Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  The historian G. M. Trevelyan, who had by this time become a friend of JB’s, wrote to say that there was not a dull page in it and that it was perfectly fair. Later historians, however, have been more critical, considering that JB was too admiring of Montrose and dismissive of his great adversary and head of Clan Campbell, the Earl of Argyle. But it did bring an important but – outside Scotland – forgotten figure back into the light. JB was still feeling his way in the genre. The book’s equivocal reception was salutary to him and he was to have another more successful crack at the subject fifteen years later.

  With his first two biographies published close together, we might take a moment to consider JB’s approach to the writing of history. In early 1914 he addressed an audience of the Workers’ Education Association on ‘The Muse of History’:

  By history I mean the attempt to write in detail the story of a substantial fragment of the past, so that its life is re-created for us, its moods and forms of thought reconstructed, and its figures strongly represented against a background painted in authentic colours … As in a novel of Scott or a play of Shakespeare, a great piece of life must be taken, the threads of it distinguished, the motives and causes diagnosed, and the movement of it represented with something of the drama of the original. Some will concern themselves chiefly with the evidence, for unlike fiction, history must produce its credentials; some will prefer to dwell on the evolution of ideas and the birth of movements and the contribution of the period to the world’s stock of thought; while others will see only the bright colours and the sounding deeds. Each half-view will claim to be the whole, and will label history accordingly as a science, as a philosophy, or as an art. But the truth is, that no more than a drama or a novel can history afford to be only one of these things. It must have science in its structure, and philosophy in its spirit, and art in its presentation.35

  He went on to say that history must have the swiftness and cohesion of good narrative:

  It must have drama, so that the sequence of events is shown as issuing in some great moment, and, contrariwise, the great moment appears not as an isolated crisis, but as linked to a long chain of causes and inspired by the characters of the protagonists. These protagonists must be made to live again with something of the vigour of reality, and psychology must lend its aid to make them credible human beings. The past must be no design in snow and ink, after the fashion of the minor moralist, but a picture with all the shades and half-tones of life.36

  In 1929 he gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge. ‘The Causal and the Casual in History’ was published afterwards as a pamphlet. It must have seriously irritated the Cambridge historians who heard it, for there was a strong tide running by then against JB’s view that it was sometimes small incidents, rather than enormous social and economic forces, which shaped events.* JB, unfashionably, agreed with George Canning: ‘Away with the cant of Measures, not men! – the idle supposition that it is the harness, and not the horses that draw the chariot along.’** This attitude informed the six biographies on which he hoped his long-term reputation would rest, and made them a pleasure for the general reader.

  Alastair Buchan was not such a scholar as JB and Willie, but he had acquitted himself sufficiently to gain a place at the University of Glasgow, where he studied Classics, joined the Fabian Society to his brothers’ amusement, wrote for the university magazine, and passed all his exams. A friend wrote later: ‘There was no one in his year in College so generally beloved as Alastair … in six years of university life I have never met anyone more honourable, more careless of spending himself for others, more fearless of fighting any injustice than he was.’37 After he left, in the spring of 1914, he began to train as an accountant with the firm of Bringloe and Maxtone Graham in Edinburgh.

  After Christmas, the Buchans went to Littlehampton by the sea, for the health of the children, as well as Susie, who had a troublesome, longstanding cough. JB would go for walks with Alice, ‘the Wozer’, now aged five, whom he found to be ‘a splendid little companion’.38 Although he had been, from the start, a fond father and a far from distant one, he was rather nervous of babies – and was shielded from them by brisk, no-nonsense nursemaids, in any event. Yet, once they were through the mad toddler stage, he found great pleasure in walking and talking with them. Early on, the children acquired a variety of extravagant nicknames, but collectively they were always referred to by their parents as ‘the Blessings’.

  In the summer of 1914, on top of all his other obligations, JB became involved with a matter that made considerable demands on his time and emotional energy and affected his health adversely. Five years earlier, Susie’s cousin and best friend Hilda Lyttelton had married Arthur Grenfell, a man of ebullient charm and charisma as well as apparent wealth. The Grenfells lived in an enormous house at Roehampton, the scene of lavish entertaining. In June, Arthur went spectacularly bankrupt, with personal debts of about £1 million, a vast sum for the time. The consequences were devastating, not least for the creditors.

  Two of the people ruined by this disaster were Arthur’s twin brothers, Francis and Riversdale Grenfell. Both were to be killed in the Great War, Francis winning the Victoria Cross. In 1920, Nelsons published a tribute to them, written by JB and originally intended only for private circulation.39 In it, he described Arthur’s business as having had ‘a career of meteoric brilliance … [which] … had naturally aroused much jealousy among others who had entered for the same stakes’.40 He went on to attribute the failure to a riding accident Arthur suffered in 1912, which had kept him from the business that had been riding ‘high speculative tides’, which required ‘the hand of a skilled helmsman’ and after which ‘it seemed to many of his friends that he was not the man he had been’.41 Additionally, according to JB, efforts by him and others to resolve matters were thwarted by ‘a mysterious current moving through the world’s finance’ and ‘by the middle of July [i.e. a month before the outbreak of war] it was clear that nothing could be done …’.42

  Others saw things differently.43

  Arthur Grenfell, whose business career was already chequered (with particular crises in 1902 and 1907),44 was the driving force in a web of interconnected enterprises concerned with British investment in Canada, at the core of which was the Canadian Agency. One of the first directors was his brother-in-law, Guy St Aubyn, of whom Arthur wrote, ‘he is extremely good at detail, rather precise, & easily frightened and as [sic] I am entirely lacking in these qualities (so necessary for a business man)’.45 St Aubyn resigned in 1909, having complained earlier that ‘Arthur suffers from a sort of financial megalomania’, pursuing ideas ‘because they are big rather than because they are sound’, and expressed his concern at his reckless speculation and improper loans.46 St Aubyn’s fears seem to have been well founded. After the Canadian Agency’s collapse, the Official Receiver’s Report showed that Arthur Grenfell had taken loans from the company of more than £1 million, which had grown, in part, due to the use of company cheques drawn in favour of his brokers. The other directors (including Riversdale) were criticised both for taking no action to restrain these loans and for their efforts to conceal them.

  There were other irregularities, the most serious of which was the misuse of £125,000 from the Natomas Syndicate trust account. According to the solicitor Herbert Smith, who had been engaged to help the Grenfells (and whose name is still incorporated in that of the firm he founded), ‘as and when the [Canadian] Agency was in need of cash, Arthur and Nonus [Riversdale] Grenfell as Directors of the Agency took this cash on resolution of their own, converting the Trust Fund into a regular deposit with the Agency…’47 Smith told Lady Wantage (who was part of the salvage effort), ‘The affairs in connection with the Agency are very far from satisfactory, and it is impossible for me to assure you that Mr. Arthur Grenfell can be regarded as free from the danger of prosecution. If the Natomas debt remains undealt with, I think it is practically certain that he will be prosecuted. On the other hand, if it is dealt with, he is by no m
eans out of the wood, but his prospect of escape is fraught with materially less danger.’48 The Natomas syndicate was squared and, as Smith hoped, Grenfell was not prosecuted, but other creditors persisted and the Agency was wound up in July 1914.

  JB was involved with the recovery attempt, particularly with trying to drum up financial support for the Grenfell family, earning fulsome thanks from family members, who seem to have had no idea of the reasons for the catastrophe. JB had uncharacteristically harsh words for those who were critical of Grenfell. Writing to Susie in late June, he said, ‘Arthur and I are seeing [the solicitor, Sir Frank] Crisp at 1.30. I have just flung Bosanquet and his friends out of my office. They had the cheek to say that Arthur had little financial ability. I told them he was high up in the City when they were being spanked at school.’49 It is apparent that, even by 1920, when he wrote the tribute to the Grenfell twins, JB also had little real understanding of the matter with which he had become involved. He should have delved more deeply, not least by acquainting himself with the conclusions of the Official Receiver.

  Two aspects of JB’s character are here revealed: his loyalty, come what may, and his clannishness. These virtues can, in some circumstances, become defects and this episode reveals that JB’s sense of family duty could badly cloud his judgement. He found it hard to discuss money with friends and family, let alone challenge them. One of his sons was later to say that talking about money gave his father the creeps. There was something naïve about him. It seems he was not the homme d’affaires that others, and indeed he himself, thought he was.

  At the same time as this disaster, Alice endured a serious operation for the potentially fatal infection mastoiditis, after a long spell of acute earache, which racked both her parents. Moreover, war had begun to look inevitable. JB was not suitable for front-line duty, because of his poor health. Although they were at the upper end of the age limit for volunteering, a number of his friends did join up, amongst them Raymond Asquith, Lord Basil Blackwood, ‘Bron’ Herbert (now Lord Lucas), Aubrey Herbert, Jack Stuart-Wortley and Tommy Nelson. There were younger friends, such as the Grenfell twins, ready now to ride through the gates of death, and there was also Willie’s great friend Lieutenant-Colonel [later Brigadier-General] Cecil Rawling, a regular soldier who commanded a battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. On the other hand, Reginald Farrer, an old Balliol friend, who had made a name as an extraordinarily accomplished plant hunter and gardening writer, capable of the lushest prose about plants, was travelling in remotest Tibet in 1914 and was quite unaware of what was happening in Europe until he arrived home in 1916.

  Alastair Buchan was only too aware. When war broke out, he abandoned his accountancy training and, with many of his contemporaries from the University of Glasgow, took the King’s shilling and joined the Cameron Highlanders. He later transferred to the Royal Scots Fusiliers, a Borders regiment with a ringing Stuart motto – Nemo me impune lacessit or ‘No one can harm me with impunity’. Walter was unable to join up because of his important civic duties in Peebles.

  The day war was declared, 4 August 1914, JB and his family were staying in Broadstairs, on the coast of Kent, in order that Alice might recuperate out of London from the operation performed six weeks earlier, and for JB to try to get fit after his own bout of illness, which was becoming increasingly serious and disabling.

  The Buchans stayed in a rented house, St Ronan’s, in Stone Road, quite close to St Cuby, which Hilda Grenfell had taken at the same time. St Cuby was on the North Foreland and the house’s occupiers had the key to a gate, which led to a wooden staircase in a tunnel down to a private beach. Confined to bed and having exhausted his supply of suitable thrillers to read, JB started to write his own. Susie recalled: ‘His mind had been turning for some time towards the writing of detective fiction. He read a few thrillers and said to me one day before the war, “I should like to write a story of this sort and take real pains with it. Most detective story-writers don’t take half enough trouble with their characters, and no-one cares what becomes of either corpse or murderer.” ’50

  JB’s working title was The Kennels of War but, in the end, he called it The Thirty-Nine Steps. There are a number of plausible reasons for the change, one being that Alice, aged six, counted those wooden steps to the beach for her father. She certainly recalled this (according to her son Edmund)51 and, when the steps were removed some time after the Second World War, one tread was kept and sent to the family with a plaque that read: ‘The Thirty-Ninth Step’. (It is now in the John Buchan Story Museum in Peebles.) A legend persists in Scotland that there were thirty-nine steps down to the beach at Pathhead. There are actually rather more, but generations of Fife schoolchildren have grown up with this notion. A more mundane, but possible, explanation is that, because JB celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday on 26 August 1914, the number was in his head. He himself never explained why he picked that number, almost certainly because he had quite forgotten the reason.* He started the book in Broadstairs, but finished it after he had been ordered to bed again at the end of October and stayed for six weeks with Susie’s mother (always a sympathetic listener to tales of illness and woe and blessed with excellent domestic staff) in Upper Grosvenor Street.

  The outbreak of war had an immediate impact on Nelson’s, the publishers. Tommy Nelson joined his Territorial unit, the Lothians and Border Horse, the day after war broke out, while his brother, Ian, joined the 4th Cameron Highlanders a few weeks later. The business would now be in the hands of only two partners, JB and George Brown. On the day war broke out, JB wrote to Brown an anxious letter from Broadstairs:

  ‘We shall have to make arrangements for a bad slump in our business. I earnestly hope it will be possible to keep going at half power so as not to throw too many of our people out of work. Our continental business will go by the board but will it not be possible to do something to fill the gap? Special war publications, for example, or a concentration upon American and South American business.’52

  Brown wrote back immediately saying they would try to keep the ‘Sevenpennies’ going, and suggesting that Nelson’s produce a weekly war magazine. JB was enthusiastic: ‘My notion is a sort of budget of war news, articles and illustrations, sold at some price like 3d … If you like I will edit it. It might succeed and be the basis for future magazine work. In any case, I think it would pay its way and help to keep our staff going.’53

  On 7 August, George Brown was gloomy about prospects generally but suggested that Nelson’s publish a ‘part work’, which would follow the course of the war – an idea that his partner seized upon. They first asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but he wouldn’t do it, and another possibility, Hilaire Belloc, was unavailable for the next six months, since he had a contract with Land and Water. This was probably a relief in view of Belloc’s cavalier attitude to deadlines. In the end, JB made up his mind that he would have to write it himself. By mid-September, when he and his wife were staying at Ardtornish, he had already begun work on the first volume. They decided that Nelson’s History of the War would be published in bi-monthly parts, of 50,000 words each, and JB would instruct a military historian, A. Hilliard Atteridge, to check facts and draw the maps. Other histories were being assembled at the same time by newspapers such as The Times, but they were ‘patchwork compilations’ rather than the work of one man.

  On 9 October, JB wrote to Lord Rosebery, asking whether he would write a short preface to the first volume. The letter shows what was in his mind:

  We are making a great effort to keep all our people in employment, which is not easy, as all our foreign business has ceased. About 170 are with the colours [i.e. have joined up], and we are trying to keep the remainder on full time and also, of course,* to pay wages to the families of those who have enlisted … I have undertaken, as my contribution to this work, to write a History of the War in monthly parts, the first part of which will appear at the beginning of November. [In fact the first one did not appear until early February 1915, at least partly be
cause of JB’s illness.] Military history on these terms is, of course rather ridiculous, but as I shall always be three months behind the fighting I shall be able to know more or less correctly the general lines of what has happened, and I have various ways and means of getting information. We propose to devote any profits from this, as from the rest of our war publications, first of all to our own employees and, if there is any surplus, to general relief purposes…54

  In the end, the idea of giving a ‘surplus’ to charity was abandoned, possibly because it was impractical to hypothecate the profits from the History, but certainly the wives and widows of serving Nelson’s men were supported during the war, as letters of thanks from them attest.55

  JB’s decision, taken in a hurry, was to have momentous consequences, for he felt honour-bound to write the History throughout the entire war, even when he was frantically busy elsewhere; the strain on him, especially in the summer of 1917, would have crushed most people. By July 1919, there were twenty-four volumes on the shelves, amounting to over two million words, only a fifth less than Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but written in four years rather than twelve.

  JB had only had limited direct military experience in South Africa, but he was well versed in conventional military strategy and tactics, both from his wide reading and from conversations with the young, ambitious army officers he had met there, notably Julian Byng and Douglas Haig.

  Ian Nelson, who was more commercially astute than either his brother Tommy or JB, questioned how easy it would be to find the accurate details in wartime. JB acknowledged the anxiety but told George Brown: ‘It is very curious how things clear up as they go along. A month ago it seemed impossible to be definite about the Belgian fighting; today we know pretty well what happened. The same with the retreat to the Marne.’ He thought he would know much more about the Aisne fighting by the time he came to write that part. But this was mobile war; it was to prove far more difficult once the two sides dug in for a long attritional struggle. He told Brown: ‘My chief sources of information are (1) a careful recension of all newspaper reports, which I am having made. It is curious how near you can get by the method of elimination. (2) The French papers, which often contain inspired articles and have very full quotations from the Russian papers, which know more than any other press. (3) Information from returned officers whom I am always seeing. (4) Reports from friends in France and Petrograd. I have also got a good deal of information about Belgian fighting from Belgian refugees. You see our scale is such a small one that we only need to tell the story on its main lines. Details like actual losses, exact numbers of men engaged, and the allocation of different regiments will, generally speaking, be impossible till the war is over; but, then, we do not want these for our scheme.’ He also told Brown that he was following the principle not to say that any regiment in any Allied army misbehaved, since Nelson’s would only get into trouble, ‘and these incriminations had better be left till after the war’.56