John Buchan
Perth, Scotland, 1875 - 1940, Montreal
Buchan, John, first Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940), author, publisher, and governor-general of Canada, was born at Perth on 26 August 1875, the eldest child in the family of four sons and one surviving daughter of John Buchan (1847–1911), Free Church of Scotland minister, and his wife, Helen Jane (1857–1937), daughter of John Masterton, farmer, of Broughton Green, near Peebles. His sister, Anna Buchan, was the novelist O. Douglas. The father was a lively character, an enthusiast for border ballads and other Scots songs which he recited or sang to the family or played on a penny whistle, and he was indulgent when a Free Church minister might have been expected to be strict. The mother made up for this. She epitomized Free Church virtues: she was hard, spare, and respectable, hated Rome, and distrusted established churches generally. Between them the parents gave young John two Scottish points of reference on which much of his fiction rested. Their different attitudes to respectability likewise provided a fertile tension, for there developed in Buchan a very sharp awareness both of the need to be respectable and of the sense that it is the eccentrics that get things done.
Youth and education
In 1876 the family moved to the small mining town of Pathhead, Fife, when Buchan's father became Free Church minister there. Aged five John fractured his skull in a carriage accident, leaving him with a permanent scar on the left forehead of his otherwise chiselled, classical features. Buchan was expelled from a dame-school for upsetting a broth pot. He attended Parkhead board school and then the burgh school in nearby Kirkcaldy and Kirkcaldy high school. Aged eleven he published a hymn for the new year of 1887 (in Buchan, Poems, 8). Buchan played on the shore of the Forth, and relished his holidays on his relatives' farm at Broughton in the borders where he first engaged with the border rivers, hills, and shallow glens and their people, which were the staple of so much of his best writing.
In 1888 the Revd John Buchan was called to the John Knox Church in the Gorbals in Glasgow, thus presenting to his children an almost Manichaean contrast between their city and country life. John Buchan attended Hutchesons' Boys' Grammar School until 1892. School was for him, he recalled, ‘only a minor episode. The atmosphere I lived in was always that of my home’ (Memory Hold-the-Door, 29). That atmosphere was one of moderate Calvinism (Buchan's father was not normally a protagonist in the theological disputes over biblical criticism in the Free Church, though he intervened on the conservative side in 1902), but John and his siblings found the social life of the manse somewhat stifling. In 1890 he went onto the classical side at Hutchesons' and, taught by James Cadell, found the classics a liberation. In 1892 he won a John Clark bursary to Glasgow University, where he chiefly studied classics, being taught and influenced by the young Gilbert Murray (more perhaps than he realized) and the philosopher Henry Jones. Buchan had by this time that formidable range of reading and reference which, with his accurate memory, enabled him to write so authoritatively and swiftly. Though a diffident youth, he was from a very early stage authorially ambitious. As a Glasgow student he published in the Glasgow University Magazine and developed his considerable ability as a poet. He also edited Bacon's Essays and Apothegms with an introduction (1894). Buchan was a natural Edinburghian (it was to be his chief place of work for many years but never his home) and although his Glasgow years supplied much fodder for later novels, he was keen to move on. He wrote about this time:
And often I dream that yonder,
Beyond the red sea haze,
Is that wonderful El Dorado
Men sung of in former days.
(Poems, 15)
He did not, however, see Edinburgh as his El Dorado, but rather Oxford.
In 1895 Buchan won a junior Hulme scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford (attracted thither by interest in two of the dons, Walter Pater and Richard Lodge), and before he matriculated in October 1895, wrote and published his first novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors, and began work on John Burnet of Barns (1898). It was during his time at Brasenose that Buchan met the public-school set whose ethos and patois his best-known novels were to record. His friends included Raymond Asquith, Auberon and Aubrey Herbert, Harold Baker, F. E. Smith, Stair Gillon (who wrote his Dictionary of National Biography memoir), and Thomas Nelson [see under Nelson family], his future employer and publishing partner. He won the Stanhope prize for history (1897) and was librarian of the Oxford Union (1898) and its president (1899). While an undergraduate he entered Who's Who in 1898 (listing five publications) and was invited by his college to write its history. He was placed in the second class in honours moderations, and in the first class for literae humaniores in 1899, but failed, perhaps fortunately for him, in the All Souls prize fellowship examination. In that year he published Grey Weather, a collection of short stories mostly set in the Scottish borders; it contains some of his best scenic writing.
Oxford gave Buchan easy access to London society, and he chose to establish himself there rather than return to Scotland. He read for the bar at the Middle Temple, paying his way by journalism, especially, like H. H. Asquith before him, for The Spectator, then a Liberal Unionist periodical, and for the tory Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (his short stories for it form the bulk of The Watcher by the Threshold, 1902). He was called to the bar in June 1901 and joined the northern circuit.
Buchan had an impatience with the Liberal Party and especially with what he saw as woolly-headed radicals. He was seen at Oxford as ‘a Tory-Democrat Jacobite’ (Isis, 28 Jan 1899, cited in Adam Smith, John Buchan, 71) but he also had an insistence on the practical and the rational and, despite himself, his values throughout his life were those of a free-trade Liberal Unionist rather than of a tory. At the end of his life, he felt he was ‘becoming a Gladstonian Liberal’ (to G. M. Trevelyan, cited in Parry, 234). While his novels recognized the importance of the irrational and of sudden and direct action (and in that sense recognize the importance in society of tendencies which fascists were later to see as desirable values), Buchan's own life was in a physical sense non-adventurous. Even in his mountaineering—in which, like many of his contemporaries, he found an outlet for excitement bonded with some of the extremes of nature—there was an absence of the sense of danger, for Buchan had ‘the opposite of vertigo, for I found a physical comfort in looking down from great heights’ (Memory Hold-the-Door, 140; however, on one occasion he experienced real panic when in the hills, an episode on which he drew in several novels). Buchan always drove himself hard, as his upbringing had taught him to do, but the danger which many of his heroes underwent physically was in his own case the danger of social and literary failure.
The metropolitan political and legal society in which Buchan had chosen to move was grappling with the problem of Britain's over-extension in world affairs, a weakness clearly exposed by the South African War, which began in October 1899. Buchan was attracted by the romance of imperial deeds of daring, but he was too canny to be wholly seduced by them. The Half-Hearted (1900), his first novel in a contemporary setting, is in two parts, the first describing country-house life in the borders (with the chief character loosely moulded from Raymond Asquith, to whom, among others, the novel is dedicated), the second a heroic ‘great game’ adventure in Kashmir and Bardur, the hero dying while saving India from invasion. The novel is broken-backed, but it staked out much of Buchan's future stamping ground, and it showed his remarkable capacity for depicting a landscape which he had not visited. ‘What is remarkable about these adventure stories is the completeness of the world they describe’ noted Graham Greene, and this quality is apparent in this early attempt (Greene, 104).
South Africa and its aftermath
Buchan proved a good but not outstanding barrister; he was becoming established as a writer of ability. Neither calling fully satisfied him and he was unwilling to yield fully to either the demands of public life or the loneliness of full-time creative writing. He had persuaded himself with some anxiety that ‘it was not my duty to volunteer for active service’ when the South African War began in 1899 (Memory Hold-the-Door, 91), but he felt some malaise as a result. When Leo Amery suggested Buchan to Alfred Milner, Milner, then high commissioner in South Africa, invited Buchan in August 1901 to assist in the reconstruction of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the Afrikaners' defeat by then being a matter of time. Milner used Buchan, who arrived in October 1901, as ‘a sort of political Private Secretary’ (letter of 7 Oct 1901, cited in Lownie, 73) and he also became legal adviser to Johannesburg town council with the large salary of £2000 per annum. In South Africa he believed he ‘ceased to be an individualist and became a citizen’ (Memory Hold-the-Door, 92). He had some responsibility for reducing the mortality rate in the concentration camps in which Afrikaners were confined, and for the land settlement department, which he ran until March 1903. He travelled extensively in the South African hinterland, described in The African Colony (1903), his only imperial travelling before the 1930s. Though he toured the Mediterranean and Europe he never made the grand imperial tour common for young men at that time. Buchan returned to London and the bar in October 1903. The Milner group was politically discredited and the Unionist Party was split over tariff reform: a long Liberal government was in the offing. Buchan had many Liberal friends, such as R. B. Haldane, who wrote an introduction to Buchan's The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income (1905); but in terms of political advancement he was harnessed to the wrong horse. Nothing came of expectations of a post in Egypt. He was approached by the South Edinburgh Unionist Association but could not afford to become an MP, supposing that he could win the seat (Lownie, 88). He became part-time assistant editor of The Spectator in 1908. In that year he published A Lodge in the Wilderness, a didactic fictional discussion of imperial values and objectives which remains one of the clearest and fairest analyses of British imperial endeavours, and shows Buchan resisting the strong protectionist imperialism followed by most of the Milnerites in the 1900s. He shared their suspicion of but not their contempt for party politics, and he remained a free-trader.
Marriage, publishing, and writing
One aspect of Buchan's lack of direction was resolved when on 15 July 1907 at St George's, Hanover Square, London, in a great society wedding, he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor (1882–1977), daughter of Norman de l'Aigle Grosvenor (1845–1898), son of Lord Robert Grosvenor (1801–1893), and his wife, Caroline Susan Theodora, née Stuart-Wortley (d. 1940). Susan Grosvenor was very well connected but not rich; she mirrored, perhaps reinforced, Buchan's ambivalent relationship to English society, though her lineage and Anglicanism greatly upset Buchan's mother (Lownie, 96). Before marriage she had worked as a volunteer for the Charity Organization Society. She had a distaste for aristocratic life. The Buchans lived initially in London at 40 Hyde Park Square, then at 13 Bryanston Street, and from 1912 at 76 Portland Place (a neighbourhood used in several of Buchan's novels). Their first child, Alice (d. 1993), was born in 1908, followed by John Norman Stuart in 1911.
To finance his marriage Buchan worked for Nelsons, the Edinburgh publishers owned by the family of his friend Thomas Nelson, visiting Edinburgh at least monthly, and sometimes for longer spells. Buchan brought flair to cheap, quality publishing, compiling an excellent list which included Conrad, H. G. Wells, and George Douglas Brown. His reassociation with Scotland prompted Buchan to try to turn the Scottish Review and Christian Leader into a Scottish Spectator. He achieved this in terms of its contributors—a distinguished group representing the Scottish, imperial, and metropolitan strands of his life—and through his own columns; but the periodical failed financially, folding in 1908.
Buchan balanced this apparent move towards the literary side of his life by attempting to find a parliamentary seat, eventually succeeding in March 1911 in being adopted by the Unionists for the predominantly Liberal seat of Peeblesshire and Selkirk, the area of his youthful holidays within which several of his relatives were prominent and where both Buchan's father and his brother William died in 1911. No general election was likely before 1915, but Buchan began nursing the seat, his experience of public meetings providing a memorable episode in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Since The Half-Hearted, Buchan had not essayed a narrative novel, though he had written striking short stories, collected in The Moon Endureth (1912), which included the remarkable ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’. In 1910 he published, initially serially, Prester John (The Great Diamond Pipe in the USA), his first significant money-maker; the novel is often regarded as the crudest of his imperial pieces, but it shows perception of the different social and political forces in southern Africa. He accompanied this with biographies of Sir Walter Ralegh (1911) and the marquess of Montrose (1913), and a memoir of his friend Andrew Jameson, Lord Ardwall (1913). Also in 1913, The Power House was serialized in Blackwood's, though not published in book form until 1916. In the summer of 1914 Buchan was overworked and exhausted by a variety of family problems. Even so, as something of a relaxation, he wrote a novel, described in its introductory note as ‘that elementary type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel,” and which we know as the “shocker”’, provisionally entitled The Black Stone but published as The Thirty-Nine Steps in September 1915 after serialization in Blackwood's between July and September under the pseudonym H de V (Adam Smith, John Buchan, 197). Its hero, Richard Hannay, was loosely based on Edmund Ironside and others of Buchan's contemporaries in South Africa. Hannay initially represented the values of the outsider, equal to but not part of the British ruling élite.
Buchan and the First World War
Buchan was too ill for active service in 1914 or subsequently; this was a psychological blow from which he perhaps never fully recovered. His response was to write, with assistance, Nelson's History of the War (24 vols.), published regularly from February 1915 to July 1919 in instalments of 50,000 words. The series had by far the largest circulation of any war commentary (Grieves, ‘Early responses’, 30). The enterprise, together with his growing reputation as a writer and his support for the war, gave prominence to his role as correspondent for The Times and the Daily News. By 1916 he was working for Haig drafting communiqués for the War and Foreign offices, with permission also to continue the war series. In 1916 he became second lieutenant in the intelligence corps. He published a series of books on the battles of Jutland, the Somme, and Picardy in 1915–16. His volume for Nelson on the Somme emphasized individual courage within a general strategic analysis which rather took for granted the reader's awareness of the scale of the slaughter, and its conclusion, much valued by contemporaries, is a lyrical evocation of the validity of war sacrifice. His intelligence work in part inspired Greenmantle (1916), set in the Middle East, its chief character, Sandy Arbuthnot, drawn from Aubrey Herbert (see M. Fitzherbert, The Man who was Greenmantle, 1983) with a dash of T. E. Lawrence (whom Buchan did not then know personally). Buchan in Greenmantle found some romance in the war, as he also did in Mr Standfast (1919), though he was careful about the political implications of the plot.
Work for C. F. G. Masterman's propaganda department at Wellington House gave Buchan experience in this new field, for which his talents naturally equipped him. When Lloyd George's coalition was formed in December 1916 Buchan was asked to prepare for the new war cabinet a memorandum on propaganda policy, which he delivered in January 1917. On the urging of Milner, a member of the war cabinet, Buchan was appointed on 9 February 1917 director of a new department of information (created by a cabinet minute of that day), with direct responsibility to the prime minister and a salary of £1000 p.a. (Adam Smith, John Buchan, 200; Messinger, 89). The same month Buchan, whose health had been under strain for some time, underwent an only partially successful operation for a duodenal ulcer (Lownie, 127); for the rest of his life he was often in pain and was never wholly fit.
In principle independent, Buchan's department was in practice an annexe of the Foreign Office, reflecting the degree to which wartime propaganda was seen as directed at allies and neutral countries rather than at the home population, though Buchan personally recognized the importance of the latter. Buchan divided the department into four sections: art and literature (under Masterman at Wellington House); press and cinema; intelligence; administration (located in the Foreign Office). The reporting structure did not work well. By July 1917 Lloyd George had decided that Buchan ‘was not the right man for the job’ (Sanders and Taylor, 71). He and the department were viciously attacked by the Northcliffe press and ministers made little effort to defend him. Though Buchan himself had in May 1917 raised the question of home propaganda with the cabinet, the latter's solution was in August 1917 to establish the national war aims committee, independent of Buchan and responsible to Sir Edward Carson. In December 1917 a committee chaired by Robert Donald recommended reorganization; the response by Buchan was ‘swift, detailed, and resentful’ (Sanders and Taylor, 74) and that month Sir Edward Carson, another member of the war cabinet, was given a supervisory role over the department, Buchan remaining executive head. This also caused difficulties and on 4 March 1918 the department became a ministry, with Lord Beaverbrook as minister and Colonel Buchan as director of intelligence. At the end of the war, ironically, Buchan was appointed liquidator of the Ministry of Information, which he closed down on 31 December 1918.
Buchan handled war propaganda liberally, continuing for the most part the tradition of Masterman, who continued at Wellington House and worked well with Buchan. Both men staunchly resisted the gaucheries of Northcliffe's Times. Buchan was a moderate innovator. He increased the scale of government propaganda considerably and, with his assistant, T. Lennox Gilmour, greatly extended the use of film in British propaganda, as a means of both educating the home population and informing allies and neutrals of the allied case. The two large-scale films made were D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1917) and Herbert Brenon's The Invasion of Britain (not completed until the end of the war and never shown). Many information films were made, including the popular ‘tags’, which were added onto newsreels. Buchan began active propaganda in enemy states, though in Germany he stopped short of encouraging social revolution (the most effective means of ending the war). Behind the façade of the gentlemanly amateur which he so sedulously cultivated, Buchan was a tough and professional propagandist. However, considering the scale and slaughter of the war his propaganda was attempting to win in 1917–18, his methods remained for the most part within the canons of democratic behaviour. It was a paradox that in practice Buchan played by the rules of the political system of representative government which his novels and sometimes his non-fiction so often seemed to deride.
After the war
Buchan did not stand for election in the ‘coupon’ election of December 1918 and turned down offers of Peeblesshire (1920) and Glasgow Central (1922; Adam Smith, John Buchan, 299). He bought the Manor House, Elsfield, 4 miles north-east of Oxford, and established a new routine for himself and his family (the Buchans' third child was William James de l'Aigle (1916–2008), a novelist, and their fourth Alastair Francis Buchan (1918–1976), who became director of the Institute of Strategic Studies). Though he continued to play a part in Nelsons in Edinburgh, his main post-war focus shifted southwards, and chiefly to writing, though he was from 1919 on the board of Reuters and was also a curator of the chest at Oxford University. As a trustee of the Pilgrim Trust he was able to benefit Oxford and other institutions. He visited Canada and the USA in 1924. At Elsfield, Buchan to an extent played the academic squire. The Manor became something of a social centre for the large Buchan circle, eclectic but essentially liberal-tory, rather as Garsington Manor, similarly close to Oxford, did contemporaneously for the liberal-socialist Morrells. T. E. Lawrence was quite a regular visitor.
Buchan at Elsfield first concentrated on further military writings, rather hastily revising his history of the war for republication in four volumes (1921–2), an edition less well received than the original, and writing The Battle-Honours of Scotland, 1914–1918 (1918), and the history of the South African forces in France (1920) and of the Royal Scots Fusiliers (1925), in part a tribute to his youngest brother, Alastair, killed in action in 1917. He declined a request to write the life of Haig, though in his Nelson's History he had praised Haig's military ability (Grieves, ‘Early responses’, 34). He also wrote These for Remembrance (1919), memoirs of some of his friends killed in action, and a memoir of Francis and Riversdale Grenfell (1920); these were important contributions to the literature of the ‘missing generation’.
Photographs of Buchan in the country show him dressed with exaggerated precision and wearing country clothes like a uniform. Indeed, all his photographs suggest a very carefully presented public persona. But he was by no means fully Anglicized, in either religion or culture. His Poems, Scots and English (1917) showed how in moments of stress he turned to writing Scots vernacular verse. In Scotland he was seen not as the chronicler of clubland but as an important if not wholly engaged literary figure, part of the inter-war Scottish literary renaissance. An LLD from Glasgow University was the chief recognition of his war work, when the London establishment declined him the desired KCMG. His poems were included in two of C. M. Grieve's Northern Numbers (1920–21); Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) dedicated his Annals of the Five Senses to Buchan in 1923, and Buchan wrote an introduction to Grieve's Sangshaw (1925). In 1924 Buchan edited The Northern Muse: an Anthology of Scots Vernacular Poetry, one of the renaissance's better selling volumes, which MacDiarmid, who disliked Buchan's novels, thought ‘by far the best anthology of Scottish poetry available at the time’ (MacDiarmid, 257). Buchan was, however, rightly one of MacDiarmid's ‘Strange Bedfellows’ and it was an improbable long-term involvement. Buchan soon became chiefly a commentator on vernacular Scottish literature rather than a participant.
Fiction and biography between the wars
Buchan also began, with The Three Hostages (1924), a remarkable series of novels: every year until 1937 he published at least one popular novel, many of which remain in print. These fell into three chief categories: historical novels, Scottish novels, and what may be called imperial novels. Several of Buchan's best historical novels, notably Midwinter (1923) and The Blanket of the Dark (1931), were set in the Cotswolds and showed a natural affinity with English rural life and the interplay between paganism and Christianity, and between the countryside and the town. The Path of the King (1921) traced the concept of kingship through several centuries. Witch Wood (1927)—Buchan's personal favourite—and The Free Fishers (1934) were historical novels with Scottish settings and preoccupations. Witch Wood poignantly combined many of Buchan's interests, in landscape, Calvinism in the seventeenth century, the fate of Scotland. The theme of town and country was developed in a series of novels depicting Dickson McCunn, a Glaswegian trader, in a variety of contemporary adventures: Huntingtower (1922), Castle Gay (1930), The House of the Four Winds (1935). Buchan's best work is to be seen in Witch Wood and The Blanket of the Dark, but it is for his stream of ‘shockers’ that he is chiefly remembered as a creative writer. In the inter-war years, the chief of these were The Three Hostages (1922), The Dancing Floor (1926), The Gap in the Curtain (1932), A Prince of the Captivity (1933), and The Island of Sheep (1936, reusing with quite different content the title of a book ‘by Cadmus and Harmonia’ he had written with his wife and published privately in 1919). Richard Hannay became a Cotswold squire, the guardian rather than the observer of British values. These novels, together with the earlier ‘shockers’, are among Britain's most striking political fiction. Their chief themes—the individual accidentally caught up in great affairs of state, the vulnerability of nations to evil conspiracies with worldwide connections, the excitement and detail of the chase, the dislocation between the city and the country, the psychology of disguise—were articulated in a distinctive authorial voice epitomized in the opening chapter of The Thirty-Nine Steps:
I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me inquiring, and I collected any other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little bookshop off the Rachnitzstrasse in Leipsig. I completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris.
Buchan caught the tone of Edwardian and inter-war English public life, the anxiety which accompanied complacency, its instinctive antisemitism, its male, public-school culture. His imperial novels are a pastiche of that culture and of the fiction it encouraged; their force in part derives from the fact that they are written against the grain of Buchan's inherent liberalism. Buchan was much blamed subsequently for élitism and antisemitism: the charge derives from these novels and fails to recognize their intention of pastiche, even of parody (and latterly self-parody). As the preface to The Thirty-Nine Steps makes clear, Buchan adopted a conscious pose when writing his shockers. His other work is written in a quite different voice.
In addition to this substantial corpus of fiction Buchan was an excellent essayist—as is shown by A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys (1922) and The Last Secrets, on exploration and mountaineering (1923)—and he was a notable biographer. He never completed his life of Lord Mansfield on which he worked for many years, but a steady stream of lives flowed from his pen, notably Lord Minto (1924); Montrose (1928, an improvement on his under-researched book of 1913); two on classical figures, Julius Caesar (1932) and Augustus (1937); Oliver Cromwell (1934); and—prepared for via Some Notes on Sir Walter Scott (1924) and The Man and the Book (1925)—Sir Walter Scott (1932), ‘a book which I was bound one day or other to write’ (p. 7). These were not works of primary historical research, but in the British genre of generalist biography they stand as perceptive, humane accounts, successfully appealing to the general reader without cheating the specialist. His concluding chapter on Scott as ‘the greatest, because the most representative, of Scotsmen ... [Scotland's] great liberator and reconciler’ (Scott, 372) stated a notable credo, as much perhaps Buchan's as Scott's. In the face of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and Buchan's own shockers, their tone was respectful and balanced. His literary eminence was recognized by the award of the Companionship of Honour in 1932.
Buchan's inter-war literary output was remarkable. He wrote fluently and with little correction. His secretary, who typed out his spidery handwriting, recorded that he ‘always worked to a time-table ... and as a rule this time-table was not only adhered to, but was completed a little beforehand’ (Buchan by his Wife and Friends, 279). With this literary punctiliousness went an obsession with punctuality and tidiness. He wrote chiefly in the morning, from 9.30 until 1 (and never in the evening) in the library he built for himself at the top of the house. He relaxed at Elsfield especially by walking, on several occasions walking the perimeter of the hills surrounding Oxford in a day. He did not, as it was sometimes said, write his novels on the train, but he often travelled third-class so as to meet characters and situations useful for his fiction. His punctilious appearance masked an easy and friendly manner, and he often surprised young people by the relaxed and unconventional way he spoke to them, Catherine Carswell, for example, being much taken by him (Buchan by his Wife and Friends).
Politics and political life
‘Publishing is my business, writing my amusement and politics my duty’, Buchan was wont to remark (Lownie, 206). In 1927 he accepted the Unionist candidacy at a by-election for one of the three Scottish university seats, winning easily. He held the seat until 1935. It was a convenient seat, for university members were conventionally allowed a good deal of latitude by the Unionist whips. He supported, for example, the MacDonald government's Education Bill in 1930 and its decision to recognize the Soviet Union. He was instrumental in establishing what became the tory Education Institute at Ashridge. He campaigned for a school leaving age of fifteen. He was chairman of the parliamentary pro-Palestine committee in 1932 and spoke in Shoreditch in 1934 at a mass demonstration by the Jewish National Fund. His bill for the protection of birds was enacted in 1933. Always cautious about commitment, Buchan was as friendly with Labour MPs as with those of his own party: Ramsay MacDonald (depicted in A Prince of the Captivity), with whom he shared attendance in Lady Londonderry's circle, and several of the Clydeside group of socialists, particularly James Maxton and Tom Johnston (Adam Smith, John Buchan, 317 ff.). In the latter days of MacDonald's premiership, Buchan used to bolster the flagging prime minister with walks round St James's Park, just as he had earlier formed a friendship with the aged and largely forgotten Lord Rosebery, whose Miscellanies Buchan edited (without credit on the title-page) in two volumes in 1921. Despite these inter-party contacts, Buchan was not one of those Scottish tories who in the 1930s supported devolution or independence. He romanticized the extent to which, as he saw it, the First World War had broken down class barriers and killed ‘a shoddy gentility’, and his jubilee celebration of the reign of George V, The King's Grace, 1910–1935 (1935)—an interesting essay on wartime and inter-war Britain—expressed the belief that ‘the young man of the educated classes today is at home, as his father could never have been, in a Hull trawler, or working the soil with unemployed miners’ (The King's Grace, 313). Buchan expected but received no political office when the tories returned to office in the National Government of 1931. This was unsurprising, for in politics Buchan
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