wish for the life of the Parliament to be extended. He wanted a new mandate, and he felt this was an opportune moment to try to get it. Moreover, if Parliament were dissolved, there was less danger of the government being subjected to criticism, which they couldn’t answer, since much of their work was now confidential. The Germans tried to make capital out of it, as JB noted in a letter to Walter at the beginning of February: ‘I see that Goebbels on the radio, speaking about the Canadian election, said that I had ordered it in order to divert the deep fear and unrest, which is rampant in Canada, by a minor excitement! He is a blithe spirit!’⁸¹

JB was very proud of Canada: his Red Cross appeal had netted almost twice what he had asked for, and he sensed the country’s unity and keenness to help in the war effort (there were long waiting lists to enlist, even of French Canadian regiments). It was a quiet time for him and he busied himself with trying to interest Colonel Sam McLaughlin, the millionaire head of General Motors of Canada,^* in partly financing a British Columbian version of Hollywood – a scheme promoted by three prominent film actors, Charles Laughton, Ronald Colman and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. JB was enthusiastic because he thought film-making might become very difficult in Britain during wartime. In the end, for many reasons, one of them being the war, the idea came to nothing, but in light of the development of ‘Hollywood North’ in British Columbia and Ontario – now a billion-dollar business – his actions can be seen as visionary.⁸² On the personal side, he was working hard on the story for an adventure film set in Canada, which Alexander Korda had wanted to make since 1938, and the production of which could begin once JB had left Canada that summer.

On 25 January, JB travelled to Montreal to visit the Catholic Université de Montréal and spending the morning with the Sulpician Brotherhood. ‘I never saw more beautiful faces than those of the brothers.’⁸³ Susie went with him and was mobbed by people in suburban Montreal, shouting ‘You mustn’t go away.’ They brought back their old friend Father Martin D’Arcy, the Catholic philosopher and Master of Campion Hall, the Jesuit college in Oxford, to stay the night. JB told Walter: ‘On Saturday [3 February] I am dining in high ecclesiastical circles, with the Cardinal, the new Archbishop and the Apostolic Delegate – fine company for a Presbyterian Elder!’⁸⁴ He also told Anna that he had finished his novel and reminiscences and was almost at the end of his children’s book. ‘This will leave me with a clear field for farewells this summer.’ He ended his letter to Anna on Monday, 5 February, with ‘Take great care of yourself, and make Walter do the same.’⁸⁵

The next morning, he suffered a slight stroke while shaving in his bathroom, fell backwards against the bath, hitting the back of his head badly and causing it to bleed. He was concussed and rendered unconscious. An hour later, James Cast found him. The bulletin issued that evening from Government House and signed by Dr Wilder Penfield, the world-famous neurosurgeon, and Dr Jonathan Meakins, having rushed from Montreal in a snowstorm to see him, said that he had steadily improved and was now conscious. He was able to recognise and talk to Susie and Alastair, and his aides. However, during the next day, pressure began to build up in his brain, and he became restless and fatigued. By lunchtime on Thursday, he was unconscious and his condition was causing grave anxiety ‘on account of increasing weakness’. The following morning his condition was so critical that Dr Penfield and his colleague, Dr William Cone, performed an emergency trepanning operation, to relieve the increased intra-cranial pressure.

The decision was then made to remove him to the Montreal Neurological Institute, and he was taken by ambulance to the station and put in the Governor-General’s carriage. An ordinary carriage was coupled to the engine in front to deaden any shocks and the tracks were cleared of other rail traffic to let the train pass unhindered.

That day, Penfield and Cone carried out two subtemporal decompression operations, which resulted in a slight but definite improvement, but his condition was still considered critical. On Sunday morning he suffered a relapse, and a further emergency cranial operation was carried out. The doctors thought then that they had seen him ‘entering a safe harbour’. However, early on Sunday evening, 11 February, an embolus entered his lung from his leg, and it was all over.⁸⁶ The telegram to Bank House read: ‘John died in perfect peace at 7.13 this evening.’⁸⁷ The doctors had not slept for three days and Susie told Alice that, when Dr Penfield came to tell her the news, he looked ‘an old, broken man’.⁸⁸

That evening, Mackenzie King broadcast to the nation, referring to JB as ‘a great and good man’.⁸⁹ Three days of national mourning were announced and JB’s body was brought back from Montreal by train the next morning, 12 February. At Union Station the coffin and party were met by a crowd of officials, including Mackenzie King, his Cabinet and the Mayor. The coffin was placed in the Chamber of the Senate, where JB had opened Parliament four times. Here he lay in state, guarded by four soldiers of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards and the 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards, with Alastair taking three turns on guard. Some 15,000 people filed by in the two days before the funeral.

Ferris Greenslet, who came north for the funeral, recalled: ‘When I went to Ottawa … porters, conductors, small shopkeepers, men in the street, spoke of him with broken voices. Even the French press of separatist Quebec, which had greeted his arrival with epithets of agent provocateur and espion, spoke of him with remorseful eloquence.’⁹⁰

On the day of the funeral, 14 February, flags flew at half-mast, schools closed, and provincial legislatures opened only for memorial meetings. Early in the afternoon, the coffin was put back into a hearse and, flanked by JB’s aides, was driven at walking pace down Wellington Street to the ‘old’ St Andrew’s Church at the corner of Wellington and Kent, where the Tweedsmuirs had worshipped most Sundays when in Ottawa. The snow was swept from the streets and, behind a double row of troops, people stood many ranks deep, bare-headed (the CBC commentator described ‘dense crowds of hushed, sorrowing people’), in an intense cold that measured zero degrees Fahrenheit (−18°C). In front of the hearse marched the band of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards, playing Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. Immediately behind was the Insignia bearer, carrying JB’s decorations on a black cushion.

The service, which was broadcast live by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and heard across the Commonwealth and the United States, was conducted by the Reverend Alexander Ferguson, the Scotsman from Falkirk whose sermons JB had liked (although not his affected parsonical delivery) and whom he used to invite to Sunday lunch at Rideau Hall.

Ferguson’s address began:

When, just over four years ago, Lord Tweedsmuir stepped ashore at Quebec he was to us an official … Today all Canada mourns him as a friend. There is not a home among us that is not saddened by his passing, not a heart that does not sorrow with his gracious wife and family because so rare a spirit has fled. From coast to coast, from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes, our Governor was loved by us all, known to us all as one on whose eager interest we might count, as one who cared for Canada and made her life his own. With dignity and patience and humour and self-forgetfulness, this great heart has put all his shining gifts of mind and character unreservedly at the service of the Dominion…

Deep-rooted in our Governor’s life was religion … His was no feeble sentimental faith but something robust, pure, unshakeable, that accepted in deepest humility the great gift of Divine atonement for his sins.

The minister quoted JB’s own words:

There is still for every man the choice of two paths and conversion in its plain evangelical sense is still the greatest fact in any life.

And he ended with the description of the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress, which Richard Hannay read over Peter Pienaar’s grave in Mr Standfast:

So he passed over and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.⁹¹

At the end of the service, the eight pall-bearers from the three branches of the Canadian forces, as well as the Mounties, strapped the coffin onto a gun carriage and covered it with a Union flag, while the band played ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Abide with Me’, and there was a nineteen-gun salute. The gun carriage was pulled by naval ratings back along Wellington Street and past the Parliament buildings to Union Station.

Susie did not attend the funeral. It is most likely that, after long vigils by her husband’s bedside and the shock of his death, she could not trust her composure when the eyes of the world were upon her. Instead she waited in the train, probably in the company of Joan Pape, listening to the broadcast. The coffin was loaded once more onto the train and, together with Alastair and her husband’s close aides, she left for Montreal once more. There, in the Mount Royal Crematorium, close to the Neurological Institute where he had died, JB’s body was cremated after a short, bleak service.

At the Neurological Institute, the doctors who had worked so hard to try to save JB’s life met to honour him. Dr Meakins spoke of his ‘beloved patient. Among all adjectives this is one which could not possibly be omitted by anyone who knew Lord Tweedsmuir … I have often heard it said that he was frail – yes, perhaps, frail as a rapier is, compared to a battleaxe. There was that fineness of quality of Toledo steel in things physical, mental and spiritual.’⁹²

In the words of the historian J. P. Parry:

His send-off can be seen as the ultimate establishment accolade bestowed on Lord Tweedsmuir, the king’s representative in the greatest dominion of the greatest empire in the world. But it can also be seen as the last tribute of a plain, unfashionable, God-fearing, democratic people to plain John Buchan, who represented and propagated their values more accurately and genuinely than any other official Briton of his day.⁹³

The newspapers speculated that his ashes might be sent for burial to Scotland, but in fact they were sent home to Elsfield, secretly, on the light cruiser HMS Orion, which was leaving Halifax for England with men of the Royal Canadian Air Force on board. Johnnie, William and Vincent Massey^* travelled to Plymouth to collect the ashes and took them to Elsfield to stand in the chancel of the church, until Susie’s return.

A memorial service was held in Elsfield church the Saturday after JB’s death, for family, staff, neighbours and Oxford friends. We can easily picture the scene: the small medieval church packed with people, hunched in thick dark overcoats against the chilling cold in that first freezing winter in wartime. The service was devised by JB’s children. The congregation sang Psalm 23 (no doubt to the Crimond setting) as well as the lesser-known Psalm 15: ‘Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle: or who shall rest upon thy holy hill? Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life: and doeth the thing which is right, and speaketh the truth from his heart.’

William read the description of the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth from his father’s battered copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The lesson was from The Wisdom of Solomon: ‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace’^*

The hymns would have been well known to the congregation: John Bunyan’s ‘Who would true valour see’ and the so-called Old Hundredth (psalm), ‘All people that on earth do dwell’. Professor Gilbert Murray, sombrely colourful in his scarlet and grey doctoral gown, gave an affectionate eulogy. Later that month, memorial services on a much grander scale were held at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, and in Westminster Abbey, London, where amongst the mourners were Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin and Lord Halifax.

Sir Shuldham Redfern wrote to Sir Alexander Hardinge to describe the struggles to save JB’s life, then he went on:

I saw him about an hour after he died. The lines had gone from his face^** and he looked a young man, like those who ‘carry back bright to the Coiner the mintage of man’. And now I miss the welcoming smile he used to give me whenever I went into his room, his boyish enthusiasm, his instantaneous understanding of the one point in a subject that mattered, his kindly and scholarly wit, his simple dignity, his tacit but firm reproof of all the vulgarities, his restraint and tolerance and that inestimable gift of never interfering in anyone else’s job; and he never wore ‘the sepulchral integuments of an English peerage’ … I cannot finish this letter without saying something of Lady Tweedsmuir and her youngest son Alastair … I saw her very soon after the Governor General died. She spoke almost entirely of all the doctors and nurses had done, their skill and unselfishness … She has never faltered and those of us who have been near her throughout this heartrending epic, have been amazed and immensely fortified by her dignity and courage. The same may be said of Alastair who has been a tower of strength and in all the matters we have had to consult him about, many of them of a morbid nature, he has never failed to give us immediate decisions in the crisp manner so characteristic of his father. All this has made our task immeasurably easier.⁹⁴

On 18 March, Susie, with Alastair (who had been appointed to General Crerar’s staff in England) and some of the English staff, slipped away unobtrusively in a warship from the harbour at St John, wartime conditions decreeing that her going should not be known until she was safely across the Atlantic. Her book scheme ended abruptly on her departure from Canada.

After she arrived home, JB’s ashes were buried in Elsfield churchyard in a private ceremony. Sir Herbert Baker, the architect, whom JB had first met in South Africa decades before, designed the gravestone. He suggested a circular stone, laid flat, with a cross in relief on the top encircled by the Greek words ΧΡΙΣΤΟC ΝΙΚΗΣΕΙ, which translate as ‘Christ will prevail’. Dougie Malcolm, the friend who had beaten JB to an All Souls Fellowship, devised a Latin couplet to go round the stone’s edge:

QUI MUSAS COLUIT, PATRIAE SERVIVIT AMICIS

DILECTUM INNUMERIS HIC SUA TERRA TENET.

‘His own earth here holds a man, who cultivated the muses, served his country and was loved by countless friends.’

Amos Webb, JB’s chauffeur, who was in hospital in Ottawa at the time of JB’s death, died a month or so after his return from Canada and was laid to rest close by. His upright gravestone was also designed by Baker and the inscription includes the words: ‘Friend to Lord Tweedsmuir for twenty years’. In March 1977, Susie’s ashes were buried with her husband’s.

After JB’s death, the editor of The Times told A. L. Rowse that the newspaper had never received so many tributes to a public figure. Rowse was clear that JB paid a price in energy and concentration of achievement for his readiness and willingness to help others:

What he gained in stature was unmistakable; what others gained from him immeasurable. He gave himself away, right and left, with no thought for his own strength, with an inner generosity of spirit that was more than generosity…⁹⁵ How he contrived to get through all the reading and writing he did, let alone everything else he accomplished, beats me; though I do not forget the ceaseless watchfulness and care, the aid and help, direct and indirect of his wife: a rare comradeship in life, in work and public service.⁹⁶

George Trevelyan wrote: ‘I don’t think I remember any one who has died during my lifetime whose death evoked a more enviable outburst of sorrow and love and admiration, public and private … What a friend! I feel he was [the] best human being I have known, and he gave himself so generously to so many friends’:⁹⁷

Whenever I saw John Buchan … I always felt ashamed in his presence that I was not more active, that I did not make more of the wonderful and variegated world of nature and of man, of past and of present, that was our common heritage. One’s own little fire was feeble beside his sunlike warmth, but it was part of the world which meant so much to him, and his interest in one seemed to add to one’s value. How many men and women of all sorts and conditions have come away from seeing John Buchan feeling just like that, going back the stronger to meet the world and wave of men.⁹⁸

Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, the Hollywood actor who had stayed at Rideau Hall, thought him ‘one of the greatest men of our day’ and ‘a hero to me’.

All these were friends, pole-axed by sudden grief, but as telling was something that the republican-minded J. W. Dafoe wrote, not to Susie, but to a Canadian-born politician, Lord Greenwood. Dafoe was a very influential Canadian journalist and editor of the Manitoba Free Press, member of the Rowell Commission, and a Liberal who held no brief for Governor-Generals:

The mourning for Lord Tweedsmuir in Canada was very general and most sincere. Ordinarily a certain proportion of grief for the death of eminent people is, so to speak, official, but I think there was a universal sense of bereavement at the death of Tweedsmuir. He made himself most acceptable to the people of Canada.

Of all the Governor-Generals he had known in fifty years, JB was ‘the pick of the lot’.⁹⁹

He had made an impression in the United States as well. The New York Tribune opined that:

History will have a tough time grading this extraordinary man’s many different contributions to the life of his generation in the order of their importance and excellence … Perhaps the whole effort at classification will be given up in favour of the lasting legend of his versatility and prodigious industry and the indelible impression of him as a person whose warmth of human feeling and adaptability matched his great gifts.¹⁰⁰

After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Arthur Murray, the diplomat, wrote to George Trevelyan:

My thoughts have turned from the President to John Tweedsmuir, who was one of his greatest friends. He had warm feelings of friendship for John, and held him, in the public sense, in the highest regard…¹⁰¹

If he had lived until that autumn, JB planned to go back to Ruthin Castle to get his health right. He might perhaps have achieved the American ambassadorship, since the Marquess of Lothian unexpectedly died in December; this was the job he wanted and for which he was now very well qualified. On the other hand, his wary relations with Winston Churchill, by then Prime Minister, might not have helped his cause.

What is certain is that, if he had survived, he would have continued to write daily while his health held up, fiction for relaxation and solid history for his legacy. At the time of his death he was contracted to write five books, including biographies of William the Conqueror and St Paul, and a novel entitled The Island Called Lone. His powers were not failing. Sick Heart River is for many people, even today, his best novel.

Sick Heart River (Mountain Meadow in the United States) was partly written in the winter of 1938–9, then left alone until after war broke out the following autumn, and revised in December after JB had read Johnnie’s Baffin Island diary.

This novel indicates how much the country and its diverse people had got into his bones. Lilian Killick, who typed it, told Susie that ‘His Excellency is writing a very odd book, so unlike him, so introspective.’¹⁰² Mrs Killick, who knew him as well as anybody outside his family, was puzzled, but she need not have been. What she was clacking out on a typewriter was a spiritual testament, wrapped around by a gripping story of survival and self-sacrifice in the far north of Canada.

The book bears no dedication, but there are quotations at the beginning of each of the three parts. The first is from the Proverbs of Alfred: ‘Thus said Alfred: If thou has a woe, tell it not to the weakling, Tell it to thy saddle-bow, and ride singing forth.’ The second is from Psalm 46: ‘There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.’ The third is a translation from Plato’s Phaedo 58: ‘I had a singular feeling at being in his company. For I could hardly believe that I was present at the death of a friend, and therefore I did not pity him.’ Anyone who reads Sick Heart River will see how apposite are those quotations, the kind that JB had been able to summon at will all his adult life.

The time is the present and the hero, the rich and successful but ultimately lonely Sir Edward Leithen, who, just as Europe is plunging headlong into dreaded conflict, and after a diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, decides he must find a way of usefully employing what time is left to him. He is determined to die standing, as Vespasian said that an emperor should. So he takes up an invitation by John S. Blenkiron, to go looking for a missing New York banker, a French Canadian émigré, who is somewhere in the remoteness of Canada’s far north. He does it with the help of as motley a crew of comrades as are to be found in Huntingtower, including Scottish–Indian ‘half-breeds’ (Metis), First Nations tribesmen and Catholic missionaries.

JB was not dying in 1939 and did not know that Sick Heart River would be his last novel, but it would be strange if he never thought about death. Now that his mother was ‘away’, his thoughts turned more and more to the past. He was the same age as his father had been when he died, he knew that his strength and powers of endurance were on the wane, the pain was almost constant, and he just could not put on weight. Like his pious Scots forebears, he was concerned with his ‘latter end’. As the critic M. R. Ridley puts it: ‘When he wrote it [Sick Heart River] he was, I think, keenly, but tranquilly, aware of the shadow of the wings of Azrael … There are … few books so clearly written sub specie aeternitatis.’¹⁰³ But it would not be true to say that the epiphany that Leithen, the lapsed Calvinist, experiences concerning the mercy of God was JB’s. JB was never a lapsed Christian and Leithen was not Buchan.

Writing his reminiscences in 1939 triggered so many memories that it would be odd if some of these did not haunt him. And he put several into Sick Heart River. At one point Leithen recalls three especially delectable times in his youth: a long day’s tramp in the Border hills as a boy with a fishing rod in hand; supper in his college hall in Oxford, after a day spent in the open air in the surrounding countryside; sitting in a young man’s club in London, looking at fly-books with a friend before setting off for a fishing trip on Exmoor.

It is difficult to get all the marrow out of this novel without an understanding of the sore physical trial that JB’s life had become in his final year, together with his belief, ultimately, in the illusory nature of worldly success, and his long-held and ongoing determination to ‘make his soul’. If Death came, it would not find him unprepared. As it turned out, Death crept upon him unawares – mercifully, we would say – but he was ready for it. Like Leithen, he made his soul and died standing.

Many years earlier, as a very young man, he had written about dying:

He whose aim is high, whose mark is in the clouds, who presses hot-foot on the race, will make light of the sudden darkness which obscures his aim for the moment, the sudden ditch into which he stumbles ere he can climb up the other side. He has no thought of death. He cares not a jot for negatives when he has the burning positive of fiery energy within him; and confident of immortality, he lays aside the mortal and passes beneath the archway.¹⁰⁴

*Supplies for the journey.

*The most expensive rooms, with treatment thrown in, cost 30 guineas a week in 1925.

*This fine monument, by Vernon March, consists of a granite arch with twenty-two bronze figures of servicemen and women from the First World War.

*Now in the John Buchan Story Museum in Peebles.

*The film Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) includes a fictionalised depiction of the Royal visit to Hyde Park.

*The film, ‘Ferdinand the Bull’, came out in 1938. JB to Walter Buchan, 5 October 1929, NLS, Acc. 11627/84.

**William Buchan was accepted by the RAF to train as a pilot in early 1940. His father did not live to hear of it.

*He was to buy JB’s library as a gift for Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1955.

*Governor-General of Canada himself between 1952 and 1959, the first Canadian to fill the role.

*The Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 3.

**Mackenzie King noted this, too.