Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  JB had gone out to South Africa with a number of preconceptions, most of which did not stand up to scrutiny once he had been there for a while. In particular, he began to see that a new, distinctive and positive national identity could, and should, develop in the Dominions, drawing its power from the landscape and heritage of their peoples, rather than simply some anaemic copy of British identity. As a Scot, he knew well that the Scottish nation was racially, linguistically and religiously mixed (including Catholic Highlanders speaking Gaelic and Presbyterian Lowlanders speaking English or ‘Lallans’), and this made him temperamentally and intellectually unsuited to approve a crude policy of ‘assimilation’ of the Boers by the British, which was advocated by many imperialists, including Milner, after the war was won. JB considered it not only possible but also highly desirable for people to hold, sincerely, a number of concentric loyalties simultaneously – to locality, nation and empire. This attitude was confirmed in South Africa, where he discovered Scots people who had lived in the country for generations, yet retained aspects of their old Scottish culture, and he felt they were the better for it. JB understood the Afrikaners (who had both Dutch and French Huguenot origins) better than most because of his background and he wrote in 1902, ‘We cannot fuse the races by destroying the sacred places of one of them, but only by giving to the future generations some common heritage.’70 (The ultimate failure of that ideal led directly to the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948, and all the evil that flowed from that.)

  Early in 1902 he felt impelled (and was encouraged by Milner) to write an extended essay about South Africa, which was published in 1903 as The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction. (He had wanted to call it African Studies, which would have better described it.) ‘I could not help it,’ he told Gilbert Murray. ‘I am so much in love with this country, and have so many things to say which I think ought to be said … I want to talk about the beauty and mystery of the landscape, the curious history, the intricacies of the Boer character, and the racial and economic questions ahead. A funny hotch-potch but I think it will have a certain unity.’71 The history was certainly curious, indeed in places inaccurate, and his attitude to the attributes of the native Africans was very much of his time. But, for a Briton, he was unusually open to the qualities and rights of the Boers, and he was thinking hard about reconstruction. ‘Ideals are all very well in their way, but they are apt to become very dim lamps unless often replenished from the world of facts and trimmed and adjusted by wholesale criticism.’72 These days, the interest in the book lies principally in the accounts of the four long, exhilarating journeys he made into the wilds, his ‘celestial Scotland’.

  JB was often in Pretoria in early 1903 and, sick of hotels, at one point he stayed for a while with General Sir Neville Lyttelton, commander-in-chief of the British military forces in South Africa, and his family. However, after a few days of breakfasting with Lady Lyttelton and her three daughters, he went back to hotel life, for ‘I have lost the art of talking to womenfolk and they bore me to death.’73 The erstwhile President of the Brasenose Ibsen Society told Anna: ‘Miss [Lucy] Lyttelton will talk about Dante and Ibsen, and it is no good pretending ignorance and asking if they were horses.’74 In a letter to his mother, JB mentioned two couples of their acquaintance marrying. ‘Nocht but marryin’ and givin’ in marriage. It’s a comfort there’s nane o’ that in the next warld.’75 JB was writing to his mother and sister what he knew they wanted to hear: that he was heart-whole and not in danger of falling for any pretty, aristocratic girl whom they had never met.

  Perhaps fortunately, in February 1903, a permanent Commissioner of Lands was appointed, which meant that JB could go back to being simply a private secretary, helping to prepare the Budget for the new Federal Council. He felt much less hustled as a result. In March he had planned to conquer the unclimbed north-eastern buttress of the Mont aux Sources, a 10,000-foot mountain in the Drakensberg, with Sandy Gillon, but the latter failed his Bar exams and had to stay at home. Instead JB travelled into Swaziland with Robert Brand to see the country and shoot game. He was beginning to think hard about what to do next – whether to return to the Bar and The Spectator or to carry on with administrative work. As early as April 1902 he and Milner had talked of his future plans, since he had always intended to leave after two years. Milner considered that he had ‘administrative talents of the highest order’, and that if he continued he had a great career ahead of him. However, JB also thought, briefly, of going into the City, on the basis that doing so might provide the financial independence necessary to fulfil his ambition to be ‘a free and honest and effective politician’.76

  His Glasgow and Oxford friend, John Edgar, had come out to Cape Town in March to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the university. However, within a couple of months, he had to take a rest cure because of what was then called ‘neurasthenia’, the first intimations of the periodic bouts of profound depression he was to suffer, and which were to be a source of concern for many years to the triumvirate of Johnnie Jameson, Sandy Gillon and JB. The latter wrote to Anna, ‘Thank goodness my nerves are sound, as though I get overworked I never need rest-cures. It is a great thing to have a sound constitution.’77

  In July, just before sailing for home, he wrote to his mother that he had had ‘a very fine time, a great deal of pleasure, too, but the chief advantage is that I have come on so much, learned so much, know so much better what I can do and what I can’t do. I wouldn’t have missed the experience for worlds, and nothing can make me regret that I came out here two years ago.’78 That said, he had bumped up against the realities of what was possible in public life, and they had sobered him. He had also acquired a creed.

  Looking back in 1939, he thought that South Africa had taught him:

  … that there was a fine practical wisdom which owed nothing to books and academies … Above all I ceased to be an individualist and became a citizen. I acquired a political faith. Those were the days when a vision of what the Empire might be made dawned upon certain minds with almost the force of a revelation. Today the word is sadly tarnished. Its mislikers have managed to identify it with uglinesses like corrugated-iron roofs and raw townships, or, worse still, with a callous racial arrogance. Its dreams, once so bright, have been so pawed by unctuous hands that their glory has departed … Milner, like most imperialists of that day, believed in imperial federation. So did I at the start; but before I left South Africa I had come to distrust any large scheme of formal organisation. I had begun to accept the doctrine which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was later to expound; that the Dominions were not ready for such a union and must be allowed full freedom to follow their own destinies.79

  This was an important difference between him and some of the other Kindergarteners, who cleaved to the idea of a federated British Empire, and is the reason why JB never joined the Round Table movement. His vision was of a collection of self-governing entities bound together loosely but securely by ties of a common legal system and allegiance to the British Crown.

  Both his work on land settlement, and the process of writing The African Colony, had forced JB to think how this could be achieved, and it led him into ways that were, perhaps surprisingly, progressive for their time. Unlike many white people in South Africa, he firmly advocated the use of ‘economic equalisation’, in other words white men working in unskilled jobs, such as those in the mines, rejecting the idea that indigenous Africans should be left to do all the awful jobs.

  Against prevailing white opinion (especially, but by no means exclusively, Afrikaner), JB believed also in the gradual integration of the black peoples into the body politic. ‘I thoroughly agree with you,’ he told St Loe Strachey, ‘that we must do nothing to endanger the chance of the native progressing to equal political rights, as at present he enjoys equal legal rights.’ JB advocated a programme of education to this end. In early 1906, in the context of an uprising of Christian black Africans in Natal, JB wrote an article in The Spectator express
ing his belief in the duty owed by white towards black South Africans and the dangers of inadequate integration. His attitudes read now as paternalistic and condescending, and he used popular expressions that are unacceptable today, but he was in some ways enlightened for his time. The son of the Reverend John Buchan had at least a commitment to the common humanity of members of all races.

  He experienced widespread prejudice amongst white people as a result of his views. The antagonism he encountered may be one of the reasons why he was happy to go home in the summer of 1903, before the two years were quite up.

  Late on in his career in South Africa he was made Secretary of the Inter-Colonial Council, whose purpose was to align policy in the two former Boer republics. His last Council meeting was on 8 July, when he had to supply Lord Milner with the figures needed as he addressed the Council. At the end, Milner made a gracious speech about him, saying he could not have done without his industry and ability. Before catching his ship home, JB spent a few days staying with the Governor of Cape Colony, as he wanted to see something both of Cape Town as well as his distressed friend, John Edgar. He sailed on the SS Dunvegan Castle on 19 August, taking with him a host of curios given him by African chiefs he had met on his travels.

  His two years in South Africa had changed his perspective substantially: his rather arrogant ‘Britain trumps all’ mentality had been swiftly converted to a more humble acceptance that politics, especially the politics of reconstruction after war, are very complicated and, moreover, that other races – of whatever colour – had aspirations that needed to be respected and advanced, if gradually. His pre-South Africa sentiments, which were based on theory alone, could not survive close contact with the country and its inhabitants, including those Dominion ‘irregulars’ who had fought for the British. They were often country boys, and he conceived a real admiration for them, which would be reinforced by seeing them in battle during the First World War. ‘I had regarded the Dominions patronisingly as distant settlements of our people who were making a creditable effort under difficulties to carry on the British traditions. Now I realised that Britain had at least as much to learn from them as they had from Britain … I began to see that the Empire, which had hitherto been only a phrase to me, might be a potent and beneficent force in the world.’80 Perhaps he could not write anything else, since he was Governor-General of Canada at the time, but it chimes with much he said in earlier days.

  The fiendishly difficult post-war situation, coupled with JB’s adaman-tine loyalty to Lord Milner, despite their differences in temperament and outlook, had required him to do some morally questionable things in pursuit of what they considered the general good in South Africa. He had been given awesome responsibility for one so young and, while he had had some successes, he had also suffered embarrassing failures. In the process, he had lost something of his youthful, pleased-with-himself breeziness and he returned to England a wiser man.

  *It should not be confused with The Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison, which flourished for a short while in the early eighteenth century.

  *The French philosopher, whose works fascinated JB at the time.

  **Presumably William Paley, the eighteenth-century Christian philosopher.

  *The theory, proposed first by Heraclitus, that the world is in a state of ‘unceasing flux’.

  **The widowed Lady Arthur Russell was known for the quality of the talk at her table.

  *The minister of the church of the Middle and Inner Temple Inns of Court.

  **Who, once his financial position was secure, became first a Liberal, then a Labour politician.

  *The Earl of Mansfield, the eighteenth-century Scottish judge who became Lord Chief Justice.

  *In those days, every young bachelor would be told who the heiresses were. It must have been acutely uncomfortable for the women involved.

  *Lord Milner in his letter only offered one year, in the first instance; presumably in conversation they had talked of how it might be two.

  *The Venezuelan Arbitration of 1895 concerned the resolution of a boundary dispute between Venezuela and the United Kingdom over a portion of British Guiana. In The Power-House, Edward Leithen is very bound up with the Chilean Arbitration at the time when the arch-villain, Andrew Lumley, dies.

  *Dedication to The Watcher by the Threshold. An edition of The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, with introduction and notes by JB, was published by Methuen in November. It was dedicated to Sir Edward Grey.

  *Jan Smuts being nowhere near Johannesburg at the material time.

  *Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is the brave mongoose hero of a short story in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, published in 1896.

  *Later Lord Milner negotiated a loan of £35 million.

  *There is an impressive memorial to John Buchan in the Wood Bush near Haenertsberg, north-eastern Transvaal. It was unveiled by JB’s son, Johnnie, on 22 November 1987.

  4

  London, Courtship and Marriage, 1903–1907

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

  For a time, South Africa completely unsettled him:

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

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

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

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

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

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