Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Wicks was right about the attitude of JB’s colleagues. When Hubert Montgomery learned what was afoot, he fired off an incandescent letter to JB (which JB passed on to Carson), doubting the suitability of Donald, for ‘he is known to have a parti pris against the Department’, and saying that, if JB resigned as a result of his recommendations, ‘the whole system set up with so much care and carried out with much success in many foreign countries, and notably by Mr [Geoffrey] Butler in America, will be disorganized’. He questioned, too, why there should be another inquiry as there had been one at the beginning of the year when no fault had been found with the actual work. ‘Since then [when JB was appointed] no criticism with any substance in it has been made against the Department by any person with any knowledge of the subject: on the contrary we have evidence from many countries that its work is most effective.’100

  Donald reported in six weeks, having scarcely interviewed a single official or read a document. However, worse than the ignorant report was Donald’s behaviour: he seemed incapable of keeping his mouth shut. He showed his confidential report to friends and published some of its criticisms in his newspaper, the Daily Chronicle. This JB found very hard to forgive. Robert Donald was not, as Leo Amery called him, a ‘ruffian’101 – he was a scoundrel.

  Years later, Sir Roderick Jones wrote: ‘Robert Donald must have behaved more destructively than I ever suspected at No. 10, where he had the ear of the Prime Minister, for John always alluded to him afterwards with an unmeasured bitterness wholly foreign to him and reserved for Donald alone. Towards his fellows generally Buchan was, in my experience, one of the kindest of men; to decry others or to harbour enmity was repugnant to him.’102

  JB recognised perfectly well that improvements could be made, and the episode convinced him that he needed a boss with both a real interest in propaganda and clout in Cabinet. He finally got it in early March 1918, after Carson had resigned on a matter to do with Ireland. Lord Beaverbrook, well known already for his skill and energy as a propagandist for the Canadian war effort, was the final choice. He became Minister of Information, while Lord Northcliffe became Director of Propaganda in enemy countries,* based at Crewe House, quite separate from the Ministry. This was a device for neutralising the perpetually jealous and critical Northcliffe. Robert Donald was made Director of Propaganda in neutral countries, a position in which he did not shine; he resigned after six weeks due to poor health. Home propaganda remained with the National War Aims Committee.

  Lord Beaverbrook was a rich and canny Canadian-born businessman and newspaper magnate, who had been a Unionist MP, but was ennobled by Lloyd George as a reward for helping to oust Asquith from the premiership in December 1916. He had a controlling interest in the Daily Express newspaper, although at this point he resigned from the Express board. When Beaverbrook became Minister of Information, JB was made head of a Department of Intelligence under him; its task was to deal with the acquisition of intelligence (from Foreign Office telegrams and the like) and supply it to those writing the propaganda to be supplied to Allied and neutral countries.

  JB had suffered a demotion but it was not one that seems to have affected his amour-propre. At last, in a Ministry, he was protected from the time-wasting attacks, since the arrows now had to bounce off Beaverbrook’s broad back.

  JB liked working with ‘Max’. He wrote to his mother in May: ‘I am very busy, but finding my work much more satisfying. Beaverbrook has an extraordinarily candid mind and is so willing to learn.’103 He was also an experienced propagandist who understood, as JB did, the power of film and pictorial images. The benefit was mutual: Beaverbrook found JB very hard-working, intelligent, and a safe pair of hands, who would not make blunders like the brilliant but maverick Masterman. However, he did not think him good at fighting his own corner. In an article in his newspaper, the Sunday Express, published in 1919, Beaverbrook paid tribute to JB and Masterman, saying that he (Beaverbrook) had only taken over and developed a department which, although often attacked by the press, was praised by the German General Ludendorff. He was right: Ludendorff had admitted that German propaganda failed, especially in neutral countries, because of the strength of the Allied kind – a ‘moral blockade’104 he called it.

  JB was certainly freer to do what he was good at. An assistant, Hugh (later Lord) Macmillan, remembered his Department as the ‘power house’105 of the Ministry and considered that JB held the key position within it. His work included visits to Buckingham Palace to discuss public opinion in foreign nations with King George V. However, contrary to frequent speculation, JB was no spymaster, even if he did sometimes meet British agents to receive information and, for their sakes, in strange and covert places. What use he made of the information gleaned we will never know. No one who has read A Prince of the Captivity, his 1933 novel, or his short story, ‘Dr Lartius’, can be in any doubt that he knew how spies operated behind enemy lines during the Great War.

  As with the Department of Information, one of the most important functions of the Ministry was to provide facilities for foreign pressmen and influential travellers to see the British war effort, both civilian and military. A conspicuous success with this ‘personal propaganda’ came after JB arranged for the famous American journalist, Lowell Thomas, to meet General Allenby in Palestine in February 1918. In the office of the Military Governor in Jerusalem, Thomas met T. E. Lawrence and, after the war, he toured both the United States and Britain, giving lectures on his dealings with Allenby and Lawrence. In the process he invented ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

  In March, JB was elected to The Club, the most desirable of dining clubs for a cerebral yet sociable man, since it had been founded by Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds in the mid-eighteenth century, and had boasted as members many important figures from the worlds of politics and letters: Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold and William Ewart Gladstone. In 1918 the members included Lord Curzon, Arthur Balfour, Sir Henry Newbolt, Sir Edward Grey, Rudyard Kipling and Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary. There could be no clearer indication that JB was valued for his conversation, and that his modest origins were, for some distinguished figures at least, no bar to his popularity.

  There is nothing in a life more difficult to recreate than conversation. It is as evanescent as a cloud shadow. JB’s facial features, his voice, the way he walked, all these can be recovered in photographs and on film, but how he talked with his wife, his friends, his children, his employees, his neighbours, his fans, seems lost to us irretrievably. In the eighteenth century letter-writers often set down, apparently faithfully, what people said, but by the twentieth century this attention to detail had gone out of fashion. What is more, conversation is as much about the raised eyebrow, the sparkle in the eye, the expressive hand gesture, and these can almost never be reproduced.

  However, one or two of his friends valued his conversation so highly that they have left a sense of it in their memoirs, and we can also glean something of the breadth of his talk amongst his contemporaries from the set of stories called The Runagates Club. We know that he had a generous fund of Scottish tales, and with little or no prompting would break out into broad Scots, sometimes to the mystification of his hearers. We know also that he would talk literature, philosophy and history, but ‘argued about’ politics and religion only ‘professionally’,106 and that discussing money and sex embarrassed him and he rarely if ever mentioned them. His old friend F. S. Oliver, another sparkling conversationalist* as well as letter-writer, encouraged him to be sedately bawdy, but he rarely if ever swore (except about the ‘bloody’ or ‘damned’ war) and never in front of women.

  Walter Elliot, a friend from the Borders, recalled after his death: ‘He would stand and face you and discuss endlessly – wedge-nosed, his head forward and to one side, his lips parted, eager to speak, eager to listen. I do not remember that he ever broke off a conversation. John Buchan wrote as he spoke, and for the same reasons. He liked to meet peopl
e; he liked to talk to people; he loved to hear their adventures. When he couldn’t meet people he invented them.’107 If, as Elliot says, he wrote as he spoke, then we can capture the pleasure of his company by reading his books.

  Here is his son, William: ‘When he was in the company of tall people my father would have to stretch and crane a little to converse with them, and they would stoop to listen to him. But … I never knew him fail to dominate his surroundings. This was done … not by aggression but by a kind of collectedness, poise, concentration coupled with his unique appearance, the bright blue flash of his eyes, a look of expectant eagerness…’108

  Stanley Baldwin wrote after his death:

  In friends indeed he was a millionaire … What a joy was his conversation! The enthusiasm of a boy, the broad humanity with its comprehension of all classes and kinds of men, the generosity, the knowledge, deep and wide, of our own literature: if I had ever by chance come upon some phrase, some paragraph, some lines, which I felt I must show him, ten to one he would know it, quote the context before you had completed it, tell you where you had found it and give you details of the author’s life which had never been published in mortal book.109108

  A friend of Mrs Grosvenor’s told her that she loved talking with JB, because he made her feel clever and at her very best. In Canada, later in his life, when he was Governor-General, people were surprised (and flattered) at his capacity to listen patiently and courteously to them – be they a mining engineer in the Northwest Territories, a farm hand in Manitoba, or a French Canadian Roman Catholic priest. And not only listen, but retain what he heard.

  JB snatched a few days’ holiday in Scotland that June, spending it in Peebles and walking with his mother and sister around their old haunts. On his return to London he discovered that Beaverbrook was very sick and having to lie on a sofa all day, but life was still more orderly now that he was no longer the boss of the whole enterprise. He spent his weekends with his family in Kent, ‘prowling’ in the countryside and climbing haystacks with his children as well as telling stories to them. The Magic Walking Stick, published in 1932, grew out of tales he told on country walks to his children, and later also to his nephew and nieces.

  Meanwhile, though work at the Ministry of Information was more congenial, there was a great deal of opposition from outside it, since Beaverbrook was a businessman who owned a newspaper, and an obvious target for criticism. Members of Parliament were distinctly queasy about Beaverbrook’s access to confidential information, which he might use for his own interests in the future, if not at present. The other Ministries, especially the Foreign Office and War Office, were extremely suspicious of its wide remit. There were both general anxieties about a Ministry that had not been created by Parliament and about whose work the MPs knew very little, and specific criticisms of waste and extravagance, after a recent Select Committee report – even though the Committee’s anger was mainly directed at the Treasury for not keeping a closer grip on the accounting system. But there were also reminders of an embarrassing incident when a member of the Ministry organised the entertainment of foreign journalists in Dublin, and the cost came to an exorbitant £31 with £5 for cigars, a fact that was reported in all the newspapers at the time.

  These matters were debated in the House of Commons on 5 August 1918. JB wrote to his mother that day in anticipation: ‘My own conscience is void of offence, but Lord B has so many enemies that I will get some of the mud intended for him.’110 The subsequent report of the debate in The Times prompted a letter from Mrs Buchan, which caused a now very rare outburst of anger from her son. We don’t have her letter, but we do have his reply: ‘I never thought you would distrust me. They were blunders of subordinates – the kind of thing that occurs daily in a government department.’ She must have ranged widely for he continued, ‘I had a Herculean task, for I could get no assistance from the Prime Minister and had to build up a department as best I could. I insisted on sticking by various unpopular men like Masterman and I had a pack of journalists on my heels. I believe I did good work in spite of difficulties. I stuck by Beaverbrook, and I think I have prevented him making many blunders, but of course he has many enemies and I get a share of them.’ In the debate, the Ministry had its spirited defenders, most notably Stanley Baldwin, who drew attention to comments in the German press that the British propaganda effort was superior to their own, despite far less being spent on it.

  Mrs Buchan was stricken with remorse, for he replied to her next letter: ‘However did you get so wrong about the row we have had? There was never the slightest charge against me personally. The point of the Select Committee was to blame the Treasury for not accepting and putting into place the system of accounts I suggested, and so preventing a better accounting check. The story of the Irish trip was a blunder by a subordinate whom I sacked for it. The dinner they objected to was given under a direct instruction from the War Cabinet. The stories of waste of paper were lies, as were admitted in the House.’111

  Lord Beaverbrook decided at this point that it would be wise to shrug off the secrecy and present a short paper to Parliament on ‘The Organisation and Functions of the Ministry of Information’. Much of the report must have come as a complete surprise to the politicians who read it. The terms in which it is couched give its author away:

  Propaganda is the task of creating and directing public opinion. In other wars this work has not been a function of the Government, but has been left to the enterprise of the private citizen, since it is the traditional British plan to do nothing by official channels which can possibly be done outside them. But it was soon evident that in a struggle which was one not of armies but of nations, and which tended to affect every people on the globe, this aloofness could not be maintained. Since strength for the purposes of war was the total strength of each belligerent nation, public opinion was as significant as fleets and armies…112

  On 9 September, Susie gave birth to another boy. JB wrote: ‘He is a very fine fellow – weight between 9 and 10 lbs and a regular fair-haired, blue-eyed, square-headed Buchan type. He was perfectly hideous when he was born and very like Haldane; and now he has become rather good-looking. He is to be called Alastair Francis, after Alastair [Buchan] and Francis Grenfell. I wish my dear Father was alive to baptise him. On Sunday night I read a lot of old letters – Father’s, Willie’s, Raymond’s, Cubby’s and Bron’s, and it was like opening graves. The birth of a new child makes one realise the great and good people who are dead.’113

  On 26 October, Beaverbrook underwent an operation for a throat abscess, and resigned as Minister a couple of days later. On 11 November, the day of the Armistice, JB visited all the Ministry’s departments, shaking everyone by the hand, then went home to bed, without bothering to join the public celebrations. But he heard news from the front, which he put into The King’s Grace in 1935:

  In the fog and chill of Monday morning, November 11th, the minutes passed slowly along the front … Officers had their watches in their hands, and the troops waited with the same grave composure with which they had fought … Suddenly, as the watch hands touched eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.114

  Two days after the Armistice, the War Cabinet ordered the liquidation of the Ministry of Information. JB was asked to wind up most of its activities, and transfer those that were to survive elsewhere, with Sir Campbell Stuart doing the same for ‘Crewe House’. JB, helped by a number of volunteers, set to with a will, cancelling all schemes, terminating contracts and giving notice to his officials, both at home and abroad. Publications, stills photography and film-making ceased at once, as did entertainment for American troops in Britain. But the work of a number of sections, especially those to do with foreign countries (including entertaining foreign visitors), wireless and cables and the library, were sensibly transferred to the Foreign Office, to form th
e basis of a propaganda department to continue at least until the peace negotiations were completed. The photographs and paintings were handed over to the fledgling Imperial War Museum, providing a unique and invaluable visual resource accessible to the public to this day. Five tons of documents were destroyed. The whole process was completed in just over a month, by 18 December.*

  In July 1918, JB had written to Donald Maclean, the Liberal sitting member for Peebles and Selkirk, telling him that he would not be standing against him in the forthcoming election, whenever that was to be held. This was a principled decision, reached partly because of his conviction that, in attitudes towards post-war reconstruction, the two men were ad idem, and partly because he thought there had been an undemocratic banding together of Conservatives and Liberals, with the government granting ‘coupons’ to malleable Conservatives. Despite the efforts of Beaverbrook and others to get him to reconsider, he had come to hate the whole business of politics at that moment and would have nothing to do with it.

  It is entirely understandable that he should wish to go somewhere quiet at the end of the war to recover his strength and mourn his brother and his friends, rather than immediately plunge into a hurried, frantic and ill-tempered general election, at a substantial distance from London. The ‘Make Germany Pay – Hang the Kaiser’ election was held in December 1918, while he was busy liquidating the Ministry. However, he showed in his 1935 book, The King’s Grace,115 how well he understood the difficulties of the post-war world, and how much he deprecated the vengeful tone of British politicians, which helped result in such a controversial settlement at Versailles. This was not ex post facto reasoning; his attitudes immediately post-war were equally moderate. His temperate, reasonable voice would have stood out in such a febrile, unforgiving place as the House of Commons in 1919. As for his personal political career, the decision was against his interest. He had turned forty-three in 1918, and was still young enough to make his mark. That was far less certain by the time he eventually reached Parliament in 1927, when he himself admitted that he was too old to begin to try for Cabinet office.