In the end JB agreed to take the job for a variety of reasons: a respect, bordering on devotion, for the idea of monarchy, together with a loyalty to, and friendship with, King George V that stretched back twenty years; his sense of public duty, which had ever spurred him on to expend his strength on worthy projects of many kinds; the fillip it would give to his flickering vanity; to cheer up his mother, who was now quite frail; and a recognition that he was not going ‘all the way’ in politics. His acceptance of the Governor-Generalship was certainly partly due to his inability completely to discount flattery, but as much because of an adventurous spirit and buccaneering optimism, which overestimated the rewards and underestimated the costs. He told his eldest son: ‘Like you, I am a hopeless adventurer and cannot resist the challenge of a new thing.’86
He knew and liked, if he didn’t entirely trust, the Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. The Byngs, husband and wife, had separately left him in no doubt of the substantial difficulties the man had raised in 1926, but JB was an experienced politician, which Byng never was, and probably assumed – rightly as it turned out – that, although there might be turbulence at times, he and Mackenzie King could work together. He thought him an astute politician, a skilful diplomat and, perhaps most importantly, an adroit manager of his Liberal Party colleagues, not many of whom could match him for brains or drive.
One of JB’s great virtues, as far as Mackenzie King and indeed many Canadians were concerned, was that he was a commoner, since the Canadian Prime Minister abominated the British obsession, as he considered it, with titles and honours, a position probably reinforced by the lofty stance taken by Willingdon and Bessborough. (Mackenzie King was mightily miffed the day that Bessborough placed him between his young daughter and her governess at lunch at Government House.) North Americans generally couldn’t see the point of titles. Time magazine in the United States opined: ‘Britain hoped King George V would make his man a peer before John Buchan goes to Canada in the early autumn; Canadians fervently prayed he would not.’87
Sending a commoner to Canada would be setting a precedent and it was never an idea to appeal to King George V. Moreover, both Bessborough and Bennett respectfully suggested to the King that JB be given a peerage, for otherwise the people of Canada would wonder why a Canadian had not been chosen. The King invited the Buchans to stay the night at Windsor Castle after the announcement was made, when the subject was broached, and JB was in no position to gainsay him. In any event, a peerage inevitably appealed to JB’s sense of being a Scotsman who had made good, and pointed up how far he had come by his own efforts from Smeaton Road, Pathhead.
Despite worries that no one would know who he was, once he lost the fine, simple and famous name of John Buchan, his family all joined in the discussion as to what the title should be. Lord Buchan was out, since there was already an (unrelated) Earl of Buchan. Lamancha and Manorwater were both candidates but, in the end, he settled on Tweedsmuir, after the village near the source of the Tweed where he had fished and walked as a boy. His uncles owned land at Fruid in Tweedsmuir parish, which he would inherit, so that he would own acres in his ‘barony’.* A Covenanter, murdered nearby, was buried in Tweedsmuir churchyard, and the Crook Inn (owned by his uncles) had been an important staging inn, a place around which JB spun several short stories about Border reivers and benighted shepherds. All in all, he was happy to be gazetted ‘The First Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield’, which neatly pointed up his twin loyalties.
On 28 March 1935 he wrote to his wife:
My leaving the House [of Commons] yesterday afternoon was a terribly melancholy affair. At three o’clock, when the official announcement came from the Palace, I ceased automatically to be a Member. I went in at ten minutes to three, and took my old seat behind Baldwin. The Speaker smiled at me and he and I kept our eyes on the clock. At one minute to three I got up, shook hands with Baldwin and Ramsay, bowed to the Speaker, and walked out. The debate suddenly stopped, and Members standing behind the Bar grasped my hand. I could not have spoken without breaking down.88
Telegrams and letters of congratulations poured in, photographers and journalists disturbed the peace of Elsfield; even Jimmy Maxton, who usually prided himself on not bowing to bourgeois convention by writing letters of congratulation, wrote to wish him a happy and useful time and told him to write a book or two while he was there. JB will have enjoyed the letter from the soon-to-be Governor-General of South Africa, Patrick Duncan: ‘I congratulate you and Canada. It will be a new experience for them to get a change from the conventional run of aristocratic fainéants [do-nothings].’89
There was a lone dissenting voice. T. E. Lawrence wrote to him: ‘I read yesterday in the paper that you have been chosen as next Governor of Canada. A high office, to which I grudge you immensely. It means that for three years you will be spent on public functions, doing them excellently, no doubt, but at the sacrifice of all your private virtue. Also I shall feel that something is missing, round Elsfield way. This is perhaps a queer way of congratulating you on breaking into another preserve of the Lords. Cromwell would approve it; but still I feel sorry. You are too good to become a figure.’90 This was a douche of cold water after all the warm shower of congratulations that JB had received from the rest of his friends. But it was characteristic of Lawrence, who had once told JB that he thought public service was a shallow grave.
JB was glad to get away from all the fuss for a short walking tour with Alastair in west Wales, before beginning the task of extricating himself from the mountain of obligations he had piled up over the past few years: all those admirable duties, which had worn down his strength and limited the time he spent writing, undisturbed. He had been ill all winter, ‘dragging his wing’, and he embarked on a regime of no tobacco or alcohol, as he was determined to be well for Canada. Elsfield had never looked lovelier in his eyes that spring: ‘It makes Mummie and me ache with homesickness to think we must leave it so soon,’ he told Johnnie.91
Some time in early summer, Beverley Baxter, a Canadian-born journalist and a director of Gaumont-British, took JB to a private viewing of The 39 Steps and remarked that, whenever the plot deviated from the book, which was often, JB would say: ‘First rate. Much better than my way.’92 He told the projectionist that it was an immense improvement on the book, which electrified Baxter’s fellow directors when he told them, since they had never heard an author say such a thing before. It was also a remark he made to the assembled company when, early in June, Baxter hosted a dinner at the Piccadilly Hotel before the premiere of The 39 Steps. Alfred Hitchcock and many of the cast, including Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, were present, as were Susie, William and family friends, although not Alastair, who was in the throes of his School Certificate exams.
The critics mainly agreed with JB that the film was better than the book, since what Hitchcock had done was new and very clever. One person who remained unimpressed, however, was Susie, who, to the end of her life, could not imagine why Hitchcock had felt the need to change the plot or import a female character.
While preparing for Canada, JB was substantially helped by Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, who was Private Secretary to the Earl of Bessborough. While in Ottawa, Lascelles had written a ‘Green Book’ – so-called because it had green leather covers – which was simply entitled Government House Ottawa. Although JB had some knowledge of how things operated at Buckingham Palace, and had stayed with the Byngs at Rideau Hall, this was nevertheless invaluable for all the tricky little pieces of organisation over appointment of staff, size of household, accommodation arrangements, invitations to levées, table plans, precedence, mayoral addresses, dress for particular occasions, the traditions that had grown up as to what functions ‘Their Excellencies’ did and didn’t attend; as well as the more weighty aspects concerning the division of labour between Secretary, Comptroller and ADCs, and the protocol involved in ceremonial, entertaining and the conduct of tours. Studied conscientiously, as the book plainly was, would mean avoiding m
any opportunities for friction and muddle.
It also detailed the finance. JB’s salary was $49,000 a year, but this would be augmented by an allowance for the salaries of the ADCs of $10,000, $19,000 for fuel and light, and $50,000 for travel. The average annual expenditure on the household was $84,000 in Bessborough’s time, so it was obvious that, with all the necessary initial outlay, this was not a money-making exercise for the Governor-General.
Almost as important as the ‘Green Book’, was the highly confidential fourteen-page addendum, which Lascelles called an ‘Apocrypha’, written for JB’s eyes only, to help to ensure that he did not make the more obvious mistakes of his immediate predecessors. Open, yet never breaching the bounds of propriety, he usefully told JB that he didn’t need to do things on the grand Bessborough scale (‘… their standards in such matters as dress, food, wine, travel etc would appear fantastic in London, and do appear positively astronomical in Canada! Such standards are not necessary here; they are not even advisable’).93 The Comptroller of the Household, Colonel Eric Mackenzie,* ‘by nature an extremely practical and economical Aberdonian!’ reckoned, according to Lascelles, that ‘a G.G. with no young family can reasonably expect to re-imburse himself out of his salary, by the end of 3 or 4 years, for the round sum he has to provide for initial expenditure’.94 He ended the letter by assuring JB that Eric Mackenzie would help in every way to tone down the scale of living. All this will have been a substantial relief to JB, who was not a rich man, and was still educating two children. He was also giving an allowance to the married Alice, whose husband Brian, having left the Army as a result of recurrent bouts of malaria, was having difficulty finding permanent employment. Furthermore, JB would need to pay back a £3,000 loan to help with initial costs, which he had accepted from the ever-generous Sir Alexander Grant. (Grant also gave him £1,000 as a present.)
Lascelles, who did not want to stay, also gave invaluable advice to JB about who to choose as a Private Secretary, warning against a really obviously military man, since this could go down badly, not only with civilian Members of Parliament but also small-town mayors and dignitaries – who ‘must be treated as men and brothers, or one gets that dread label “high hat” which has damned so many Englishmen in this country’.95
JB scouted around for a suitable successor and found a youngish Colonial Service official, recently made Governor of the province of Kassala in the Sudan, who, it turned out, was prepared to exchange the heat of equatorial Africa for the cold and snow of Ottawa. Arthur Shuldham Redfern, known always as Shuldham, was twenty years JB’s junior, educated at Winchester College and Cambridge. He was tall, thick-set, with a toothbrush moustache, and walked with a limp from a wound sustained as an RFC pilot during the Great War.
He turned out to be well-nigh ideal. He was hard-working and careful, perceptive, worldly, with a excellent sense of humour, distinctly subversive in private but never in public, and able by training and temperament to think on his feet. With his pretty, intelligent and stylish wife, Ruth, and young son, O’Donnell, he sailed to Canada in the autumn of 1935, and took up residence in Rideau Cottage (which was definitely a house) on the Rideau Hall estate. So began nearly five years of very cordial cooperation. JB found him very easy to get on with, responsive, keen to uphold the dignity of the Governor-General without being a blinkered, defensive courtier.
Much to the Buchans’ sorrow, T. E. Lawrence was killed on 19 May 1935 in a motorcycle accident in Dorset. JB had last seen him in early March, when he had finally retired from the RAF and had travelled back to his home at Clouds Hill in Dorset from Bridlington in Yorkshire on a bicycle, and stopped off at Elsfield on the way. JB had described the visit to Johnnie: ‘On Sunday morning Lawrence of Arabia arrived on a push bike. He has finished with the Air Force and is moving slowly down to his cottage in Dorset, a perfectly free man, and extraordinarily happy. We had him for the whole day, and he has become one of the most delightful people in the world. He has lost all his freakishness, and his girlish face has become extraordinarily wise and mature. He relies a good deal on my advice, but I don’t know what can be done for him, for he won’t ever touch public life again, and yet he is one of the few men of genius living.’96
Lawrence came back one more time to Elsfield. On 10 May he drove to Elsfield on his motorbicycle. JB was in London, but Lawrence was entertained by Susie and William, by then nineteen years old. The visit had a great impact on the young man; he recalled very clearly the visit many years later:
I see him standing by the tall window in the library, facing me as we talked and giving me every strand of his attention. He was not a tall man, indeed decidedly short … Yet, like my father who was also short, he possessed the ability to dominate his surroundings by a combination of powerful controlled energy, poise and eager interest in what was being said. Then there were his fair good looks and, of course, his extraordinary eyes, eyes blue as the sky, brilliant, oddly innocent and yet penetrating … He was full of an enthusiasm which was almost boyish, an excitement which clearly possessed him completely and gave him a youthful, a holiday air … When that unforgettable visit was over, Lawrence mounted his fearsome machine and was off with a roar up the village street, leaving behind, for memory to lay hold of, the dying growl of a powerful motor and a whiff of castor oil.97
Not long after, William sat his first-year examinations at New College and failed them. He had enjoyed his year at Oxford, and made one or two good friends, but his activities had not extended to studying, and his parents had worried a lot as the exams approached. After the results were published in early July, JB went to see the Warden, his long-time friend H. A. L. Fisher, and the two men agreed that William should leave Oxford voluntarily, to avoid the embarrassment of being formally ‘sent down’. It takes little imagination to divine how this divergence from his own experience of Oxford will have struck JB, nor that any exasperation with his son’s idleness (for no one could doubt his brains) must have been tinged with self-reproach. But there was no use repining, for this undesirable turn of events meant that something interesting and worthwhile had to be found for him to do. He had evinced a keen interest in learning about film lighting, having been fascinated by the technicalities of The 39 Steps set, so JB used his influence with Beverley Baxter to get his son a job at Gaumont-British. He became an apprentice, paid 5 shillings a week. His parents did not wish him to be cast adrift and alone in London at such a tender age so they arranged for him to live in the house of their friends, the writer Elizabeth Bowen and her husband, Alan Cameron, with his grandmother keeping an eye on him. His Scottish grandmother was highly dubious, writing to JB: ‘The atmosphere in the 39 Steps made me very unhappy. I think you would be miserable in Canada leaving him amongst people who are so entirely without religion.’98
The summer of 1935 was frenetic; it was filled with formal dress fittings, sittings for a bust by the Scottish sculptor Thomas Clapperton*, farewell dinners (Brasenose College gave him a royal send-off at Claridge’s), and the hiring of staff, such as footmen, for Canada, as well as the letting of Elsfield Manor to Oxford friends called Askwith, who paid a peppercorn rent on the understanding that they keep on the outdoor staff. Mrs Charlett stayed at home,** but Lilian Killick agreed to accompany her employer to Canada as his correspondence secretary, James Cast as his valet, Annie Cox as Susie’s lady’s maid and Amos Webb as a chauffeur. It is not unremarkable that four of JB’s Elsfield/London staff were so devoted to him (there is no other word for it) that they were prepared to leave hearth and home for five years in order to continue to serve him. Lilian Killick was a widow, James Cast and Annie Cox were unmarried, but Amos Webb left a wife behind in Elsfield.
One pressing task was the choice of a suitable coat of arms now JB was a peer. This required visits to Edinburgh to consult with the Lord Lyon. JB told Johnnie that they had ‘settled the supporters for our arms – a stag out of compliment to me, and a falcon to you – both noble animals. The alternatives were Spider and Duggie.’99 In earl
y July he took his seat in the House of Lords, supported by the Lords Macmillan and Strathcona, and went to Buckingham Palace to ‘kiss hands’ and receive the GCMG from King George V.
July saw the publication of The House of the Four Winds, the last in the McCunn trilogy and probably JB’s worst novel. The action has moved from Scotland to the fictional European Republic of Evallonia, which is Ruritania without the charm. It is notable, however, for the use of the word ‘mole’ to mean an undercover agent, forty years before John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The book includes a masterly dissection of 1930s angst about the growing menace of authoritarian regimes, but that is unlikely to have appealed much to the general holiday reader.
He also made sure that he finished The Island of Sheep, the last of the Hannay novels, which was published in July 1936. It was dedicated to his eldest son ‘who knows the Norlands and the ways of the wild geese’, and it contains a child hero, Peter John, who bears a marked resemblance to Johnnie and who, with an equally resourceful girl companion, confounds a criminal gang, some of whom had not been dealt with completely in the earlier The Courts of the Morning.
That summer, Susie entertained Virginia Woolf to stay, so that they could visit the so-called ‘Necromancer of Snowshill’* in the Cotswolds. This may have been a thank-you for the Hogarth Press publishing her Funeral March of a Marionette, although they had known each other a long time. Woolf’s account of the visit is characteristically waspish. She wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell:
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 39
