Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  In July 1931, Hodder and Stoughton published another of JB’s historical novels, The Blanket of the Dark,** set at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is a tale about an Oseney Abbey clerk who discovers he is the son of the executed Duke of Buckingham, and bids fair to lead a challenge to the throne of Henry VIII. It is one of JB’s very best novels, showing starkly the power of his historical imagination. One of the most compelling examples of that is the description of where the London–Worcester road is crossed by that from Elsfield to Beckley, as it would have looked in 1533. JB knew the place well, since it was less than a mile from his house, and anyone who knows it can only marvel at his ability to cast his mind back four hundred years and convincingly people that road – then ‘a mere ribbon of rutted turf, with on each side the statutory bowshot of cleared ground between it and the forest fringes’31 – with mendicant Franciscan friars returning from begging money on Otmoor, a wool convoy, a troop of gypsies, and a cavalcade of King’s Commissioners, on their way to enquire into the state of the religious house at Eynsham. He describes their clothes, their animals, their accoutrements, their behaviour, and we can almost hear the clink of harness and the slap of a monkish sandal, and smell the matted coat of a gypsy donkey. Moreover, anyone who thinks that JB never wrote about sex, or sexual temptation at least, should read in this book his account of the hero facing the agonising dilemma between bedding the beautiful, worldly girl or saving his monkish soul.

  The seeds of why JB could not quite keep up the same impetus as a politician after that first year in the House of Commons were, paradoxically, sown at the time of his maiden speech. His intellectual, highly reasonable but sometimes rather Olympian approach to problems and difficulties, with all those quotations from historical precedent rather than contemporary allusions, did not particularly appeal to the stupider and more emotional of his colleagues, of which there were many. The admittedly clever Lord Birkenhead, whose plan for reform of the Parliament Act JB had criticised so successfully in his maiden speech, said of him, ‘there was a suggestion of the lecturer, a hint of the dominie, and a whiff of some by-gone Calvinism in his speeches which was alien to the House of Commons’.32 According to Lord Stewartby, who was a Conservative minister as well as JB’s grandson-in-law, his lucid, beautifully composed, lofty, outward-looking, historically literate, romantic speeches ‘were profoundly different from most of the speeches which were made by his contemporaries or indeed by his successors in Parliament’.33

  What is more, those who had had a hard graft in unwinnable constituencies before ever they arrived in the House of Commons were not inclined to admire someone who seemed to have had an altogether easier ascent, and who demonstrably had irons in other fires. Nearly all members of Parliament had other occupations at that time, but few were so famous in such a very different field. How could you take a man entirely seriously if he talked in Ciceronian periods, yet your children were snatching his latest thriller out of your hand as you came through the door? And, although university MPs have sometimes made a great impact – A. P. Herbert with his Divorce Bill being a good example – some Members of Parliament from grittier constituencies had an instinctive prejudice against them.

  Moreover, JB did not enjoy the really knotty committee work, when hours might be taken poring over a word in an amendment, the grinding dullness (and often fatuity) of so much of Parliamentary business, which was bread and butter to less gifted but more tenacious men. He skewers such a politician in his contemporary novel, The Gap in the Curtain, published in 1932. Any MP who read that will not have been well disposed towards its author.

  The greatest impact he made, while in Parliament, was as friend and confidant to both his party leader, Stanley Baldwin, when Prime Minister, and then the Socialist Ramsay MacDonald, once the National Government was formed in 1931 and he became premier. At least once each week, when the House was sitting, Baldwin and JB would breakfast together and then walk around St James’ Park afterwards. Baldwin valued these occasions. After JB’s death, he wrote: ‘… looking back through many difficult years, I never failed to find in him complete understanding and sympathy, and his approval of any particular course of action was a greater source of strength than he could ever have known’.34 The Sunday News was of the opinion that ‘it would be difficult to overestimate the influence of the quiet Scotsman and novelist M.P., Mr John Buchan. He is the closest friend of Stanley Baldwin, his advisor as regards all his more important speeches, and his confidant on all occasions.’35

  Lord Davidson, Chairman of the Conservative Party, remembered that he and Baldwin would often be joined by JB in the Smoking Room of the House of Commons and they would immediately settle down to talk politics as ideas, rather than the usual fare of ways and means to manipulate people and votes. JB would develop some thought process and it was likely that it would end up in a Baldwin speech a few days later. In Davidson’s words, JB was ‘a fertilising influence’.36

  The big foreign-policy issue at the time was India, and how it could progress in time and in an orderly fashion to become a self-governing Dominion. JB had swung behind the idea of self-government for India rather earlier than many. Maturity, and the lessons of the war years and after, seem to have tempered his youthful enthusiasm for ordering other peoples about: ‘Self-government is the ideal for every unit: with many it has been realized; with some it may take generations before the ground is duly prepared; but the same goal is at the end of every road.’37 To this end, he had a hand in drafting the 1934 joint select committee report on Indian constitutional reform.

  In 1931, when the National Government’s Cabinet was in the process of formation, JB’s name came up as a potential Secretary of State for Scotland or, failing that, President of the Board of Education. But the first job went to the Liberal Sir Archibald Sinclair, while JB’s old Peebles adversary Sir Donald Maclean got ‘Education’.

  There were misgivings about JB, arising partly from anxiety over his chronic illness, which had kept him away from London for most of the second half of 1929 and about which his colleagues knew nothing that was not alarming. There were those who saw clearly his virtues, but they tended to be outside Parliament. For example, in the summer of 1932, after Maclean’s death caused a vacancy at the Board of Education, the Buchans’ old friend Violet Markham was moved to write to Tom Jones, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, to plead JB’s cause with Stanley Baldwin:

  I think it is a real misfortune in the national interest that he [John Buchan] is not in the National Government. I also think he would make an admirable President of the Board of Education. Is there no chance of this being considered? It would be a thousand pities if that appointment is made on the rigid lines of party spoils, [for] John has vision and imagination … He would bring vigour and enthusiasm to that dreary department and I believe might make a great success of the post. It never seems to me that his services and very real abilities have received adequate recognition so far. He never pushes or clamours and so he seems to get left aside – greatly so I think to the public detriment … There are so many mediocrities in the Cabinet. John would reinforce the very moderate values of distinction not prominent at this moment.38

  Jones passed the message on to Baldwin who told him that ‘John Buchan would be no use in the Cabinet. Ramsay has written to me saying he must keep up the numbers of the Samuelites [Herbert Samuel was temporary leader of the Liberal Party] and proposing [the Marquess of] Lothian.’39 In the end, the job went to Lord Irwin, who became the Earl of Halifax.

  Later that year, when the Samuelites and Simonites (‘Liberal Nationals’ who followed Sir John Simon) in the Cabinet resigned over some aspects of the 1932 Ottawa Agreement, the post of Secretary of State for Scotland was given to another Liberal, Sir Godfrey Collins. JB wrote to Baldwin about his lack of preferment and one senses the words were squeezed painfully out of him:

  I feel that somehow I have managed to acquire the wrong kind of political atmosphere. Most of my friends seem to think th
at I am a busy man whose life is completely filled with non-political interests. But that is not the case. I gave up business three years ago in order to devote myself to politics. I do not speak overmuch in the House – there is no need for it – but I do a great deal of speaking up and down the country, especially in Scotland, where I think I have a good deal of influence. Politics have always been my chief interest and I have had a good deal of administrative experience … I am a free man and really anxious for definite work.40

  It was not to be and the key is probably to be found in a letter that JB wrote from Canada to Leo Amery in 1936 about Baldwin:

  It is wrong to say that S.B. has no capacity for friendship. The truth is almost the opposite! I had a most emotional parting from him last October. What is true is that he intensely dislikes the political game, and he has schooled himself to a kind of hard objectivity about his colleagues in it, and has tried to sink all personal feeling. He is a bad party leader so far as persons are concerned. The personal relationships in a party need careful cultivation, and S.B.’s curious moods of apathy and idleness prevent him from doing this most needful work. Only a perfectly first-class private secretary could have saved him. The result is that he has constantly been, apparently, guilty of harshnesses and disloyalties of which he was completely unconscious.41

  Who knows if JB would have got further if he had been a man more assiduously looking out for his own advantage? It is not necessary to be one of those to achieve high office, but it certainly helps. JB never formed a group of supporters round him, and therefore did not need to be appeased by office. As Violet Markham made clear in her letter, he was not a squeaky wheel.

  Needless to say, Baldwin’s refusal to give him preferment made no difference to their friendship; they worked happily together until JB’s translation to Canada in 1935, and remained friends thereafter.

  He performed something of the same service of companion and sounding board for Ramsay MacDonald as he had done for Baldwin, after October 1931, when the National Government was formed. MacDonald was Prime Minister of a coalition comprising mainly Conservatives (many of them graduates of Ashridge College, incidentally), having been disowned by the members of the Labour Party, which he had helped to found. MacDonald was a long-widowed, lonely, difficult, humourless man, whose mental and physical powers were slowly on the wane, but JB’s kindly feeling for any fellow human being in a fix, as well as his conviction that the Labour Party was a more natural opposition to the Conservatives than the Liberal Party, made a bond that crossed party lines. They had met first in 1925, and found common ground in discussions of Scots poetry and history. So in 1931, JB took to meeting and talking to him about his day-to-day commitments, suggesting points for his speeches, even sometimes drafting them, and giving his opinion on people and policies.

  Generally, amongst the Conservatives he led in the coalition government, MacDonald was not well liked, being thought to be vain, conceited and snobbish, thrilled by the pageantry that so disgusted his left-wing colleagues, yet finding it difficult to find common ground with people who were not of his ilk. He was also often very hard to cheer up. JB’s kindness was often tested sorely in the early-morning walks around St James’ Park, before breakfasts at No. 10, but he stuck by him, aided by Baldwin, another kindly man, living next door at No. 11. MacDonald had qualities that JB admired; for all his faults, he was courageous, courteous and decisive. But he admitted that MacDonald lacked the ‘kindly affection for the commonplace, which may be called benevolence, or, better still, loving-kindness, the quality of Shakespeare and Walter Scott … He was too ready to despise. He loved plain folk, but they must be his own kind of plain folk with his own background.’ Nevertheless, JB thought his alleged vanity to be largely sensitiveness, the result of his difficult early struggles. ‘The whole man was a romance, almost an anachronism. To understand him one had to understand the Scottish Celt, with his ferocious pride, his love of pageantry and poetry, his sentiment about the past, his odd contradictory loyalties.’42 No wonder he clung to JB as to a solid spar in a stormy sea. MacDonald considered making him a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet in early 1934 but, although that never came off, in effect he did the job informally for about eighteen months, until Baldwin became Prime Minister once more in May 1935.

  MacDonald’s isolation made him vulnerable to pushy, confident individuals such as the Marchioness of Londonderry, the society hostess, who called herself ‘Circe’. A Tory, she entertained at Londonderry House, at the south end of Park Lane, on a scale that would have seemed lavish before the Great War, and must have seemed positively obscene to some in the lean years of mass unemployment. She took up Ramsay MacDonald, and he became part of her inner circle, known as ‘the Ark’. JB accepted invitations from her, at least partly to keep an eye on MacDonald, but he was never so drawn in as the latter, probably because Susie didn’t care for her.

  *

  JB finally found his name on the New Year’s Honours List in 1932, as a Companion of Honour. This Order was established by King George V in 1917; there are only ever sixty-five Companions at one time, plus the Sovereign. JB told Lord Beaverbrook in reply to congratulations on this highly prestigious honour, that he preferred a suffix to a prefix.43 Whether Beaverbrook believed him is another question.

  In 1932 there was agitation in some quarters in Scotland for Home Rule and, in the debate on the King’s Speech on 24 November the issue of a Scottish parliament was raised. In a speech that contemporary Scottish Nationalists, who want independence from the rest of the United Kingdom, have fallen upon with glee, JB said

  I believe that every Scotsman should be a Scottish Nationalist. If it could be proved that a separate Scottish Parliament were desirable, that is to say that the merits were greater than the disadvantages and dangers, Scotsmen should support it.

  However, he went on to say that, although a certain measure of devolution was desirable, and the Scottish Office really should be in Scotland, a parliament in Edinburgh was a ‘top-heavy structure [which] would not cure Scotland’s ills; it would intensify them. It would create artificial differences, hinder co-operation, and engender friction if we attempted to split up services which Scotland has had in common with England for 200 years … I believe as firmly as ever that a sane nationalism is necessary for all true peace and prosperity, but I am equally clear … that an artificial nationalism, which manifests itself in a barren separatism and in the manufacture of artificial difference, makes for neither peace nor prosperity.’44 There is no support for the SNP there.

  The truth was that he was a ‘unionist nationalist’, with concentric, not warring, loyalties. As he wrote in his dedication to Vernon Watney at the beginning of Midwinter:

  We two confess twin loyalties –

  Wychwood beneath the April skies

  Is yours, and many a scented road

  That winds in June by Evenlode.

  Not less when autumn fires the brake,

  Yours the deep heath by Fannich’s lake,

  The corries where the dun deer roar

  And eagles wheel above Sgùrr Mòr.

  So I, who love with equal mind

  The southern sun, the northern wind,

  The lilied lowland water-mead

  And the grey hills that cradle Tweed,

  Bring you this tale which haply tries

  To intertwine our loyalties.

  He was well aware of the potential for comedy in politics, particularly in constituency speech-making, and a number of his novels and short stories deal with the subject in a decidedly amused way. The Radical (Liberal) candidate he encountered a lot in Scotland before the war finds his way memorably into The Thirty-Nine Steps, while in The Three Hostages, Sandy Arbuthnot recalls a speech that he had made on Irish Home Rule:

  Has it ever struck, Dick, that ecclesiastical language has a most sinister sound? I knew some of the words, though not their meaning, but I knew that my audience would be just as ignorant. So I had a magnificent peroration. �
��Will you men of Kilclavers … endure to see a chasuble set up in your market place? Will you have your daughters sold into simony? Will you have celibacy practised in the public streets?’ Gad, I had them all on their feet bellowing ‘Never’.45

  Since no one wanted to give him a government post, JB spent his time in ferocious literary activity. In 1932 he published a major biography, a novel and a children’s story.* First there was Sir Walter Scott (Cassell, March 1932), dedicated to ‘two friends, lovers of Sir Walter, Stanley Baldwin and George Macaulay Trevelyan’. It was the only literary biography he ever wrote, but he told friends he was bound one day to do it, for he had been born and bred under the shadow of Scott’s great tradition. The book reveals much about himself, his own writing method and attitudes and, for many people, it is his finest biography.

  Sir Walter Scott shows what a very good literary critic he was: careful, judicious, with a close ear for the music of words, and an educated eye for their texture. Here he is on the subject of Scott’s poetry, for example:

  He adapted the old ballad form so as to fit it for a long and often complex narrative. Scott’s octosyllables embrace, if carefully studied, surprising varieties of manner, and they are far more artful than they appear … They can gallop and they can jig, they can move placidly in some piece of argument, and now and then they can sing themselves into a lyrical exaltation.46

  This book is one of the very best guides to Scott’s novels, those great but now, with the passing of time, sometimes problematic works of fiction. JB encouraged the reader to think them worth the effort of learning some of the Scots language, and ploughing on through the tedious scene-setting at the beginning of, for example, Rob Roy.

  There was so much that he knew of Scott’s Borders and also of Edinburgh, and he used his knowledge and imagination to describe ‘Auld Reekie’ in 1771 (the year Scott was born), which can hardly be bettered: