Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Plate Section

  Broughton Green in Broughton, upper Tweeddale, on the Edinburgh–Carlisle road, where John Buchan’s mother, Helen Masterton, was born, and the Buchan family spent their childhood summer holidays.

  The Reverend John Buchan, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, with his wife Helen and two eldest children, John (born 1875) and Anna (born 1877).

  Lieutenant Alastair Buchan (1894–1917) in the uniform of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

  An oil painting of Alastair Buchan by Sir William Orpen from the photograph opposite; Orpen did not charge a fee.

  The dust jacket of the first edition of Mr Standfast, published in 1919. It is mystifying until one realises that it harks back to the cover of Greenmantle, published three years earlier by Hodder and Stoughton, and JB’s bestselling novel at that point.

  JB in the uniform of a Lieutenant-Colonel, with William on the left and Johnnie on the right, in 1918.

  The Buchan children in late 1919 or early 1920 with their grandmother, Caroline Grosvenor, known to them as ‘Tin’. Alice and Johnnie stand behind with William in front and Alastair on Mrs Grosvenor’s knee.

  JB with Alice and Johnnie in Broadstairs, Kent, on the August 1914 holiday when he began to write The Thirty-Nine Steps. He was suffering badly from a duodenal ulcer and Alice was recovering from a mastoid operation.

  JB after he had been appointed Deputy-Chairman of Reuters in 1923. According to Johnnie, photographs of his father were misleading, since they ‘gave him a look of frozen gloom, a travesty of his good-humoured self ’.

  A photograph of the family in the garden at Elsfield Manor taken by Walter Buchan, probably April 1934. Standing are Johnnie, with his beloved goshawk, Jezebel, on his hand, together with William and Alice. Sitting are JB holding on to an invisible dog, Mrs Buchan, Susie and Anna Buchan (O. Douglas).

  The stone-built, architecturally mixed Elsfield Manor from the road in the 1920s, after another storey, containing JB’s writing room, had been built on the garden side.

  JB, Susie and the Reverend Charlie Dick leave the Palace of Holyroodhouse in an open landau on their way to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, of which JB was Lord High Commissioner, in May 1934. The landau was accompanied by a mounted escort of the Royal Scots Greys.

  JB with Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The way the picture is lit suggests the photographer had a sense of humour.

  The dustjacket of the first edition of The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was published by Blackwood’s in October 1915. It shows Richard Hannay bursting in, unannounced, on an emergency high-level meeting, after he divines that a German spy has impersonated the First Sea Lord.

  JB’s coat of arms when he was made 1st Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield in 1935. The motto translates as ‘Not following inferior things’. Why the sunflower’s leaves should be wilting is an irrecoverable mystery.

  JB’s bookplate after he bought Elsfield Manor. It was designed by E.H. New in 1926, and shows the view from JB’s study towards Oxford.

  A formal group photograph taken in early 1937 in Government House, Ottawa. From left: Colonel Eric Mackenzie, Comptroller of the Household (far left); Shuldham Redfern, Private Secretary (fourth from left); Ruth Redfern, (sixth from left); Lieutenant Gordon Rivers-Smith, R.N. (ADC); William Buchan; Johnnie Buchan; Beatrice Spencer-Smith (lady-in-waiting); Colonel H. Willis-O’Connor (permanent ADC) (fourth from right); Lilian Killick, (third from right); Captain John Boyle (ADC) (far right). Seated: JB and Susie (aka Their Excellencies, the Governor-General and Lady Tweedsmuir).

  JB fishing on the Cascapedia River in Quebec, probably in early June 1939, while the Royal party toured the west of Canada. This was JB’s favourite leisure pastime but, as things turned out, they were there a week too early for the salmon run.

  JB with his mother on the garden steps of Rideau Hall (Government House) in Ottawa, June 1936. Only when he became Governor-General did Mrs Buchan feel that her son was properly appreciated for his talents.

  Hutchesons’ Grammar School masters and pupils in 1891. JB, aged fifteen, is second from right, back row, and James Cadell, his inspirational Classics master, is second from right, middle row.

  The Buchan family in the summer of 1892 or spring 1893. Back row (left to right): Anna, JB and the Reverend John Buchan; front row: Walter, Mrs Buchan with Violet on her lap, looking like a wraith, and Willie.

  The Oxford Union Society Committee, 1898. JB is second left, middle row, with his hands on Johnnie Jameson’s shoulders. The inventor of the clerihew, E.C. Bentley, is furthest on the right.

  Tommy Nelson, who met JB first at Oxford, asked JB to join his family publishing company in 1906. He owned an estate, Achnacloich, on the shore of Loch Etive in Argyllshire, which is probably where this photograph was taken.

  JB is sitting second left in a camp in the South African veldt. ‘No words can tell the tale of a veldt sunset’ (The African Colony).

  Lord (Alfred) Milner, High Commissioner of South Africa and JB’s immediate boss, on an old nag close to the Parliament House in Cape Town. Note the cows wandering about.

  William (Willie) Buchan, born 1880, the handsomest of the Buchan brothers, in Indian Civil Service uniform. He worked in Bengal and Bihar from 1903 until shortly before his death in 1912. He is the ‘Fratri Dilectissimo’ of JB’s most famous poem.

  JB – barrister, journalist and dapper man about London – just after The African Colony was published, and about the time he was writing The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income, by a distance his least-read book.

  Norman Grosvenor, youngest son of the 1st Baron Ebury, with his wife, Caroline (neé Stuart-Wortley), parents of Susan and Margaret Grosvenor. An amateur but accomplished pianist and composer, Norman died aged only fifty-six, when Susie was sixteen and Margaret (Marnie) eleven. Caroline was an artist and later a published novelist.

  Susie before her marriage, with a fashionable ‘teapot-handle’ hairstyle and just a hint of the Stuart-Wortley undershot jaw.

  Announcement of the marriage of Susan Grosvenor to John Buchan in St George’s, Hanover Square, London in The Throne, July 1907.

  A fashion plate from Queen magazine showing the dresses worn by (from left) the bridesmaids and the bride, as well as Susie’s ‘going away’ outfit.

  Susie and JB at the Lido in Venice in August 1907, during their honeymoon. As Susie wrote to her mother: ‘Mine was a sort of Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers all in one, and striped pink … Anything more killing than we both looked would be hard to imagine.’

  ‘We reluctantly gave up the hats and plunged into the sea which was Prussian blue and hot and gogglie to the last degree … It was the most delicious experience I have ever had.’

  Outside the White House in Washington at the beginning of the Tweedsmuirs’ stay with the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his wife, Eleanor, in April 1937. What was happening off-camera to cause such different reactions in the subjects?

  On the terrace of the Citadel in Quebec City, overlooking the St Lawrence River, in July 1936. JB is telling a Scottish story to the President of the USA, who is supported by his son, James. ‘Mr Micawber’ – William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada – looks on.

  A group of American congressmen close-question JB on his visit to Washington in April 1937. Are they pressing for his considered view on Hitler or do they want to know what Richard Hannay will do next?

  Shuldham Redfern’s cartoon of Susie on her return to Ottawa in January 1937, painfully highlighting her predicament. Her dress has prison arrows, her earrings are keys and she wears a chain necklace and handcuff bracelet.

  JB had a famous enough face to be portrayed on a cigarette card in 1937.

  Voyagers down the Mackenzie River on the SS Distributor in July 1937, amongst them the Governor-General (centre, seated), Shuldham Redfern standing behind his seated wife, Ruth, and Gordon Rivers-Smith, JB’s ADC, and Hugh Bonnycastle of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who organised the trip, on the top
deck. The photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, who took this picture using a shutter timer delay, is standing, far right.

  JB meets some Catholic missionaries of the Oblate Brotherhood at a small settlement on the edge of the Mackenzie River. They feature, in fictional form, in his last novel, Sick Heart River.

  JB, characteristically neatly turned out, was photographed many times in Ottawa by Yousuf Karsh. This was his favourite picture.

  JB dressed in the headdress and cloak of a First Nations people, most likely the Plains Cree that he met in 1936.

  King George VI and Queen Elizabeth with the Tweedsmuirs in the garden of Rideau Hall in May 1939 during their four-week north American tour, a few short months before war broke out. This tour was instigated and orchestrated by JB. If for no other reason, the Queen’s glamorous clothes by Norman Hartnell set her apart from everyone else.

  JB’s body lay in state in the Senate Chamber of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa for two days before his funeral in 1940. Among the soldiers who took turns to guard the coffin was his son Alastair.

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  First published in Great Britain 2019

  This electronic edition published 2019

  Copyright © Ursula Buchan, 2019

  Ursula Buchan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

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  ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ from Collected Poems, by John Betjeman

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-7081-5; eBook: 978-1-4088-7083-9

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