Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  He was intensely aware that this was an important moment for democracy, now that the suffrage had been granted to women over thirty and men over twenty-one. JB had been an enthusiastic supporter of women’s suffrage, but he could see that mass participation in the democratic process was not without its dangers; in particular it was necessary to provide a clear, attractive path between Left and Right. Moreover, the individual must never be lost sight of; JB thoroughly disliked abstractions such as ‘the masses’.

  The Island of Sheep (1919) is not a book to read for pleasure a hundred years on; it is too earnest, and the preoccupations are sometimes opaque. But there are some gems as, for example, when the leader of the Labour Party says about a Liberal newspaper: ‘I’ve got tired of a paper that’s shaken in every column by a passion of sobs.’9

  The Island of Sheep foreshadows much of his writings in the next two decades, which become more insistent with the rise of authoritarianism and the hijacking of democratic levers for anti-democratic ends. According to the historian J. P. Parry, for JB ‘the counter-attack must proceed along two lines: the private battle within each soul, and the public one to safeguard the marriage of law and self-government which protected it. In one way or another, these struggles were the stuff of most of Buchan’s novels.’10

  *

  There was one piece of business left over from the war, which JB was reluctant to let go: petitioning for an honour for his work during the Great War. Here the modern reader bumps up against one of those practices that seem now both inexplicable and frankly demeaning, although it was the accepted way of doing things in the past.* As early as 1916, R. B. Haldane had petitioned Sir Edward Grey for a KCMG (Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George) for JB, but Grey left office so nothing transpired. Putting the idea of a KCMG rather than the much more commonplace Knight Bachelor into JB’s head, and in particular his mother’s, was a mistake for, in December 1918, he and Lord Beaverbrook discussed how he might get a KCMG for his multifarious efforts, paid and unpaid, during the war. Beaverbrook approached Arthur Balfour, who told him that only the Foreign Office or the Colonial Office could recommend a KCMG, so there was no use applying to the Prime Minister for one for JB.

  Balfour went on: ‘… we only have a very small store and it would really not be fair to rob men who look forward to this Honour after many years under the Foreign Office in order to reward services, however meritorious, rendered to other Departments’. This ignored the fact that JB had worked for the Foreign Office during much of the war. In a postscript he added, ‘Personally I have the greatest possible regard for Col. Buchan, and hold his abilities in very high estimation.’11 JB’s name did not appear in the Honours List of January 1919.

  It is a mystery why JB was not prepared to settle for a plain knighthood, which he would undoubtedly have got** (and which he turned down in 1921), but held out for the more prestigious KCMG or KCB (Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, in the Prime Minister’s gift). Part of the answer must have to do with his mother’s persistent badgering of him and partly with the fact that KCMG and KCB are orders of chivalry, which the KB is not. But most people, even then, would hardly have known the difference, and Knights Bachelor were often ‘upgraded’ in future years, so he could just have bided his time, his wife would have been Lady Buchan and his mother would have been content.

  That was not the end of it, however. In February 1922, JB revived his request, writing to tell Beaverbrook that he was pretty well restored to health and would probably take up politics again, and would like to have a memento of his war service. (It would certainly help his status when he stood for Parliament.) He admitted that his mother was ‘desperately anxious for something of the kind…’12

  In May, Beaverbrook asked him to send a draft of what he should forward to Lloyd George. This embarrassing document, written, as JB said, ‘with a scarlet face’ and which he begged ‘Max’ to destroy (which Beaverbrook obviously didn’t), itemises his public achievements in the war; it included Nelson’s History, which had by far the largest circulation of any war publication, ‘and which by its sanity, breadth of view and reasoned optimism, did much to balance and inform the public mind and had, notably in America, a far-reaching influence’.13 He also said that the recognition of his services would be welcomed by the very large public to whom his name had become a household word.

  All this was probably true, if embarrassing to read in cold print. However, despite the petition that Beaverbrook sent to Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary, on 2 June, signed by Sir Robert Horne and Lord Birkenhead as well as himself, and with the words ‘We set forth many reasons why you should make him a K.C.M.G. For God’s sake, do it!’,14 Churchill did not. Nor was Lloyd George any more inclined to grant him a KCB. Indeed, JB could not have chosen two people less likely to do him a favour, or even play fair by him. Either he had no choice, since his ill-wishers were still in the ascendant, or he did not fully understand how grown men could nurse resentments for years on end. It may have been clearer to him, when Lloyd George published his war memoirs in the mid-1930s, that for the former Prime Minister a grudge was a grudge that could not be forgiven or forgotten.

  All through JB’s adult life he struggled with, and never entirely overcame, a propensity for small acts of vanity. He knew the dangers better than most, but could not quite cure himself of it. No one born to privilege, as so many of his friends were, could truly understand the enduring sense that self-made men have of the road along which their own efforts have brought them. As he thought back, as he surely did, to his childhood amongst shabby people, living next to a muddy lane and close to a coalpit, he would scarcely have been human if he had not wondered why his success and acts of public service had not brought more obvious worldly rewards.

  Two honours that he did get, and without angling for them, were an Italian decoration, the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1918, as well as the Freedom of Peebles, which he was very pleased about. In June 1919 he accepted an honorary LLD from the University of Glasgow ‘in recognition of your eminent services to the country and to letters’.15 At the same time he founded a poetry prize in memory of his brother Alastair at the university, which is still awarded annually.

  In 1919, JB was also determined to gather his strength once more. He weighed only ten stone, and his ulcer was giving him periodic trouble. Indeed, he had such a painful episode in May 1919 that he carried laudanum around with him, in case of a sudden acute attack. The first step to better health, not just for him but his wife and children, seemed to be to find a house in which to live in the country.

  His children had thrived best when staying in the countryside during the war, falling ill with minor complaints on their returns to London, while Susie had been told by her doctor that she should spend more time in the country ‘for her nerves’ sake’. JB’s leisure occupations had always been rural. Walking, fishing, bird-watching and gardening were hard to do from a house in Portland Place, and he always felt better for them. Moreover, the happiest days of his life had been spent in the countryside and, at a very fraught moment in September 1917, he and Susie had managed to get away for a few days to the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire where the very pretty limestone villages and the rolling, wooded hills and green watered vales enchanted them. At the beginning of Mr Standfast, the rugged colonial Richard Hannay describes this peaceful countryside and attributes to it the reason why he is fighting:

  Below were dusky woods around what I took to be Fosse Manor, for the great Roman Fosse Way, straight as an arrow, passed over the hills to the south and skirted its grounds. I could see the stream slipping among its water-meadows and could hear the plash of the weir. A tiny village settled in the crook of the hill, and its church tower sounded seven with a curiously sweet chime. Otherwise there was no noise but the twitter of small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.

  In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was pe
ace, deep and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares.16

  Gloucestershire, the Buchans knew, was too far from London to be convenient if JB were to continue working for Nelson’s, so they started to look in a small circle around Oxford, which not only had a good train service to Paddington and contained a number of their friends, but was a place that held such happy, prelapsarian memories for JB.

  That May, they finally settled on a house, Elsfield Manor, a partly Jacobean, partly Georgian, partly Victorian house in a small, straggling village on the top of the ridge just outside and to the east of Oxford, at the very eastern end of the Cotswolds. He wrote to his mother soon after the deal was done: ‘It was looking ravishing yesterday, and I fell desperately in love with it. I walked all round the borders of the land we are taking.’17 There had probably been a dwelling on the site since Anglo-Saxon times and certainly the land surrounding it appears in the Domesday Book. The present house, however, dated from the seventeenth century, with additions in the following century made by Francis Wise, a scholar and antiquarian, who was the Librarian of the Radcliffe Library in Oxford, and a friend of Dr Samuel Johnson, who visited him there in the summer of 1763. This event is imagined in JB’s historical novel, Midwinter.

  Since 1886 Elsfield Manor had been in the possession of an Oxford banking family called Parsons, who had added a large and very ugly ‘Oxford Gothic’ extension on the north side of the house, with precipitous back stairs and cavernous kitchen quarters in the basement. In 1919 they had sold the village houses and farms they owned to Christ Church but, since the college was not interested in the Manor, the Parsons* sold it on to JB with twenty acres of ground, consisting of a large garden, a small, broad-leaved wood and a couple of meadows.

  The house, built of the soft grey-yellow Cotswold limestone with stone roof tiles, had the quality of a Border keep in the way it rose, cliff-like, from the village street. It was much like Fosse Manor, where Richard Hannay settles into married life, but a far cry from Weald Manor, the elegant Georgian country house at Bampton in Oxfordshire that JB had been unable to secure, almost certainly because he could not afford it. Weald Manor influenced the house imagined in his short story ‘Fullcircle’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1920. To console himself for his disappointment, or to warn himself of the dangers of smug vegetating in the country, JB made the house, Fullcircle, take over the lives of the supposedly fortunate couple who had inherited it, turning them from progressive, atheistic, active do-gooders into complacent Roman Catholic idlers.

  In buying Elsfield Manor, JB was part of a vanguard of professional people who moved out from the cities after the Great War. They bought houses that once belonged to the hoar-ancient squirearchy and, in places, helped to revivify country life.

  In June 1919 the Buchans took their seven-year-old Johnnie to visit Moor Park, just before it was sold by Susie’s first cousin, Lord Ebury, to Lord Leverhulme. ‘It was looking perfectly lovely, but that great kind of house is no use to anybody now except profiteers…’18 Lord Leverhulme would not have liked to have been called a profiteer, but he certainly destroyed the integrity of the Capability Brown landscape by laying out a golf course, which survives to this day.* Also that month, the horse that Waldorf Astor had bred and named ‘John Buchan’ was just beaten into second place in the Derby at Epsom. JB told his mother: ‘He would have won if the jockey had not tried to pass the winner on the wrong side.’19 (It did, however, win the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park in 1919 and 1920, and sired some great horses, with witty names such as Short Story and Book Law.)

  The Buchans’ last day in the old home in Portland Place was 24 June 1919. However, since Elsfield Manor needed a good deal of modernising, especially the installation of new lavatories and bathrooms as well as extensive bookshelves in the library/study, so necessary for JB’s work and comfort, they rented a house in Headington, the suburb of Oxford nearest to Elsfield. They moved into the Manor on 7 January 1920.

  JB told visitors that Axylos, the son of Teuthras, in the sixth book of the Iliad, had built his dwelling by the roadside and entertained every wayfarer.20 I imagine that he used the example of Axylos to excuse the shortcomings of his house rather than buying it on Homer’s recommendation. As ever, he made the best of things. And the Buchans were certainly kind to wayfarers, in this case, tramps, of whom there were many on the roads after the Great War.

  JB described the village in his book of reminiscences:

  Elsfield stood on the edge of the long ridge which intervenes between the Chilterns and Cotswold, a ridge muffled in great woods, and dropping in the north to the fen of Otmoor; so our people were half-uplanders and half-woodlanders, and therefore dissociated both from the shepherd-folk of the high Cotswold and the valley-folk along Thames and Cherwell. They had their own ways, their own speech, their own pride of descent, for you will find the same names to-day in the villages as in mediaeval abbey-rolls, and they gripped like a vice on the past. From my lawn I looked over some thirty miles of woods and meadows to the dim ridges about Stow-on-the-Wold, and, except in the bareness of winter, there was not a house to be seen. That view was a symbol of our detachment.21

  Certainly, it was far more remote before cars became commonplace and the roads were tarmacked, but it was probably a slight exaggeration to say that, less than four miles from Oxford, it was ‘as set in its ancient ways as an isle of the Hebrides’.22 However, it is true to say that both the Manor and the surrounding countryside were as full of historical echoes as Tweeddale: not only was there the Johnsonian connection but Oliver Cromwell’s troops had used the stable yard as a gun park before the siege of Oxford. The great Elizabethan botanist, John Gerard, author of the Herball, had looked for rare wild flowers in nearby Stowood. At the crossroads where the London to Worcester road bisected that from Elsfield to Beckley stood an old elm from which hung a rusty chain; this was the tree on which Haynes the highwayman was hanged, after he shot dead a coachman of the Worcester Mail. Below Beckley lay Otmoor, once marshland surrounded by the seven ‘towns’, whose inhabitants had risen up against the drainage of the marshes for enclosures in 1829 and 1830, in the so-called ‘Otmoor Riots’. The people who lived in those villages were strange to the ridge-dwellers and known as ‘web-footers’. At one end of Beckley Common were the remains of a Roman camp. All this naturally resonated with such a finely tuned historical sensibility as JB’s and he used the surrounding countryside as the setting for two historical novels, Midwinter and The Blanket of the Dark.

  The visitor to the Manor entered by a door off the village street into a stone-flagged hall, the walls covered in white panelling which reflected light, and showed off the undistinguished paintings as well as could be. There was also the head of a ‘Royal’* stag, which JB had shot at Glen Etive in 1912. Beyond an arch, a Georgian staircase curled right-handed to the upper floors. The back hall opened into a morning room and, next to this, a drawing room, also panelled, with tall, deep-set windows. According to a Homes and Gardens article of 1932, hanging on the walls of the drawing room were a painting by Melchior d’Hondecoeter, which I can believe, and one by Poussin, which I cannot. JB bought pictures for their subject matter or associations, not for intrinsic artistic merit, and even in the 1920s a Poussin would surely have been beyond his grasp.

  The Victorian extension tacked onto the north of the Jacobean house contained the dining room and library. Above the marble fireplace in the library hung a picture of one of JB’s heroes, Sir Walter Raleigh, after Federigo Zucchero. But what struck the journalist from Homes and Gardens most were the books in shelves that extended from floor to ceiling: he gushed that there was ‘a splendid collection, including many rare editions. And with a writing desk of generous dimensions, easy chairs and miscellaneous personal items to keep them company, the room imparts a most delightful feeling of intimacy…’23 Both the drawing room and library were certainly very comfortable, with mahogany fur
niture, chintzes on the sofas, plenty of cut flowers from the garden and bright log fires. (They needed them, for there was no central heating.)

  A few years later, the Buchans vastly improved the appearance of the Georgian part of the garden front by removing the flat roof and building another storey with a pitched roof to match the existing one. This provided, above the drawing room, a large upstairs study, with a writing table by each of the three windows, so that JB, Susie and Anna (when she was staying) could all write there. These windows provided the best views from the house.

  The garden consisted of a broad terrace, facing due west, below which was a stiffish slope of lawn, bordered by the elms of Crow Wood, a pond and a ‘druidic’ temple summer house. Beyond was Manor Meadow, and to the side Pond Close, another meadow which concealed a venerable well. To get to Pond Close meant passing through an archway of elms, which framed the magical view of the spires and domes of Oxford, captured by E. H. New when he drew a bookplate for JB in 1926, and which the latter’s son, William, called ‘as serene and heart-catching as a celestial city in the background of an Italian primitive’.24

  On the south side of the Manor was a rose garden, much loved by Susie, together with cottages for staff and a walled garden, complete with glasshouses. On the other side of the house was the stable yard and the chauffeur’s cottage, as well as a large, sloping orchard, a second kitchen garden and a very broad herbaceous border. JB himself would go to the ‘cutting garden’ in the morning to select a button hole before he left for London, and often at weekends he would pick and arrange the flowers for the house; skilfully, as well, much to the exasperation of his wife and daughter.