Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  He wrote to a very concerned Lady Mary Murray at the same time: ‘The Refugee Camps have made my hair grey. When we took them over they were terrible – partly owing to the preoccupation of the Military with other things, partly to causes inherent in any concentration of people accustomed to live in the sparsely peopled veldt. I shall never forget going through the hospitals a month ago, where the children were dying like flies. We have now revolutionised the whole system, and the death rate is down to something nearly normal now.’47 Not only were the physical conditions greatly improved but so also was education for the Boer children, provided by teachers who came from across the British Empire, and who often stayed to settle permanently.

  With the end of the war in sight, there was pressing urgency to resettle the rural Boers back on their farms. In 1939, JB recalled that:

  … we [meaning the whole of Milner’s team] had to prepare for the repatriation of the Boer inhabitants from the commandos, the concentration camps, and the prisoner-of-war camps overseas. This was a heavy business, and it had to be done at racing speed. Since so much of the land was devastated, huts and tents and building material had to be provided in vast quantities; transport, too; horses and mules and cattle; seeds and every kind of agricultural implement; as well as rations for many months. We had the help of people with an intimate knowledge of the country, and the task was duly accomplished, though at a high cost owing to the necessity for speed. I have always considered repatriation a really creditable achievement. We had no luck, for the first year of peace saw a serious drought. Nevertheless, within a year from the treaty of Vereeniging [31 May 1902] burgher families to the extent of nearly a quarter of a million souls had been settled on their farms and equipped with the means of livelihood.48

  The other pressing problem was to find land for the demobbed soldiers – both British and from the Empire – who fancied staying on to farm. This resettlement had a political as well as economic imperative for Milner, since he was thoroughly committed to a policy of increasing the numbers of English-speakers at least to parity with the Boers. His hope was partly that, if the Transvaal became more anglicised, it would be possible to control any disloyal Afrikaner element in a parliament of a federated South Africa, when that moment came, as it surely would. But he also wanted, more positively and idealistically, to bridge the gap between the Afrikaner rural and British urban communities, in order to foster a common South African identity. In the end, however, land resettlement was not very successful, and what achievements there were came about by the use of questionable tactics, with Milner cutting constitutional corners, and requiring JB to be his ‘fixer’.49

  Although a Land Settlement Board existed in Pretoria, Milner decided to form a Land Settlement Department, putting JB in charge, until a permanent Commissioner of Lands could be appointed. Its primary task was to place new settlers on the land, and it faced major challenges in relation to the acquisition of suitable land. Milner, who, according to Emily Hobhouse, had the ‘soul of a spy’,50 charged JB with the secret recruitment of agents, to pose as private land dealers and go into the refugee camps to try to buy land from Boers, who were both isolated and frightened that the British were going to confiscate what they owned. Milner understandably feared that, if it became known that the British administration was interested in buying land, there would be a property boom and, anyway, the disgruntled Boers would not sell to it. But this stratagem left a sour taste in the mouths of senior officials overseeing the camps. Milner also wanted the Colonial Office to grant him powers of compulsory purchase and, to that end, anonymous articles, written or instigated by JB, appeared in The Spectator and elsewhere approving the High Commissioner’s land policies. Ever the optimist, JB told his uncle in February 1902 that ‘My Land Settlement schemes are, I am glad to say, going very well.’51 However, looking back, years later, JB wrote that their hopes for land settlement had been disappointed.52

  His work took him to remote districts (often on a horse called Alan Breck) where he met what he thought were the last of the professional Boer hunters, ‘whose lives were spent far beyond the edge of civilisation and to whom the War signified nothing’.53 Peter Pienaar, hero of Greenmantle and Mr Standfast, was a well-realised character based on these self-reliant, but sometimes highly dubious, individuals. JB was not blind to the fact that these hunters had greatly helped to deplete the numbers of large animals in parts of South Africa, and there is an eloquent appeal in his 1903 book, The African Colony, for the need to conserve big-game populations by the founding of game reserves in South Africa.

  He recalled later that he had had to be a jack-of-all-trades – transport-rider, seedsman, stockman, horsecoper, merchant, lawyer, diplomat – especially at the beginning, before proper civil departments were established. It was fortunate, perhaps, that he had, unusually amongst the British, some understanding and liking for the country Boer, as a result of his own partly rural and fully Presbyterian background. It is true that he thoroughly disliked their brand of Calvinism but he understood it better than many. He deprecated the way ‘it was used to buttress his [the Boer’s] self-sufficiency and mastery over weaker neighbours … [In his religion,] God made men of two colours, white and black, the former to rule the latter till the end of time …’54 Despite that, he generally got on well with them, staying often with Boer farmers in far-flung homesteads.

  His upbringing had inclined him to the conclusion that the countryside was inherently healthier, morally and physically, than the city, and he saw Nature as a beneficent force in life, vital for refreshment, invigoration and even sanity. In the words of the historian Peter Henshaw, ‘In common with a wide range of Victorian thinkers, most famously Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, Buchan thought that without an ongoing and energetic engagement with the countryside and the wilderness, Britain and the empire would slip into irretrievable moral and material decline.’55 He also grew to believe that a country’s natural landscape gave a nation a powerful and valuable unifying identity, a belief that he would carry to Canada in the 1930s.

  In April 1902, The Watcher by the Threshold was published, attracting favourable reviews and good sales; Blackwood’s brought out a second edition only two months later. His brother Walter thought that it had a horrible cover and JB replied, ‘If I wrote a book of hymns, it would be published as a yellow-back,’56 the name given to cheap books with colourful, pictorial covers.

  These three stories and two novellas are all set in Scotland, but they show the influence of Oxford, both on JB’s experience and his reading, especially concerning the possible survival of the Picts. The title novella had been expanded and improved from a rather unsatisfactory short story, which had first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1900. This collection also reveals for the first time his preoccupation with the supernatural – in ‘The Far Islands’ and ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ – which can be found later, in more accomplished form, in stories such as ‘The Wind in the Portico’ and ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, as well as the novel, The Gap in the Curtain. Nevertheless, these unsettling stories are remarkably assured for someone still in his early twenties.

  In late May 1902 the peace treaty of Vereeniging was finally signed in Pretoria. Both sides had negotiated skilfully, and there was sufficient magnanimity displayed by the British to prevent the Boers feeling humiliated. (Jan Smuts and Louis Botha, two of the Boer leaders, supported Britain in the Great War.) By this time, JB was acquainted with a young British artillery officer, who spoke fluently a number of languages, in particular Cape Dutch. Lieutenant Edmund Ironside was an excellent soldier with a taste for intelligence work, who acted as an interpreter in the negotiations with Jan Smuts over peace terms. According to the present Lord Ironside, whose biography of his father is based on the latter’s diaries, JB (presumably on Milner’s orders) employed Ironside to listen in to the Boer deliberations, using Marconi recording equipment installed in their tents. ‘Effectively, the proceedings had been bugged, and Buchan needed someone by his side w
ho was more than just an interpreter, when he was in discussion with Smuts and his associates.’ According to Lord Ironside, ‘My father fitted the bill perfectly and his insights aided Buchan’s negotiations by enabling the latter to foster an atmosphere of trust between the negotiating parties…’57 Nowhere else can I find evidence that JB was directly involved in the peace negotiations, but the fact that this information comes from Ironside’s contemporaneous diary is, at the very least, suggestive.

  After the war was over, Lieutenant Ironside went undercover, seeking out intransigent Boers who would not swear allegiance to the Crown, before spying for the British in Hereroland and German South West Africa (now Namibia), in the guise of an ox-wagon driver working for the German Army. These exploits proved him to be brave, resourceful, a talented linguist and capable of taking on disguise. These were all qualities that were later to distinguish Richard Hannay, the character whom JB always maintained was partly based on Ironside.

  In June 1902, Milner made JB Acting Secretary of the Department of Lands. He was effectively the head of it, with a hundred officials under him, some of whom worked on the development of a department of scientific agriculture. JB, not unnaturally considering his upbringing, was extremely interested in agricultural methods, and their modernisation, even writing a memorandum58 on the virtues of the steam plough for tilling new ground, at a time when draught animals were scarce. ‘I have at last got my Crown Lands Disposal Act passed, and the whole department organised,’ he told his mother, who had recently arrived home from South Africa. ‘The thing is my own creation from top to bottom and I am quite proud of it…’59 He also told her that, although he would have earned much more as a civil servant, rather than as an independent directly employed by Milner, he was determined to maintain both his close links to Milner and his freedom of manoeuvre.

  In fulfilment of the peace treaty, £3 million was set aside by the British government for resettlement and reconstruction work,* and part of that was put at JB’s disposal. He had little of the caricature carefulness of the Scot with money, or public money at least. Farming experts needed to be recruited from abroad, but luring them to South Africa meant promising high salaries and he was criticised, from time to time, for profligacy by Johannesburg newspapers. Moreover, the department’s policy of threatening to cancel leases held with the previous governments, if the rent had been very low or the land not developed, was opposed by the Attorney-General in the Transvaal Administration, who thought it illegal.

  Word of some of his difficulties reached his parents: ‘The papers last week were full of attacks on me for reckless expenditure,’ he told his mother in December 1902, ‘engineered by a man to whom I refused employment. I was able to show, however, that the paper was ludicrously wrong and that there was actually a balance to our credit in the transactions where I had been accused of wild extravagance. I don’t think after my experience here I shall ever be afraid of responsibility again.’60

  He did have some stout defenders. As The Times put it in early January 1903: ‘Mr Buchan … at once brought to bear upon his work not only an intelligent interest in, and some practical knowledge of matters agricultural, but an aptitude for rapid decision and for taking responsibility.’61 The Times correspondent (probably Leo Amery, who had recently returned from Johannesburg) could not share in the ‘wholesale condemnation’ of the department and, in particular, he praised the Settlers’ Ordinance. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that some unsuitable land was bought, expensively, and the blame for that had to be laid at JB’s door, since it was his department. In the context of all the difficulties in communication, dislocation, destruction, and with an unhappy, beaten people to deal with, it is hard to see how criticism could have been avoided. That said, in the words of the historian Michael Redley, JB ‘came to epitomize the inexperience and naivety of the young assistants … whom Milner had set over the permanent civil servants in South Africa’.62

  Like many Britons in South Africa at the time, JB suffered periodic bouts of ill-health, especially when travelling. Late in 1901 and again in early 1902 he contracted dysentery from drinking ‘bad water’ and sleeping out of doors. He took opiates for the dysentery, and for a number of days he was quite ill and was left very weak for some time afterwards. On these trips, he had often to carry on regardless, his discomfiture made worse by sunburn and saddle sores. He occasionally also suffered from non-specific fever, possibly malaria, and recalled later: ‘Every one who has ridden through the African bush with fever on him knows the misery of the experience – the blinding headache, the unbearable thirst, the shivering fits which make it difficult to keep in the saddle.’63

  Generally speaking, however, he found the climate and life suited him marvellously well. And he was young. Indeed, the happiest times for him in South Africa were spent travelling in the ‘backveld’, since the rural environment had a profound attraction for him. In August 1902 he went off for a ten-day tour with two cape carts, a spring wagon, eight mules, two riding horses, as well as a guide, two servants and a cook. He travelled west of Johannesburg to Klerksdorp, Lichtenberg, Korannafontein, Malmani Oog, Zeerust, Elands River, Rustenberg, Crocodile Poort, ending up in Pretoria.

  He never forgot it. Nearly forty years later, he wrote in Memory Hold-the-Door:

  I bathed in one of the Malmani pools – and icy cold it was – and then basked in the early sunshine while breakfast was cooking. The water made a pleasant music, and near by was a covert of willows filled with singing birds. Then and there came on me the hour of revelation … Scents, sights and sounds blended into a harmony so perfect that it transcended human expression, even human thought. It was like a glimpse of the peace of eternity … The world was a place of inexhaustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of something infinite, ineffable and immortal, in very truth the garment of God.64

  That autumn, Willie sat the Indian Civil Service exams and came a creditable twenty-fourth. JB was delighted for him, but there were predictable difficulties with his mother. He told Anna: ‘Do try to keep Mother from fretting about Willie going to India. It is a perfectly healthy and safe life [which was disingenuous of him, since he had read Kipling] and he will get ample holidays. Ask her whether she does not think that she keeps her sons far nearer her by letting them go abroad in honourable professions, than if she had them married and living in the next street … It is not distance that alienates – just the other way.’65

  In late November, Cubby Medd, who had contracted typhoid on a tour of Albania and Italy, died in London. JB was very shocked and saddened, but also rather guilt-ridden. Medd had been badgering him since the summer to help him get a job working for Lord Milner, and he had not yet achieved it:

  … and I cannot forgive myself that I did not hurry on the matter and the whole thing might have been saved. He was one of my dearest friends, and though I have a great many so-called friends, I haven’t very many real ones – Cubby and Raymond, John Edgar and Boulter, Sandy and John Jameson make up the list. [He missed out Charlie Dick, but that was surely accidental?] It seems such a stupid causeless thing for a man so brilliant and courageous to die of a thing like fever in a place like London … Out here one gets accustomed to death – accustomed to dining with a man one week and hearing that he has got a bullet through his heart the next: but death out here is a different and simpler thing. When I think of the old walking-tours and escapades I nearly cry.66

  He continued to attract criticism that winter. He told his mother that one Johannesburg paper had said he was the most headstrong and unreasonable person in the country. The criticisms did not surprise him, he told her, since he had to do some unpopular and arbitrary things in land settlement. Curiously, despite the press criticism, he was offered the editorship of the influential, and sometimes inflammatory, Johannesburg daily, The Transvaal Leader, at a munificent £3,000 a year, but he had few qualms in turning the offer down, despite the fact that he would have made ‘a modest fortune’. He told Anna, ‘I think if one does a thi
ng purely to make money one is apt to make a mess of it.’67

  After Christmas 1902 he went on a week’s trip, with a fellow Kindergartener, Robert Brand, to the Wood Bush, an elevated plateau in the Zoutspansberg in the eastern Transvaal. He told Anna that the climate was like Scotland and the countryside like Glenholm, a glen near Broughton. This remote place was to haunt him all his life as a temenos, the Greek word he used for a sacred, consecrated place, and it appears not only in Prester John but also in the short stories, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ and ‘The Green Wildebeest’:

  You climb to it through bare foothills where the only vegetation is the wait-a-bit thorn, and then suddenly you cross a ridge and enter a garden. The woods of big timber trees are as shapely as the copses in a park laid out by a landscape-gardener. The land between them is rich meadow, with, instead of buttercups and daisies, the white arum lily and the tall blue agapanthus. In each cup is a stream of clear grey-blue water, swirling in pools and rapids like a Highland salmon river … Here is a true lodge in the wilderness, with on the one side the stony Pietersburg [now Polokwane] uplands, and on the other the malarial bushveld. The contrast makes a profound impression, since the Wood Bush itself is the extreme of richness and beauty. The winds blow as clean as in mid-ocean, soil and vegetation are as wholesome as an English down … I resolved to go back in my old age, build a dwelling, and leave my bones there.68

  He told Anna about it: ‘I have an idea of buying a little farm on the ridge of the plateau, and having it as a kind of African country house, where you could grow every known flower and fruit. I only wish my old father could have seen the place. He would have realised where the garden of Eden really was situated.’69 He wanted to build a long, low, whitewashed, thatched house, which he would call ‘Buchansdorp’, on the edge of the plateau looking down 4,000 feet onto the fever plains below, 60 miles of mountainous terrain from the nearest train station.*