John Buchan

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (; 26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian, British Army officer, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. As a youth, Buchan began writing poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 1895 and ultimately writing over a hundred books of which t...

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (; 26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian, British Army officer, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. As a youth, Buchan began writing poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 1895 and ultimately writing over a hundred books of which the best known is The Thirty-Nine Steps. After attending Glasgow and Oxford universities, he practised as a barrister. In 1901, he served as a private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa towards the end of the Boer War. He returned to England in 1903, continued as a barrister and journalist. He left the Bar when he joined Thomas Nelson and Sons publishers in 1907. During the First World War, he was, among other activities, Director of Information in 1917 and later Head of Intelligence at the newly formed Ministry of Information. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927. In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, appointed Buchan to succeed the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada and two months later raised him to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir. He occupied the post until his death in 1940. Buchan promoted Canadian unity and helped strengthen the sovereignty of Canada constitutionally and culturally. He received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom. Early life and education Buchan was born at today's 18–20 York Place, a double villa now named after him, in Perth, Scotland. He was the first child of John Buchan – a Free Church of Scotland minister – and Helen Jane Buchan (née Masterton). He was brought up in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and spent many summer holidays with his maternal grandparents in Broughton in the Scottish Borders. There he developed a love for walking and for the local scenery and wildlife, both of which are often featured in his novels. The protagonist in several of his books is Sir Edward Leithen, whose name is borrowed from Leithen Water, a tributary of the River Tweed. After the family moved to Glasgow, Buchan attended Hutchesons' Boys' Grammar School. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Glasgow at age 17, where he studied classics as a student of Gilbert Murray, wrote poetry, and became a published author. He moved on to study Literae Humaniores (the Classics) at Brasenose College, Oxford, with a Junior Hulme scholarship in 1895 and in his third year achieved a Senior Hulme scholarship, adding to his financial security. At Oxford, he made many friends including Raymond Asquith, Aubrey Herbert and Tommy Nelson. Buchan won the Stanhope essay prize in 1897 and the Newdigate Prize for poetry the following year; he was also elected as the president of the Oxford Union and had six of his works published, including a book of short stories (Grey Weather, 1899) and three of his first adventure novels (John Burnet of Barns, 1898; A Lost Lady of Old Years, 1899; The Half-Hearted, 1900) Buchan had his first portrait painted in 1900 by a young Sholto Johnstone Douglas at around the time of his graduation from Oxford. Author, journalist, war, and politics After graduating from Oxford, Buchan read for and was called to the Bar in June 1901, as a member of the Middle Temple. In September 1901 he travelled to South Africa to become a private secretary to Alfred Milner, who was then the High Commissioner for Southern Africa, Governor of Cape Colony, and colonial administrator of Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, making Buchan an early member of Milner's Kindergarten. He also gained an acquaintance with a country that would feature prominently in his writing, which he resumed, along with his career as a barrister, upon his return to London in 1903. In 1905, he published a legal book, The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income. In December 1906, he joined the Thomas Nelson & Sons' publishing company and was also a deputy editor of The Spectator. On 15 July 1907, Buchan married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor—daughter of the Hon. Norman Grosvenor, a son of the 1st Lord Ebury, and a cousin of the Duke of Westminster. Together, Buchan and his wife had four children, Alice, John, William, and Alastair. In 1910, Buchan wrote Prester John, set in South Africa, another of his adventure novels. He began to suffer from duodenal ulcers, a condition that later afflicted one of his fictional characters, about the same time that he ventured into politics and was adopted as Unionist candidate in March 1911 for the Scottish Borders seat of Peebles and Selkirk. He supported some Liberal causes, such as free trade, national insurance, and curtailing the powers of the House of Lords. But he did not support Home Rule in Ireland and what he considered the class hatred fostered by Liberal politicians such as David Lloyd George. With the outbreak of the First World War, Buchan began writing a history of the war for Nelson's, the publishers, which was to extend to 24 volumes by the end of the war. He worked in the Foreign Office, and for a time was a war correspondent in France for The Times in 1915. In that same year, his most famous novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, a spy-thriller set just prior to the First World War, was published. The novel featured Buchan's oft-used hero, Richard Hannay, whose character was partly based on Edmund Ironside, a friend of Buchan from his days in South Africa. A sequel, Greenmantle, came the following year. In June 1916 Buchan was sent out to the Western Front to be attached to the British Army's General Headquarters Intelligence Section, to assist with drafting official communiques for the press. On arrival he received a field-commission as a second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps. Recognising his abilities, the War Cabinet, under David Lloyd George, appointed him Director of Information in 1917, essentially leading Britain's propaganda effort. In early 1918, Buchan was made head of a Department of Intelligence within a new Ministry of Information under Lord Beaverbrook. Throughout the war, he continued writing volumes of the History of the War. It was difficult for him, given his close connections to many of Britain's military leaders, not to mention the government, to be critical of the British Army's conduct during the conflict but nonetheless did so in certain instances, being critical of government, politics or statements, or disagreeing with statistics. Buchan could enter comment on political events. He complimented Winston Churchill's "services to the nation at the outbreak of war for which his countrymen can never be sufficiently grateful ... but he was usually selected to be blamed for decisions for which his colleagues were not less responsible." At one point, Beaverbrook had requested that Buchan meet with journalist and neo-Jacobite Herbert Vivian and admitted to Vivian that he had been a Jacobite sympathiser. Buchan was in fact ambivalent about the Jacobite cause but he did write romances about that adventurous period, for example, A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899), A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys (1922) and Midwinter (1923). Following the close of the war, Buchan turned his attention to writing on historical subjects, along with his usual thrillers and novels. He moved to Elsfield, Oxfordshire in 1920 and had become president of the Scottish Historical Society and a trustee of the National Library of Scotland, and he also maintained ties with various universities. Robert Graves, who lived in nearby Islip, mentioned his being recommended by Buchan for a lecturing position at the newly founded Cairo University. In a 1927 by-election, Buchan was elected as the Unionist Party Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities. Politically, he was of the Unionist-Nationalist tradition, believing in Scotland's promotion as a nation within the British Empire but also as a constituent of the United Kingdom." The effects of the Great Depression in Scotland, and the subsequent high emigration from that country, also led him to reflect in the same speech: "We do not want to be like the Greeks, powerful and prosperous wherever we settle, but with a dead Greece behind us". He found himself profoundly affected by John Morley's Life of Gladstone, which Buchan read in the early months of the Second World War. He believed that Gladstone had taught people to combat materialism, complacency, and authoritarianism; Buchan later wrote to Herbert Fisher, Stair Gillon, and Gilbert Murray that he was "becoming a Gladstonian Liberal." After the United Free Church of Scotland joined in 1929 with the Church of Scotland, Buchan remained an active elder of St Columba's Church, London. In 1933 and 1934, Buchan was further appointed as King George V's Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Beginning in 1930, Buchan aligned himself with Zionism. He was active and vocal in Parliament in condemning the treatment of Jews in Germany. To a mass demonstration organized by the Jewish National Fund in 1934, Buchan described Zionism as "a great act of justice ... a reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong which have stained the record of nearly every Gentile people." He was a friend of Chaim Weizmann and assisted him to keep alive Britain's commitment to a Jewish state. Despite Buchan's support of Zionism, particularly after he became a Member of Parliament and after the rise of the Nazis in Germany, there are conflicting views as to whether his personal views were overtly antisemitic, imperialistic and/or racist, at least in the period when he wrote his early novels. The Penguin Companion to English Literature characterized him as a "convinced imperialist" and commented: "He tells a yarn with economy. The implications of his social and political ideas, conscious and unconscious, are less admirable." A 1996 article in the Scottish newspaper The Herald (Glasgow) opined that Buchan's poem The Semitic Spirit Speaks "is poisoned by prejudice". It is significant that this satirical poem was, however, never published by Buchan, who didn’t like some of the very rich Jews he met in South Africa, nor did he like Rhodes. There were other Jews in South Africa he obviously did like and became friends with, for example, Hermann Eckstein who hosted the couple’s engagement party in London in January 1907 and Lionel Philips who had a home in Hampshire and where the newlywed John and Susan Buchan spent the first week of their honeymoon (July 1907). Even in earlier writing, there are favourable depictions of individual Jews, for example, A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906) and the 1912 short story "The Grove of Ashtaroth" which shows an understanding and appreciation of the thoughtfulness and spirituality of Jews. Buchan was described as being "overtly antisemitic" by author Anthony Storr. The critic Roger Kimball maintained that "some of [Buchan's] attitude and language" could be interpreted as those of "a colonialist ... a racist ... an anti-Semite." Kimball acknowledged that the attitudes and language about Jews and blacks in Buchan's novels are voices of fictional characters but also opines that it is "likely" that Buchan was "anti-Semitic (and anti-foreigner) in the way nearly everyone in his society was," at least until the 1930s. American academic Jordan M. Poss states such accusations warrant looking into. One passage from The Thirty-Nine Steps in particular "seems damning, unless you remember that Scudder [an American who makes disparaging remarks about Jews] is a fictional character—and unless you keep reading" which provides context to these fictional characters who reflect the prejudices of society then. Buchan's granddaughter Ursula claimed that the charge of antisemitism is almost entirely the result of some unfavourable comments made by his fictional characters, and are not necessari