Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Private letters, especially those to his family, did not often bring out the best in JB as a writer. Once his youth was past, he saw letters as a means of keeping in touch, rather than – except on rare occasions – displaying his feelings or his personality and interests. He wrote so many, particularly to his mother and his wife, that they have a rather deadening sameness to them. They were the early twentieth-century equivalent of the nightly telephone call to reassure the recipient that they are loved and all is well. Only at times of triumph or disaster did he expand in his letters to his mother. Those to Susie were not very different, except that he would ask for her advice, especially on family matters, and he rarely, if ever, failed to tell her how much he missed her. His letters to his children, as they grew, were affectionate, perceptive and engaged. Any criticism was lightly done, while praise was heaped on honest effort in any field.

  He spent his mornings either at Paternoster Row or at Reuters’ headquarters in Carmelite Street. He would lunch with political colleagues in the House, pass the afternoons sitting on Parliamentary Committees or charitable trusts and, after dinner, would spend the rest of the evening in the House, listening to debates or waiting to vote. It was a pleasant, orderly, thoroughly masculine existence.

  Although he took his seat in May 1927, he bided his time before delivering his maiden speech. The occasion he chose was the vote of censure moved by the opposition leader, Ramsay MacDonald, on 6 July against the government’s proposals for reform of the Parliament Act, on the grounds that these were unconstitutional. These proposals, which had been developed by, amongst others, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cave and Lord Birkenhead (F. E. Smith), were designed to restore some of the powers to the House of Lords that had been ceded in 1911. By 1927, however, attitudes had altered, and these proposals were causing disquiet even in die-hard Tory circles, especially as the House was at that moment embroiled with the contentious Trade Disputes Bill.

  The censure debate began with a speech by MacDonald. He was followed by the Prime Minister, who defended his noble colleagues’ plan but made it pretty plain that his heart was not in it. JB, knowing that he had 150 of the more progressive Tory members at his back, then rose to his feet and criticised the Labour leadership for wanting to censure the plans but also the Tory government for supporting such backward-looking proposals. His thesis was that the Parliament Act had turned out surprisingly well and that, although the British constitution had many anomalies, it nevertheless appeared to work. He went on to say that the argument used for Cave’s scheme was fear of some revolutionary intention on the part of some future Government. There was no worse cant talked in public life, he averred, than the cant about revolution:

  … whether it is used by those who hanker after it or by those who fear it … I am as credulous and as imaginative as most men, but my imagination and my credulity cannot rise to these apocalyptic heights. But suppose there was any such danger of revolution, how could any paper barrier prevent it? There will be no revolution, no constitutional revolution, in Britain until the great bulk of the British people resolutely desire it, and if that desire is ever present, what Statute can bar the way?2

  In his speech he also quoted Edmund Burke:

  The old building stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, till an attempt be made to square it into uniformity. Then, indeed, it may come down upon our heads altogether in much uniformity of ruin.3

  It was a nimble and witty speech, with graceful allusions to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents, and it was endorsed by both David Lloyd George, who called it a brilliant, wise and eloquent maiden speech, as well as by Winston Churchill, both men who he might not have expected to back him. One Liberal MP, Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy, said his speech could not have been made more damaging if it had been delivered from the Liberal benches.

  JB told his mother the next day, in a long letter euphoric from relief: ‘I never started anything in such poor form. I was feeling very tired and not very well, and it was horrid, hot, muggy weather. To make things more difficult “The Times” announced that I was going to speak, and the whole stage was set as if I had been a Cabinet Minister … Besides, I was going to attack the [Tory] Government and try to get them to drop this foolish House of Lords scheme, which would split the party, and that is not an easy job for a new Member, especially when the Prime Minister is an intimate friend.’ Matters were not helped by Stanley Baldwin not saying exactly what JB was expecting him to say, so he had rapidly to recast his speech. He rose to his feet at about 5.30 p.m., ‘with a very empty House, in which interest was absolutely dead. You know I am not often nervous, but my legs knocked together and my mouth was as dry as a stick!’ He spoke labouredly at first, but as the word went round that a maiden speech was in progress and the House filled up, he began to enjoy himself. He spoke for more than twenty minutes and was cheered to the echo, so that Lloyd George had to wait several minutes before he could begin. ‘I had a ludicrous amount of congratulations, which I must store up against the day when I shall make a fool of myself.’4 He particularly enjoyed telling his mother how pleased the Clydeside Labour Members had been, coming up as a group to congratulate him. Maxton told him, ‘Man, we were terrible nervous when you began, for we thought you weren’t going to get away with it, and we were awful happy when you got started!’5 To Henry Newbolt, JB wrote: ‘I got on surprisingly well, but my goodness! I was in a funk at the start. There is no doubt that the thing that pays in life is audacity. We have killed this foolish scheme, and Baldwin told me privately that I had done him a great service.’6

  James Johnston, a political commentator, wrote that he had heard many maiden speeches, but none that made such an impression on him and the House. He thought the voice sometimes had something of the ‘Free Kirk whine’ about it, but was generally a pleasant blend of Scotland and Oxford. However, it did not match the golden quality of the words. He thought the speech statesmanlike in the noblest sense ‘for it exhibited a mind which does not live on catchwords and stratagems but on great fructifying ideas’.7 The Spectator stated: ‘The wide knowledge of a student of history, the grave enthusiasm of an ardent patriot, the pawky commonsense and shrewd realism of a Lowland Scot, the deep sympathy and understanding underlying the whole, and the impressive eloquence of the final passages, combined to give this speech an unusual distinction, and to place it upon a plane far above the level of ordinary Parliamentary debate.’8 JB gave an equally accomplished speech a few weeks later on the history of the Union with Scotland, and the benefits it had brought, which may have surprised MPs by its mixture of wit and erudition. All this augured very well.

  Later that year, a measure came before the House that thoroughly engaged his interest. It concerned changes to the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, which had been accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities but which had to come before the House of Commons, since the Church of England is established and subject to statute. The Book of Common Prayer dates from 1662, but is close to that devised by Archbishop Cranmer during the previous century. The language was already archaic by the seventeenth century and, by the early years of the twentieth, was causing disquiet to Anglican clergy – although not their congregations, who generally were keen to keep to the old ways. The modifications that the Church of England advocated were not substantial, but they were unacceptable both to Low Churchmen, who thought them too Romish and, to a lesser extent, to High Church Anglicans, who thought they were too Calvinist.

  This debate produced a great deal more heat than light, since MPs, especially Evangelicals, seemed to wish to fight the Reformation all over again, and it needed the cool intelligence of a man bred in another tradition to try to bring them back to some sense of the point of the debate, namely the constitutional rather than liturgical implications of a measure that the Church of England hierarchy was impatient to implement. Although raised in a different Church, JB knew a great deal more than most of his colleagues about the history and content of t
he prayer book that they clung to. He attended a Book of Common Prayer service every Sunday in Elsfield, and was well versed in church history.

  In an elegant speech he tried to tear the debate away from the metaphysical and back to the pragmatic. He likened MPs to Milton’s fallen angels ‘in wandering mazes lost’. He owned that there was a fear that the measure was a denial of Reformation principles and a departure from the Reformation heritage, but maintained that, since England was a Protestant country, he regarded the Reformation settlement as an implied part of the Constitution. It was masterly because it was so clear.

  [The Reformation] was a re-birth of the spirit of man. Its essence was simplification. The great organism of the mediaeval church, with all its intricate accretions of fifteen centuries was exchanged for a single revelation, the voice of the Almighty speaking through His word to the individual heart and judgement … Liberty was its keynote, liberty as against enforced obedience. It involved in a reformed Church a certain degree of self-government and that involved the right to change … But what I would press upon the House is that this liberty to change, with all its imperfections – this liberty to change with popular approval – is the very opposite of the authoritarianism against which the Reformation was directed.

  He went on: ‘The Promised Land remains the same; its direction is the same; but there are various routes to it across the desert.’9

  The Evangelicals were not having it and the vote was narrowly lost. The following summer, the measure came again to the House, and again the vote was narrowly lost. This time JB did not speak. Some parishes adopted the 1928 Prayer Book, illegally, but it took until the 1970s before the Church of England felt able to have another crack at modernising church liturgy, and this time it succeeded.

  Besides the Constitution and religious practices, JB concentrated, as most backbenchers did, on a ragbag of worthy concerns, in his case tending mostly towards safeguarding and improving the lot of the general population: Scotland, including whether there should be a Scottish Parliament;10 education, both of children and adults, including attempts to raise the school leaving age to fifteen; protecting workers’ rights; the Empire and free trade; the countryside and its protection; the media, including films, and their use for education and entertainment; and the cause of a national homeland for Jews. He spoke on a variety of subjects, from unemployment to greyhound racing (he tried unsuccessfully to get a Bill through Parliament to regulate it), to the importance of air power in any future conflict. He managed to get a Bill through Parliament to outlaw the capture and caging of British wild birds in 1933. (The more substantial Protection of Birds Act of 1954 was piloted through the Commons by his daughter-in-law Priscilla Tweedsmuir, MP for Aberdeen South, while his son Johnnie saw it through the Lords.)

  In the summer of 1929, Ashridge House in Hertfordshire opened as a residential college, training lecturers and providing public lectures and discussions, and in effect promoting the development of a corps of educated young Tory thinkers. JB was made chairman of the executive committee. Those trained at Ashridge College of Citizenship went out to influence opinion in the universities, under the auspices of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations, founded in 1931, with JB as its first President. (He chaired and spoke at every annual conference of the Federation until he left for Canada in 1935, exhibiting his keen interest in developing political consciousness in the youthful.) The infusion of ‘one-nation’ Conservative values and ideas promoted by Ashridge and the Federation galvanised the intellectual wing of the Conservative Party in the years before and after the Second World War.

  In 1928, JB joined the Central Council for Broadcast Adult Education, which was set up by the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE, formed 1921) and the BBC. The following year the BIAE collaborated on a widely consulting commission, looking at educational and cultural films. The report, ‘The Film in National Life’, published in 1932, provided the intellectual underpinning for the foundation of the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1933. In May 1932, JB had suggested, during a debate on the Sunday Entertainments Bill, that 5 per cent of Sunday cinema takings should go to the assistance and development of British films:

  What those who are interested in the matter desire to see is something positive, a constructive effort to help in the development of this great medium of instruction and entertainment … The idea is ultimately the creation of a film institute, not a Government Department but a private body with a charter under the aegis and support of the Government.11

  The purposes of a film institute, as he saw it, would be: to act as a school for the study of technique and interchange of ideas; to improve public taste; to provide advice to teachers about the educational possibilities of film as well as government departments on the use of film; and to secure the development of the assets for film production that the country and Empire possessed. His idea of a levy was accepted, the Institute was set up by Royal Charter, and JB became one of the nine founding Governors, and Chairman of the Advisory Council.

  His interest in the BBC (as with the BFI) stemmed from his post-war preoccupation with the importance of informing and educating the general public, if it were not to fall prey to the kind of demagoguery that had seduced the masses in Russia in 1917, and was affecting Germany and Italy. He was a supporter of it against its early critics in Parliament, although not a completely uncritical one: ‘We have not had many pieces of good fortune as a nation since the War, but I think that one of them has been the Broadcasting Corporation.’

  He went on to say, in a passage arguing against censorship:

  I see no reason why a Communist should not be allowed to broadcast his beliefs and the reason for them. Incidentally, I cannot imagine anything more damaging to Communism … Truth … comes from an honest clash of opinion and not from the suppression of it. Controversy, honest, straightforward, well-regulated controversy is the only salt which will save a most valuable side of broadcasting from going rotten. After all, we can trust our people. The British Broadcasting Corporation, as it has grown up today, is a peculiarly British product, and, like all our true indigenous products, it is based upon a trust in the ordinary man.12

  As a result of his interest in the issue, JB joined a cross-party consultative committee to advise on controversial political talks.

  In November 1929 he took the trouble to articulate his political creed in an article in The Spectator entitled ‘Conservatism and Progress’. He began by writing that he disliked the word ‘Conservatism’ since it seemed to connote the duty of preserving always, at any cost, when the real duty may be that of ruthless destruction. ‘It suggests an antagonism to rational change.’ He preferred to be called a ‘Tory’ since it originally meant an Irish robber and he thought a bandit had a more hopeful attitude to life than ‘he who cherishes relics which should long ago have been buried or burned’.

  His was a humane doctrine, rejecting the idea that society could be fully comprised by any set of categories. ‘[The conservative] is inclined to be suspicious of mere logic and highly suspicious of all abstractions. He dislikes undue simplifications and anything that savours of mechanism … The problem in all politics is how to give to actual human beings the chance of a worthy life.’ In his view, conservatives (with a small ‘c’) had no passion for change for change’s sake but, when the case for change was clear, they would act boldly, for they set no sentimental value on a tradition which had lost the stuff of life:

  The two great problems of today in the widest sense are, I take it, the business of reaching a true democracy, where everyone shall be given a chance not only of a livelihood, but of a worthy life, and the business of building up some kind of world-wide régime which shall ensure peace and co-operation between the nations.13

  Some of JB’s critics have accused him of Fascist sympathies on the basis of an article that he wrote for The Morning Post, published on the last day of 1929. It looks dashed off, probably on Boxing Day, and is a not very interesting o
verview of global politics in the preceding decade, in which he noted the decline in parliamentary institutions and the rise of dictatorships in a number of countries. He praised the new kind of imperial unity (since 1926) based ‘on the completest liberty of the constituent parts’ and went on to write that but for that, and ‘the bold experiment of Fascism’,14 the decade had not been fruitful in constructive statesmanship. However, in his opinion, the post-war recovery of European countries such as Italy and Germany had much less to do with a creed or a man than with ordinary people working hard. His true and considered political views are clear from his many other expressions of support for democracy, moderation and pluralism; it is indicative that a little more than a year after the Morning Post article, he began the contemporary novel, A Prince of the Captivity, in which he describes a sinister and murderous German political brotherhood, plainly based on the Nazi Brownshirts.

  In 1928, Hodder and Stoughton brought out a collection of his short stories, The Runagates Club. The genesis of these tales was various, some of them having already appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine, but JB gave them unity by declaring them stories told after dinner at the fictional Thursday Club. The fifteen members of the club include a number of Buchan stalwarts – Hannay, Arbuthnot, Leithen, Lamancha, Palliser-Yeates, Sir Arthur Warcliff – but others, such as Major Oliver Pugh, are introduced for the first and only time. Most have had exciting, sometimes secret, jobs in wartime. (Dominick Medina, suave villain of The Three Hostages, is a member of the club until his demise.) JB reproduces the Clubland atmosphere that he enjoyed, although it must have been rare in real life to hear such a collection of cracking tales, however distinguished the company. Like JB, these men are not your average club buffer but classically educated men with a taste for the apposite Biblical quotation. In the Preface he writes of the storytellers and the varied lives they have led – ‘the ornithologist had watched more perilous things than birds; the politician had handled a rougher humanity than an English electorate.’15