Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  This was a high-minded as well as commercial venture. JB and Newbolt were determined to better the lot of future citizens of all classes, by providing attractively written textbooks that would open to them a world of good literature, both contemporary and traditional, and connect them with their cultural and historical roots. When Newbolt told Fisher of the plan, he replied: ‘I think it is the greatest service you could do for the country…’37

  Henry Newbolt, the son of an evangelical Anglican vicar, was becoming one of JB’s closest friends. Although Newbolt was thirteen years older, they often lunched together at the Athenaeum or The Club. They had worked together briefly at the Ministry of Information. They were both very involved with the Workers’ Educational Association just after the war, when it was expanding rapidly to try to fulfil the needs of returning servicemen; for JB, adult education was a vital component of the struggle to cleave a via media between Left and Right, by educating the public so that they did not fall for false abstractions or too simple solutions. Both men were interested in social amelioration but averse to abstract theorising about it. Small wonder that Newbolt was so enthusiastic about Nelson’s offer, although he did insist on a contract lasting ten years with a retainer, so that he could work undistracted on the project.

  Newbolt had a thin, ascetic, eagle-like profile, much like JB’s, and they had much the same approach to conversation, ideas and literature. JB viewed Newbolt as much more than the writer of the ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ (as Newbolt called it) of Vitaï Lampada. Newbolt admired JB for both his scholarship and his practical sense. Perceptively, he wrote to his wife: ‘I wish I were as free as John Buchan from the fatal scholar’s habit of trying to know all about a subject before you write on it – he always seems able to call his Secretary and dictate an article on anything at a moment’s notice. Exhilarating for him, and much better suited to public taste … JB is a scholar, but he doesn’t take thought to prove it – he knows it and can bear a slip or two.’38 Henry and Susie were also firm friends, as was Margaret, his wife; they were the first guests at Elsfield, after the Buchans settled in. Henry liked children and was especially kind to the shy, bookish Alice. (Of his irregular ménage à trois, with his wife’s cousin who lived with them, the shockable Buchans can have had no idea.)

  JB himself wrote a couple of the ‘Teaching of English’ books – A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys (1922) and The Last Secrets (1923). He had always been fascinated by journeys carried out under stress and pressure: ‘In the great romances of literature they [hurried journeys] provide many of the chief dramatic moments, and, since the theme is common to Homer and the penny reciter, it must appeal to a very ancient instinct in human nature … We live our lives under the twin categories of time and space, and when the two come into conflict we get the great moment. Whether failure or success is the result, life is sharpened, intensified, idealized.’39 The stories include the escape of Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden, the springing of the Earl of Nithsdale from the Tower by his resourceful wife after the ’15, and Winston Churchill getting away from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp.*

  The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration also concerned an enduring fascination of JB’s, namely, exploration, at a time when people began to fear there were few fascinating geographical unknowns still to discover. The book was dedicated to the memory of Cecil Rawling, ‘An intrepid explorer, a gallant soldier and the best of friends’. This book describes pre-war exploits, including Younghusband’s expedition to Lhasa, Scott’s epic failure to get first to the South Pole, Rawling’s own exploration of New Guinea and his discovery of a pygmy people, as well as the 1922 Everest expedition.

  The move to Elsfield had changed JB’s circumstances. He had been working for Nelson’s on a basis that had been agreed in 1907, at the time of his marriage. By early 1923 the cost of setting up and maintaining the elaborate establishment at Elsfield and the arrival of four children had put real pressure on his financial affairs. During the war he had been the government’s appointee on the Reuters Board and in 1919, at the invitation of Sir Roderick Jones, had supplemented his income by resuming his directorship. He was now looking to increase both what Nelson’s paid him and his involvement with Reuters, after Jones had asked him to become Deputy Chairman, at a handsome salary.

  JB could not face discussing Reuters’ offer with Ian Nelson, but asked another director, John Kemp, to tell him instead. In an apologetic letter to Ian, he later explained, all too truthfully, that this was because ‘I am desperately shy about speaking money matters with friends.’40 Nelson responded, ‘[I am] aware that you have not got very much out of the business in the past. This has been due to the fact that, as conducted during the last 20 years or so, the business has been extremely unsuccessful and for this result we must all take some share of responsibility. Had the business been moderately successful your share of the surplus profits on ordinary dividends (whichever you like to call them) would have been very considerable. As things are today the Co. is in such a critical condition that I am afraid as a director I could not at present support an alteration in anyone’s agreement which would involve the guaranteeing of more cash year by year and that quite independent of results.’41 JB’s response was to the effect that he realised Nelson’s could not afford to pay him a large salary – his value to the firm being in developments that would not be immediately profitable. He added that he had not decided whether to accept Reuters’ offer, which would depend on the advice of his doctor and Reuters’ agreement to his continuing to work for Nelson’s.42

  There was an issue about the remuneration JB had received and, in that connection, JB was provided with a statement, which caused him to write, for him, a strongly worded letter complaining that he had been paid £6,300 less than was shown and asserting flatly that ‘the figures are certainly wrong’.43 In reality (as an equally stern letter from Ian Nelson and a further financial statement proved),44 the statement was right and it was the author of The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income who had forgotten to take into account tax paid by the company on his behalf to the Inland Revenue. Such an elementary error, in relation to such an enormous sum of money, is, to say the least, surprising. It resulted in a humiliating climb-down.45

  In July, Ian Nelson wrote to JB to say that, after the latter had said in January that he had not made up his mind about Reuters, ‘From that day to this, I have heard nothing from you directly, but it seems obvious from your very close association with Reuters, and from what has appeared in the Press, that your position there now is very different to that of an ordinary director.’ He wanted to know exactly what was going on.46 After the two men met that month, JB explained his failure to discuss the matter earlier: ‘I had avoided raising the question before, for I did not like to worry you when you had so much to think about.’ He went on to summarise (as Nelson had asked him to do) the terms they had discussed.47 Nelson, in reply, pointed out that JB had omitted from his account what Nelson’s might expect from him in return for the proposed remuneration. Lilian Killick’s observation about JB being businesslike but not a businessman was uncomfortably close to the truth. He undoubtedly suffered from having had no mercantile upbringing. Gradually, however, matters progressed and the terms on which JB could work for both Reuters and Nelson’s were agreed that November. The agreement was to last another six years.

  In late 1920, JB suggested to his old friend the Earl of Rosebery that he might edit a collection of the latter’s speeches and essays, since ‘it is really not old friendship which makes me think they are the purest and finest prose of our time’.48 Rosebery, extremely grudgingly, agreed, and Hodder and Stoughton published, in two volumes, Miscellanies; Literary and Historical, in September 1921. In an act of singular generosity the old man gave the royalties to JB and he spent them partly on renovating the dilapidated temple near the pond in the garden at Elsfield, and partly on helping ‘some of the honest men I am always coming across who have been knocked out by the War an
d those beastly times’.49 In the end he received more than £1,500.

  Meanwhile, the printing presses continued to turn on his account, with Nelson’s producing The Long Road to Victory as well as Days to Remember: The British Empire in the Great War, while The Nations of Today: A New History of the World was published in nine volumes by Hodder and Stoughton in late 1923 and early 1924 with JB providing the General Introduction to each one.

  He wrote, or co-wrote, three regimental histories, without taking a royalty for them, in the early 1920s: The History of the South African Forces in France (Nelson’s, 1920); The History of the Royal Scots Fusiliers (Nelson’s, 1925); and The Fifteenth (Scottish) Division, in which he collaborated with a Lieutenant-Colonel J. Stewart, DSO (Blackwood’s, 1926). A note in this last book announced that his contribution ‘was a labour of love in memory of his gallant brother Alastair, who fell in action at Arras, 1917, while serving with the Division in the 6/7th Royal Scots Fusiliers’. With that book completed, JB had finally discharged his duty to the dead. It was more than time to move on.

  In 1921 he went back to fiction with the publication of The Path of the King, which chronicles the varying fortunes of descendants of a Viking king, the physical link being a gold ring. He had the help of Susie in this and the dedication reads ‘To My Wife I dedicate these chapters first read by a Cotswold fire’. This was an ambitious attempt to trace royal blood over a dozen centuries, starting with a Viking boy descended from Charlemagne and finishing with Abraham Lincoln, ‘the last of the Kings’, thereby implicitly connecting Britain with America in a shared heritage, as well as underscoring his belief that greatness could, and often did, come from humble origins. JB was fascinated by how certain characteristics in a family surfaced from time to time in later generations.

  The times he chose included the thirteenth-century with the Crusades, the sixteenth century at the time of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris, and the seventeenth century at the time of Charles I’s execution. One of the best stories is set in twelfth-century Bruges. ‘The Wife of Flanders’ was later dramatised by Susie, as was the chapter about Joan of Arc, which she called ‘The Vision at the Inn’.

  G. M. Trevelyan, a close friend and, by now, a famous British historian, well known for the quality and readability of his own prose, declared that it was the best of JB’s books and that ‘The historical vignettes are full of the spirit of each passing age, psychologically interesting and yet with a “moral uplift” which “done me a lot of good”, and a unity to the whole book given by the entrancing mystery of heredity … The idea and execution of the seedy rascals is also capital … And for the imaginative use of real historical knowledge and sound thought on historical happenings it delights me to the heart.’50

  During the early Elsfield years the family spent six weeks every August and early September in Scotland, partly staying at Peebles or Broughton, and partly with friends in the Highlands, where they would fish for brown trout, sea trout or salmon, and JB would stalk red or fallow deer. The favoured locations were Ardtornish, where the ever-hospitable Gerard Craig Sellar lived with his mother until his untimely death in 1929; Letterewe, a house on Loch Maree taken by Alec Maitland, an Edinburgh barrister, and his wife Rosalind, who was Craig Sellar’s sister; Glen Etive in Argyll, owned by Ian Nelson; and Kinlochbervie in Sutherland, home to General Stronach, the moving spirit behind Road Rails, a short-lived company providing transport in difficult terrain in developing countries, with which JB and Lord Milner were involved in the early 1920s.

  JB’s eye for topography, first sharpened when walking with his friends from Oxford in Galloway or climbing in Skye, developed during his tours of battlefields, and writing accounts of battles during the Great War, served him well when he began to receive stalking invitations from friends. For this reason he must have earned the respect of the ghillies, whose provinces these ‘forests’ were, and with whom he often made friends. He was no ‘head hunter’ but, like his hosts, keen to remove the older stags who were ‘going back’, to keep the herd strong. He would also sometimes refrain from shooting a deer that was in his rifle-sights, since it was the ‘stalk’ not the kill that appealed to him more and more as he grew older.

  All his love of wild landscape, strenuous exercise, thrill in the chase, the intellectual challenge involved in out-thinking an animal in its element, together with his conservationist instincts, came together in those August days. Susie seems also to have enjoyed these holidays (which cannot have been true of all wives in these circumstances), for she was content to read, walk, fish or sit in the garden, and there would be good, if sleepy, talk at night over dinner. JB usually felt very well on these holidays. It is no accident that he wrote a hymn to the joys of good fellowship and stalking, the novel John Macnab. And, because all experience could be grist to his mill, the fact that he once found himself with a deer in his sights but the wrong cartridges in his pocket51 became a crucial plot development in The Three Hostages. As the children grew older, and were thought to be able to cope with being cold, wet and bitten by midges, they began to accompany their parents on these strenuous holidays.

  It was in the early 1920s that JB began a tradition of each spring writing a book that could be published in time for his readers’ summer holidays. Huntingtower, a contemporary novel of adventure, was published by Hodder and Stoughton in August 1922. It was dedicated, at length, to an old Glaswegian friend of an earlier generation, W. P. Ker, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In the dedication he gives the ‘history’ of the descent of his hero, Dickson McCunn, from Baillie Nicol Jarvie,* a playful nod to Sir Walter Scott that Ker would have enjoyed. Moreover, Ker would not have missed the strong resemblance of Huntingtower to the house on the edge of the cliffs in Guy Mannering.**

  The plot revolves around the threat to an exiled Russian princess by ruthless Bolsheviks, who chase her to a castle in south-west Scotland. Those who come to her rescue consist of a most motley crowd of unlikely heroes and heroines: a recently retired, profoundly respectable, eminently practical but secretly romantic Glasgow grocer; a gang of Glasgow street urchins, whom the grocer is supporting, let loose in the countryside; a young Modernist poet, who is ‘turned’ by Dickson McCunn so that, in the end, he burns his poems to keep warm and goes back to reading Tennyson; an elderly, respectable village Scotswoman who both bakes delicious scones and intrepidly takes on a disguise; the boyishly charming and game, if sometimes naïve, Sir Archie Roylance;* and a Russian prince on a motorbike.

  The story is ridiculous but fast-paced and witty (the Socialist Sunday School songs in Scots are delicious). But it is still preoccupied with the problem of evil, in this instance represented by totalitarianism that breeds brutal degenerates, an evil that in this case is defeated by a small, disadvantaged, inner-city boy.

  JB’s knowledge of feral street children in Glasgow in the late nineteenth century comes through in this comic book. It is, of course, a fantasy of how resourceful poor children would behave, but it exhibits a deep sympathy for them, as well as a general belief that Man has a capacity for greatness, however humble or unpromising his beginnings. As he was later to say: ‘The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.’52 That explains why he had such an enduring interest in the Scout movement, from its early days under Sir Robert Baden-Powell, and took his Chief Scout duties so seriously once he became Governor-General of Canada.

  Late on in the book, Dickson McCunn muses about the Gorbals Die-Hards:

  As he looks at the ancient tents, the humble equipment, the ring of small shockheads, a great tenderness comes over him. The Die-Hards are so tiny, so poor, so pitifully handicapped, and yet so bold in their meagreness. Not one of them has had anything that might be called a chance. Their few years have been spent in kennels and closes, always hungry and hunted, with none to care for them; their childish ears have been habituated to every coarseness, their small minds filled with the desperate shifts of living �
�� And yet, what a heavenly spark was in them!53

  At least two of the Gorbals Die-Hards appear in Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds, having benefited from McCunn’s generous patronage.

  Huntingtower sold, in hardback, 230,000 copies, as many as Mr Standfast and two-thirds as many as The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. None of his other contemporary novels would do as well. Gainsborough Pictures made the book into a ‘comic’ film five years later. It starred Sir Harry Lauder, the Scots comedian and singer, as Dickson McCunn, the castle scenes being filmed at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland.*

  Nothing shows his indifference to literary coteries better than JB’s persistent interest in the Borders (‘Lallans’) dialect, in pursuit of which he brought out a careful selection of poetry, The Northern Muse: An Anthology of Scots Vernacular Poetry (Nelson’s, August 1924). It was dedicated to Lord Rosebery but was also a homage to his father. ‘I have made this little [it’s 547 pages long] anthology with no other purpose than to please myself,’ he wrote in the Introduction, and confined his choice to poems, which he considered to be literature ‘from a bottle song just redeemed from doggerel by some quaintness of fancy to the high flights of Burns and Dunbar’.54 The book did include some modern poetry, but by fellow Scots language enthusiasts, such as the vernacular poets Charles Murray** and Violet Jacob, the latter best known for her novel, Flemington, and her 1915 collection of poetry, Songs of Angus.

  In this Introduction he put the case for the Scots vernacular and its literature, but he was clear-eyed enough to see that the particularities of the Scots written language were dying out. The problems with it, from which he excepted the poetry of Robert Burns, were a certain provincialism and sentimentality. ‘Instead of Burns’s “stalk of carle hemp” there seems to be in such writers a stalk of coarse barley sugar.’55 Besides Burns and Stevenson, as well as Murray and Jacob, the Scottish poet who gets the best coverage is the medieval chronicler, William Dunbar.