Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  The summer of the following year, 1927, was spent partly on the mountainous coast of the Isle of Mull. The house the family took was close to the River Lussa, where it entered the sea-loch, Loch Spelvie, so they caught sea-trout, watched eagles and otters, and did their best to avoid the many adders that made their home in the heather. JB, as was his custom, worked on a novel in the morning (The Courts of the Morning), fished for an hour until lunch, then walked or bird-watched with the children in the afternoons. On Sundays, when they were not allowed to fish, they would go on expeditions, for example to see the salmon jumping up the waterfall at Tor Ness. It was one of their happiest holidays. His son Johnnie recalled it:

  During our third week at Ardura the worst school report that I have ever had … arrived by the somewhat erratic post. My father was horrified by it. It was a close thundery day when the post arrived. Then the clouds broke and the whole valley was a smoking deluge of thundery rain. Within fifteen minutes it was reported that the river was rising.

  My father was a fisherman first. We grabbed our rods and all four of us tumbled down to the sea pool … When we came back – soaked to the skin – we were carrying a heavy basket up the steep slope to the house. Practically nothing was said about my report after that. It was talked over briefly, but without rancour, as one might discuss an unpleasant happening, reported in the newspapers, in some part of the world where Britain had no responsibilities.91

  While on Mull, JB received a John Macnab-style challenge from three sporting Clydeside Labour MPs, but to his great regret he could not accept it as they were just about to leave the island.

  Many Buchan fans will have taken a copy of the recently published Witch Wood with them on holiday that summer. Dedicated to his brother Walter, this book was born of the researches he had done over the years on the Marquis of Montrose, which had led first to his 1913 biography and would lead to a revised version, published in 1928. Witch Wood is the product of the keenest of historical sensibilities, and it lacks the obviousness of John Burnet of Barns, since by the 1920s JB was vastly more at home with the speech patterns and thinking of seventeenth-century Scots. And he really minded about the subject. In a number of the historical novels he tried to explain the hideous perversion of religion represented by seventeenth-century Covenanting Protestantism, and the harm it did to Scotland, but nowhere was his hand surer than in Witch Wood.

  He himself wrote of his novels that ‘The best, I think, is Witch Wood, in which I wrote of the Tweedside parish of my youth at the time when the old Wood of Caledon had not wholly disappeared, and when the rigours of the new Calvinism were contending with the ancient secret rites of Diana. I believe that my picture is historically true, and I could have documented almost every sentence from my researches on Montrose.’92

  In the novel, the Marquis of Montrose plays a crucial, if mostly offstage part, winning over the earnest, ardent and scholarly young Kirk minister, David Sempill, who has the cure of souls in a benighted parish in Tweeddale, called Woodilee and based on Broughton. Some of the self-righteous members of his congregation are in fact practising witchcraft in the Wood of Caledon; David determines to root it out, with the help of Katrine Yester, an idealised young gentlewoman straight out of a Border ballad, with whom he falls in love, as well as a few villagers of generally ill-repute. In the process he uncovers hypocrisy and licentiousness on a grand scale, but he brings down the wrath of his blinkered Kirk superiors, haters of the ‘malignant’ Montrose, lovers of ‘church discipline’, and deeply suspicious of Sempill’s emphasis on Christian charity to all.

  JB took more care over this book, particularly the psychology and the characterisation, than over his rollicking adventure stories, and devised some memorable characters, such as David’s friend, Mark Riddel, Montrose’s captain, whose denunciation of fundamentalist Bible literalism is a tour de force. In this story JB tackled antinomianism – as he did in Salute to Adventurers. Even more than sexual perversion, which he addressed in The Dancing Floor, JB detested religious perversion.

  The minister, David Sempill, is one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action (compare The Free Fishers). He is also one of the most complex. His character, without doubt, is based on the Reverend John Buchan. This is a book of light and shade, of paradisaical contentment and stark tragedy. Much of the dialogue is in Borders dialect, already in rapid retreat by the 1920s. But the idiom (which is not difficult to pick up, and there are online dictionaries to help) adds mightily to the power of the language – as does the author’s sure use of Biblical texts.

  Witch Wood is the only example of JB writing a novel as a result of research for a biography. His revised and expanded Montrose was published in 1928. As in 1913, the book was dedicated to the memory of his brother Willie. He had started to collect more material, in particular seventeenth-century pamphlets and contemporary accounts, as soon as the first book had been published, and began to write it during the General Strike of 1926, finishing it in March 1928.

  He made a much better fist of the task second time round. It was 100 pages longer and much more nuanced in tone and fact. He said his aim was to ‘present a great figure in its appropriate setting’, and this is an excellent guide for anyone confused about the precise nature of Scottish seventeenth-century religious struggles, part of what we now call the War of the Three Kingdoms. This book may one day be superseded in scholarship but it is unlikely ever to be bettered for readability. It won the James Tait Black Prize – the only literary award that JB ever achieved. Clarity of thought, brevity of expression, acute historical imagination, breadth of learning and courage of conviction were the hallmarks of his biographies, and Montrose exhibits all these qualities.

  The strengths of Montrose are the ones you would expect: the vivid descriptions of weather and landscape, the understanding of military tactics, religious profundities and political wranglings, and the portrayal of a man of (usually) honour and integrity, a romantic hero born well ahead of his time. Montrose was committed to religious toleration, at a time when that was widely considered the Devil’s work in Scotland. That, for JB, was his crowning glory. He told friends that this book contained much of his own philosophy of life. Montrose and Witch Wood are compelling expositions of the disastrous consequences of religious fanaticism – destructive both to society and to the faith it perverts.

  One of the most thoughtful of all the congratulatory letters that JB received came from T. E. Lawrence in Waziristan, where he was stationed in 1928. He was reading Montrose ‘inch by inch’ – keeping it in the Wireless Cabin where he had to collect signals several times a day, and taking ten minutes off each time to read it:

  I had not suspected, from my desultory reading of the Civil War, that such a man existed. The style of his last words on the gallows! And those profound memoranda on political science … He has been unlucky in waiting three hundred years for a real biographer: but he must be warmly happy, now, if anything of his personality can still feel. You unwrap him so skilfully, without ever getting yourself in our way. The long careful setting of the scene – first-rate history, incidentally, and tingling with life, as if you’d seen it – and on top of that the swift and beautifully-balanced course of action. Oh, it’s a very fine thing … Too long, this letter. But I couldn’t help telling you of the rare pleasure your book has given me. Its dignity, its exceeding gracefulness, its care for exactness and the punctilio of your manners, fits its subject and period like a glove. You’ve put a very great man on a pedestal. I like it streets better than anything else of yours.93

  *The memorandum contained representative names from writers, clergy of every stripe, trade unionists, journalists and editors, politicians, intellectual Socialists and Liberal aristocrats.

  *Cf. Peter Pienaar and his fate in Mr Standfast.

  *He told the Provost of Peebles that he believed whole-heartedly in a League of Nations, not because he was a dreamer, idealist or humanitarian but because he was a practical man. ‘I want u
s not only to have won the war but to bank our winnings and I can see no other way but this.’ JB to the Provost of Peebles, 1 January 1919, Queen’s University Archives, John Buchan fonds, locator 2110, box 3.

  *When Walter Scott wanted to be a Baron of Exchequer, he wrote to the Duke of Buccleuch: ‘… a man may, without condemnation, endeavour at any period of his life to obtain as much honour and ease as he may handsomely come by’. Quoted in John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott, Cassell, London, 1932, p. 167.

  **A great many were given out after the war for acts of public service. For example, William Jury, head of the Film Department in the Ministry of Information and junior to JB, received one.

  *The elderly Miss Parsons moved to another house in the village and became a friend as well as an important ally in Susie’s attempts to interest an evasive female population in the benefits of belonging to the Women’s Institute that she founded in the early 1920s.

  *The house became the grandest of golf clubhouses.

  *A ‘Royal’ has antlers with fourteen points. It is now in the John Buchan Museum in Peebles.

  *The gold watch given to him by the John Knox congregation when he went to Oxford shone brightly from constant use.

  *Catherine Carswell, a novelist who had also published books on Robert Burns and D. H. Lawrence, helped Susie to put together two books, The Clearing House and John Buchan by his Wife and Friends, after the Second World War.

  *He was later a literary critic, biographer and public lecturer in the United States.

  **The house plays a part in Midwinter.

  *Rimmon was a Syrian god, mentioned in 2 Kings, chapter 5. Naaman, the Syrian commander, although cured of his leprosy by the prophet Elisha, still feels he must support his king physically, by bowing down when he did in Rimmon’s temple. What Helen Buchan seems to have missed, but JB would not have done, was that Naaman did it only out of loyalty.

  **They were baptised into the Church of Scotland.

  *A quarter of an old penny. The first print run must have been an impressive 24,000.

  *Professor Rait was a popular Principal of the University from 1929 to 1936.

  *This book was still being given out as a reader when I first arrived at grammar school in the mid-1960s.

  *Baillie Nicol Jarvie is an important figure in Rob Roy.

  **Scott scholars will no doubt find other associations in the book.

  *First encountered as a brave but insubordinate RFC pilot in Mr Standfast, Sir Archie Roylance – airman, ornithologist and Scots laird – was one of JB’s favourite creations, appearing in six novels, and referred to in two more.

  *Sadly, because it was filmed on nitrate film stock, which was highly flammable and also degraded over time, there is no extant version of this film. Since then, there have also been two radio and two television dramatisations.

  **Best known for a collection called Hamewith (1900).

  *‘Fratri Dilectissimo’, ‘Fisher Jamie’ and ‘From the Pentlands Looking North and South’.

  *Other important donations included £5,000 from Lord Rosebery to establish a Department of Manuscripts. Rosebery, a most avid reader and discriminating bibliophile, also gave many important volumes from his enormous libraries.

  **JB left all the books that he had gathered on Montrose to the National Library of Scotland on his death. Many of his personal papers, as well as those of his wife, brother, sister and eldest son are also held there.

  *The house in Ottawa that he had inherited from his predecessor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

  *She was exonerated by the Massachusetts General Court in 1957.

  *Funded by money raised in memory of the twenty-two alumni who had died in the Great War.

  **16 October 1924.

  ***He was in fact invited to give the inaugural lecture the year before, but was too tied up at Nelson’s to contemplate a trip in 1923.

  *Sadly, but not surprisingly, there is no record of what JB said to King George V, or vice versa.

  8

  Elsfield and London, 1927–1935

  JB’s political ambitions had been slow to revive after the war. He resigned the Conservative and Unionist candidacy for the Peebles and Selkirk constituency (by this time Peebles and Southern Midlothian) in 1918 and turned down the offer of Central Glasgow, in succession to Andrew Bonar Law, in 1922. That did not mean that he was not thinking about politics or meeting politicians. In particular, he had grown to know and admire Stanley Baldwin, the mild-mannered, shrewd, politically conservative but socially progressive, rather lethargic ex-businessman, the would-be classical scholar who also loved the works of Sir Walter Scott. As for Baldwin, he had been a fan of JB’s fiction ever since a day in 1902 when he had bought a second-hand copy of The Watcher by the Threshold at Paddington Station, and he responded positively to the younger man’s keen intellect and lack of partisanship when he met him. From 1924, they began to collaborate on plans to expand Conservative education.

  In 1927, on the death of Sir Henry Craik, JB was invited to stand as one of the three Members of Parliament for the Scottish Universities in the resulting by-election. He scarcely hesitated before accepting, since this constituency had the virtue, for a man in indifferent health, of not requiring him to do any of the wearing electioneering or speech-making that had been necessary when he was the candidate for Peebles and Selkirk. He had merely to write one election address, to be sent out by post to all the eligible voters, who were the graduates of the Scottish Universities.* He achieved 88 per cent of the vote.

  When he had first stood as a political candidate in 1911, there were friends uncertain as to which party he would espouse. In 1927 there was no such uncertainty, but he let it be known that, although he sat as a Conservative, since he was a firm believer in party government, he was an MP for the Universities and he would not be single-mindedly partisan. After he arrived in the House of Commons, he was apt to call members of other parties ‘My Honourable Friend’ if he knew and liked them, when the convention was (and still is) to do that only to those on your own side. As he wrote in a short story of 1910: ‘Every man has a creed, but in his soul he knows that that creed has another side, possibly not less logical, which it does not suit him to produce. Our most honest convictions are not the children of pure reason, but of temperament, environment, necessity and interest. Most of us take sides in life and forget the one we reject.’*

  As it happened, 1927 was a difficult year for the Conservatives. Large majorities cause their own problems, especially for newer members who want to get on, and the party had also been thoroughly shaken by the General Strike of 1926. The first major debate of the new session concerned the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Bill, designed to outlaw secondary industrial action and ensure that there could not be another General Strike. Labour members thought the measure vindictive and were also fearful that funds from unions would decrease, since this Act required trade union members to contract in rather than out of the ‘political levy’. All in all, the Bill had rather soured the atmosphere in the House.

  Nevertheless, this was an exciting time for JB. Here was something he had dreamed of doing – if intermittently – ever since he was a young man, and he always enjoyed feeling that he was in the centre of the action. He had plenty of ready-made friends in the House of Commons: Lord Hugh Cecil, who was MP for Oxford University; Philip Snowden; Walter Elliot from the Borders; and Leo Amery, the imperialist thinker from South African days. He soon made more friends, such as Oliver Stanley, W. S. (Shakes) Morrison, Robert Boothby and Harold Macmillan. Members of Parliament were genuinely fascinated to meet him, since he was a celebrity.* And he developed a broader acquaintance than most, for he was on good terms with many in the Labour Party, and seemed able to draw out the best from even that dry old stick, Clement Attlee.** The latter thought him a most delightful man and a very broad-minded one – ‘a romantic Tory, who thought Toryism was better than it was’.1 Even the wilder Glasgow members, such as James Maxton, a ‘Hutchie bug’ like JB, Tom Johns
ton and David Kirkwood, did not scare him, despite Maxton having been imprisoned for a year during the Great War for promoting strife in the shipyards. These men found JB friendly, sympathetic and non-partisan, and he liked their humour and egalitarianism. However, his propensity for speaking kindly of most people meant that he was open to the charge of insincerity and even, occasionally, toadyism.

  Life changed substantially for JB when he became an MP. Instead of commuting daily to London, he left Elsfield on a Monday morning and came back on Friday afternoon. Susie travelled up to London sometimes to join him, particularly if they had accepted a dinner invitation, but she was happy to stay mainly in the country. He would lodge with his mother-in-law in Upper Grosvenor Street or (more conveniently for the House) with her hospitable sister, Blanche Firebrace, in Buckingham Palace Gardens; but more often he slept at St Stephen’s Club, a haven for Conservative MPs, close to his office in St Stephen’s House and across the road from the Houses of Parliament. If not invited to dine out, he would eat mainly in the House of Commons or in one of his clubs. He wrote to Susie every day, the letters a mixture of concern for her, the children and their doings, a list of the people he had dined with, and political gossip – a distillation of the day’s events, fleshed out no doubt over dinner on Friday. Mercifully for Susie, his letters were often typed by Lilian Killick, for they were practically illegible when he wrote them on his knee while listening to a debate in the House.