Scotland had recovered her confidence. But in the process she was shutting the door upon her past. There were two strains in her history – the aristocratic and Cavalier; the Covenanting and democratic; and both were so overlaid by novelties that they were in danger of being choked and forgotten. The first, having suffered downfall with Jacobitism, survived only as a dim sentiment, the inspiration of songs when the claret went round, a thing of brocades and lace and twilit windows. The second had lost itself in formalism or eccentricity, and its stubborn democratic tradition was half forgotten. There was a danger lest the land, setting out confidently on new paths, might condemn as provincial and antiquated what was the very core and essence of her being. She was in the van of the new enlightenment: was her progress to be that of the rocket which shoots from earth into high places and then falls, or like the slow growth of a tree, deep-rooted by ancient waters?
In 1771 Scotland stood at the parting of the ways. That she chose rightly was due to two children who were then alive on her soil.47 [Burns and Scott].
JB also experienced, and could empathise closely with, many of Scott’s difficulties, especially indifferent health. He could have been writing of himself in 1932: ‘The reaction of a man to the ebbing of bodily strength in middle age is a certain proof of character, and Scott revealed that tough stoicism which can laugh even when the mouth is wry with pain.’48
He could also have said of himself what he said of Scott:
He had mingled intimately with every class and condition of men; he had enough education to broaden his outlook but not enough to dim it; he was familiar alike with city and moorland, with the sown and the desert, and he escaped the pedantry of both the class-room and the drawing-room…49
Trevelyan, the dedicatee, called it ‘the best one-volumed biography in the language’.50
In the summer The Gap in the Curtain was published, the only full-length supernatural novel he ever wrote. (Most of his tales of the uncanny are short stories.) Sir Edward Leithen is the narrator/onlooker and the gap in the curtain of the title refers to a moment when members of a Whitsun house party catch a glimpse of a page of The Times one year hence. How five of them deal with the foreknowledge forms the basis of the story. This novel contains, in the account of one of those who catch that glimpse, a brilliant, lengthy and disillusioned description of British politics at that time. It may well indicate how disappointed the high-minded JB had become with the manoeuvrings of contemporary politicians. Baldwin and MacDonald are, however, exempted; there are sympathetic portraits of them both.
A typical couple of days for JB in London, as he told his wife, included entertaining ‘some University professors to lunch, and then … successively Edward Irwin’s education meeting, the Ashridge Governors, and a very long meeting of Scottish Members on Scottish Home Rule, where I had to speak at length … Today I have to lunch with the English Review Club, and then have meetings of the Film Institute people and the British Philosophers, and finish with a long meeting at the House on the Everest flying scheme.’51 The only aspects of his public life not crammed into those two days were the Pilgrim Trust and his local involvement in the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Oxford University Chest and the Oxford Preservation Trust. These worthy and various projects gave him satisfaction and, in the case of the daring (and successful) Houston Mount Everest Flying Expedition, which he helped to promote, some intense, if vicarious, excitement.
Excitement of another kind came in May 1932. He wrote to his wife from London:
Now, here is something important which I want you and Alice to talk over before I come back on Friday. They are going to separate Burma from India, and make it a separate Dominion under a Governor-General, and, since the Burmese are a reasonable and docile people, they believe that if self-government succeeds there, it will be a model to India. I was sent for last night, and they asked me to be the first Governor-General. I have been whistling ‘Mandalay’* whilst shaving for some weeks, and that seems to have been an omen. What do you think about the old ‘Moulmein Pagoda’? This would not be like Canada, a quasi-royal affair, but a piece of solid and difficult work. There is no hurry about a decision, for I have only been sounded, but I wish you would turn it over in your mind. Are we too old for a final frisk?52
It is interesting that, at fifty-six, he thought himself towards the end of his useful public life and that being Governor-General of Burma would be a more taxing task than Governor-General of Canada. The question came to nothing in the end, since the idea of creating a separate country fizzled out for the time being, but it resurrected thoughts JB had had about representing the King overseas, ever since Mackenzie King’s abortive proposal that he should be Governor-General of Canada in 1926.
One of the most pressing issues that concerned JB in and out of Parliament in the early 1930s was the plight of European Jews, and the development of Palestine as a homeland for the persecuted. And in the light of the work he did in this field, we must consider the charge of anti-Semitism, which surfaces from time to time, mainly as a result of about half a dozen unfavourable comments by fictional characters, mostly to be found in the Hannay books.
If the question is whether JB was, himself, anti-Semitic, it is important to avoid anachronism. Racial and national stereotyping, favourable and unfavourable, was commonplace throughout all society during his entire lifetime. It is hardly surprising that characters in JB’s novels should engage in it, in ways that both commend and criticise. As it happens, there are favourable depictions of individual Jews in the short story, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, in A Lodge in the Wilderness and, in particular, A Prince of the Captivity. In any event, great care should be taken to avoid attributing to an author the views of his fictional creations. For example, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the anti-Semitic comments of the freelance American spy, Scudder, are explicitly denounced by Sir Walter Bullivant, as well as Hannay (who thought them ‘eyewash’); both of them, of course, are also products of JB’s imagination. (Scudder believes in a conspiracy of Jews seeking war for profit and to get back at Russia for the pogroms, which turns out to be completely wrong; the enemies in the book are in fact Prussian-led.) In any event, the case can be made that distinctions expressed by his characters and those made by JB outside his novels were really to do with nationality and culture, rather than genetics. JB was no cultural relativist. If he was not personally anti-Semitic, it would be hard to argue that he intended to be so in his writing. If anti-Semitism were found in his work, that would be the result of the reader’s perception and not JB’s intention.
The evidence of his close personal relationships with Jews and his support for the Jewish people – at a time when Tory politicians were thought to damage their chances of preferment by such support53 – suggests that, if anything, JB was a philo-Semite. How could it be otherwise for a man deeply imbued in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in Jewish historical culture? As Allan Massie puts it, ‘I think it well nigh impossible for a Presbyterian Scot to be hostile to the Jews and Israel.’54 It is no surprise, therefore, that one of his most long-standing friends was the Jewish economist Moritz Bonn, who fled from Germany in 1933. Hermann Eckstein, a Rand magnate and banker, threw JB’s engagement party. He dedicated Prester John to the Jewish financier Sir Lionel Phillips, in whose house he and Susie spent the first week of their honeymoon. He and Dr Chaim Weizmann, later the first President of Israel, were good friends. All of which at the very least suggests that there were prominent Jews who did not consider JB anti-Semitic. He supported the Balfour Declaration, which endorsed a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. A Prince of the Captivity has been called ‘almost certainly the first major anti-Nazi popular novel’.55 In 1933, as Chairman of the Parliamentary Pro-Palestine Committee, JB received a deputation from ‘the leaders of the synagogue’ concerned with the persecution of German Jews; sitting at dinner that evening next to ‘my beloved Mrs. Jimmy’ (de Rothschild) he was so moved by singing the Hymn of Exile ‘t
hat I made a really good speech’.56 On 5 April 1933, less than three months after Hitler came to power, JB was one of only fifty MPs who signed an Early Day Motion deploring the treatment of Jews in Germany. In the spring of 1934 he spoke at a rally in Shoreditch organised by the National Jewish Fund, describing Zionism as ‘a great act of justice. It was reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong, which had stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.’57 His name was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund of Israel. It also appeared in a Nazi publication, Who’s Who in Britain (Frankfurt, 1938), the entry reading: ‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity.’58
In 1933, Ramsay MacDonald invited JB to fulfil the role of Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (with which the Free Church had merged in 1929). Ever since the sixteenth century, this body had met every year in the spring to discuss church matters. The Lord High Commissioner was the King’s representative – ‘a kind of stage sovereign’59 as Robert Louis Stevenson put it – so the royal standard waved from the roof of the Palace of Holyroodhouse while he was in residence, and the whole procedure was hedged around with the conventions of (almost) kingship.
There would be much entertaining of worthies, grandees and friends of the Buchans at levées, receptions, luncheons, dinners and a large garden party. (On being told, Susie immediately began to worry about what she would wear.) However, the allowance for entertainment was not munificent, and initially JB told MacDonald that he would only accept the invitation if they could agree on how much, or rather how little, entertaining he was expected to pay for. Fortunately, before this became an impasse, Sir Alexander Grant came to his rescue by offering to help out financially, if need be, so JB agreed to do it.
His acceptance of the invitation was, at least in part, a homage to his father as well as an obvious fillip for his mother. Moreover, he had loved heraldry, ancient arcane Scottish chivalry and, by extension, formal ceremony ever since he was a boy, and he had always enjoyed dressing up. He often quoted Dr Johnson: ‘Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us therefore be cautious how we strip her.’ He knew that Susie would rise to the occasion as a hostess, that it would mean they could see and entertain a number of their Scottish friends, and that Alice, aged twenty-four, an aspiring novelist and sometimes underemployed actress, would enjoy being a lady-in-waiting.
The task of the Lord High Commissioner, addressed as ‘Your Grace’, was to open and close the Assembly, and attend some of its deliberations, although, since the Kirk was not established (as the Church of England is), he could not speak or vote, the proceedings being presided over by the Moderator. He also had to report on the events afterwards to King George V. The ceremonies had all the panoply of a medieval pageant: military guards of honour; a Purse-bearer; the Lord Lyon King of Arms, together with his heralds and pursuivants; the Royal Company of Archers in their dark green tunics; the Holyrood High Constables in blue and silver. JB, who was already a Deputy Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, was swiftly appointed one for Peebleshire as well, so that he could wear a scarlet uniform and a plumed hat. He told a friend that he looked like a blend of General Moltke and ‘Lord’ George Sanger, the circus owner.
The ceremonies began on the evening of 22 May, when the Lord Provost of Edinburgh solemnly handed over to JB the Keys to the City, as the symbol of the city’s allegiance to the Crown. He settled into Holyrood Palace with his wife, mother, mother-in-law, sister and daughter, and they were attended by aides-de-camp, who included the Marquess of Clydesdale, fresh from flying over Everest, and Captain Brian Fairfax-Lucy of the Cameron Highlanders. The Lord High Commissioner requires a chaplain, so Charlie Dick was invited down from his Shetland fastness to say daily morning prayers and stand by his friend’s side.
The following day, the Buchans hosted a levée of judges, members of the armed forces, the town council and church leaders in the Throne Room, and then inspected the guard of honour of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the courtyard. There was much blowing of trumpets and playing of band tunes, which mingled with the jingling of the harness of the mounted escort, and the barked commands of their officers. They then drove, in an open landau, accompanied by a mounted escort of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, to St Giles’ (Presbyterian) Cathedral, through streets pressing with people, to the accompaniment of a twenty-one-gun salute from the Castle. After the service in the Cathedral, they removed to the packed Assembly Hall on the Castle Mound where, after a message from the King, JB addressed the Assembly: ‘I come before you to-day with a full heart, for I am one of yourselves. I have in my bones the traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism.’60 He paid tribute to the men of the Kirk whose memory was still a living thing to him, including his father. ‘From their teaching and their lives I learned the meaning of the beauty of holiness and the grandeur of Christ’s Kirk in Scotland.’
During the many receptions the ADCs would bring people up and introduce them to Their Graces, just as if they were the King and Queen; the stately Caroline Grosvenor, used to Court life at the end of nineteenth century, was not too grand to confess she was mightily impressed. She told her daughter, Marnie: ‘The whole thing has a sort of fairy-tale touch about it … When I see people being led up to Susie and curtseying nervously to her, and when I have to curtsey myself I feel as if I must wake up and find it a dream … I must say I am very proud of John and Susie. They both do it with much dignity and simplicity.’61
Most of the Scottish aristocracy, together with every senior civic officer, serviceman and legal luminary, found themselves at Holyrood Palace at some point over the ten days.* Among the personal guests were the Baldwins, Sir Alexander Grant and his family, and the Gillons. Not surprisingly, Mrs Buchan was in her element. She had been attending the Free Kirk assemblies for many years, and the Church of Scotland ones since Unification in 1929, listening intently to debates, knitting needles in her hand. She had a broad acquaintance amongst church people and an excellent memory for ecclesiastical disputes, so she was very helpful to JB.
Violet Markham, who was invited to stay at Holyrood (and gave a long account of the visit to Mackenzie King), remembered that JB, with his considerable entourage, made a point, after opening the Assembly, of visiting the other assembly, that of the Free Kirk, known as the ‘Wee Frees’, the numerically small sect that had stood out against all amalgamations:
As our party clattered in, we seemed to fill up half the space of a thinly peopled hall. This was a gathering which might have been a persecuted remnant, meeting in the catacombs, mostly ageing men and women with here and there a child who looked on wide-eyed at this sudden influx of pomp and colour – soldiers in their brilliant uniforms, ladies in their gay frocks, and officials in dignified garb. [The Moderator told him that they had never before been visited by the King’s Representative. JB talked to him of the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, whom he admired] with a fluency and knowledge above the heads of his guests. Then with mutual expressions of courtesy and good will, we clattered out again to engage in the festivities and the ceremonies of the day. But I remember I was very near to tears.62
At the end of the ten days, JB handed back the keys to the Lord Provost and the family climbed into a first-class carriage at Edinburgh Waverley, changing at Paddington Station into a third-class carriage to travel back to Oxford. It had all been a howling success, with the added bonus that Alice and one of the ADCs, Brian Fairfax-Lucy, had fallen in love. The Buchans were pleased, JB calling him ‘the best of good fellows’. By the end of the following month the couple were engaged, and they married in St Columba’s Church in Knightsbridge on 29 July.
After the Assembly, Sir Alexander Grant sent JB a cheque to help defray the substantial expenses; in strictly utilitarian terms – which this was not – a very generous return for a novel dedication. JB replied: ‘I wish there were any words in the English language in which I could express how much I feel about your kindness.’63 Grant also insisted on providing Alice�
��s wedding cake, which must have been a magnificent confection.
The following spring, JB was asked again to be Lord High Commissioner. This time he did not hesitate. It took the same pattern of ceremonial, large-scale entertaining, and a great deal of visiting of worthy institutions. The weather was again sufficiently clement for the Buchans to be driven to St Giles’ Cathedral and the Assembly Hall in an open carriage, this time escorted by men of the Royal Scots Greys on their bright white horses. JB told the General Assembly that the Kirk had always laid emphasis on the freedom and responsibility of the individual soul and that in the difficult times they were passing through there was a danger of revolt against freedom from a failure of nerve. ‘To oppose to-day a weak craving for servitude is as sacred a duty for this Church of free men and free women as any that it has faced in its stormy history.’64 It is not difficult to see where his thoughts were tending, with the disquieting rise of dictators in Europe. The newspapers picked up on the theme and Gilbert Murray, who had by this time been awarded the Order of Merit, wrote to JB to thank him and to tell him that what he said needed saying. What JB had proved, not for the last time, was that he could make something meaningful and worthwhile out of an occasion that might otherwise have been not much more than flummery.
The year 1934 saw the publication of a novel and two biographies. The Free Fishers, his last historical novel, took him back to ‘the windy shores of Fife at a time when smuggling and vagabondage were still rife’.65 It is a rollicking, exuberant story, set in Regency times, and concerns a scholar/gipsy of St Andrews and some dubious old friends, who find themselves caught up in a bid to thwart a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval. JB seemed to be able to evoke the early nineteenth century almost as well as the seventeenth, being at home, crucially, with the apparatus that attached horses to a coach. It is meant as a high compliment to say that this is a Georgette Heyer novel, but written by a man.
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 37
