It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart … Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul…
This passage was written just after the Second World War had broken out, and he continued:
But something has happened. A civilisation bemused by an opulent materialism has been met by a rude challenge. The free peoples have been challenged by the serfs. The gutters have exuded a poison which bids fair to infect the world…
And the result? The free nations now valued freedom, as they had ceased to value it in the comfort of peacetime:
We have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvellous service in reminding us of the true values of life.78
This quirky book of reminiscences had a substantial impact, not only with the ‘ordinary’ reader, but with policy-makers and statesmen as well. None more so than John F. Kennedy, who numbered Montrose and Pilgrim’s Way among his twelve favourite books. He quoted the latter in a number of speeches. According to his widow, Jacqueline, JB’s views on democracy and the profession of politics profoundly shaped her husband’s thinking. Three years after JB died, the King broadcast to the nation on Christmas Day in wartime. The last sentence, before the National Anthem sounded, was this: ‘In the words of a Scottish writer of our day, “No experience can be too strange and no task too formidable if a man can link it up with what he knows and loves.” ’ This is a quotation from Memory Hold-the-Door.79 Perhaps the King did not give the Scottish writer a name for fear he might stumble over the ‘B’ of ‘Buchan’. But plenty of people will have known that these are the words that follow one of JB’s favourite true stories, of a Scottish soldier in Mesopotamia who, when asked where he got his wound, replied that it was two miles on the Rothiemurchus side of Baghdad.
JB professed himself happy for the United States to stay out of the war for the time being, for American industrialists were proving extremely helpful, fulfilling Allied orders for materiel on favourable terms. ‘The situation,’ he told Walter, ‘in [the States] is curious. America is confirmed in her isolationism, which is all to the good, for we could make no use of her infantry at present; while all the big industrialists are being extraordinarily helpful in our munition work, and the aeroplane people are quite excellent.’80 His anxiety was over whether Britain could finance these purchases, since the Johnson Debt Default Act forbade any loans from America to the Allies. He wanted to talk to Roosevelt about this but thought it too dangerous at the time to suggest it.
To JB’s relief, the King agreed to him leaving Canada in September 1940. He was aware that he had put his Sovereign on the spot, for it might be difficult to find a successor in wartime. In the event, Queen Mary’s brother, the Earl of Athlone, agreed to cross the Atlantic in wartime to replace him; Athlone had already been Governor-General in South Africa, so he knew the ropes. He and his wife, Princess Alice, would turn out to be very popular and hard-working in Canada, although it must be said that Redfern wrote Athlone’s speeches for him.
JB opened Parliament in the last week of January 1940, and proclaimed an immediate dissolution at the request of Mackenzie King, since the time for an election was drawing near, and the Prime Minister had no wish for the life of the Parliament to be extended. He wanted a new mandate, and he felt this was an opportune moment to try to get it. Moreover, if Parliament were dissolved, there was less danger of the government being subjected to criticism, which they couldn’t answer, since much of their work was now confidential. The Germans tried to make capital out of it, as JB noted in a letter to Walter at the beginning of February: ‘I see that Goebbels on the radio, speaking about the Canadian election, said that I had ordered it in order to divert the deep fear and unrest, which is rampant in Canada, by a minor excitement! He is a blithe spirit!’81
JB was very proud of Canada: his Red Cross appeal had netted almost twice what he had asked for, and he sensed the country’s unity and keenness to help in the war effort (there were long waiting lists to enlist, even of French Canadian regiments). It was a quiet time for him and he busied himself with trying to interest Colonel Sam McLaughlin, the millionaire head of General Motors of Canada,* in partly financing a British Columbian version of Hollywood – a scheme promoted by three prominent film actors, Charles Laughton, Ronald Colman and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. JB was enthusiastic because he thought film-making might become very difficult in Britain during wartime. In the end, for many reasons, one of them being the war, the idea came to nothing, but in light of the development of ‘Hollywood North’ in British Columbia and Ontario – now a billion-dollar business – his actions can be seen as visionary.82 On the personal side, he was working hard on the story for an adventure film set in Canada, which Alexander Korda had wanted to make since 1938, and the production of which could begin once JB had left Canada that summer.
On 25 January, JB travelled to Montreal to visit the Catholic Université de Montréal and spending the morning with the Sulpician Brotherhood. ‘I never saw more beautiful faces than those of the brothers.’83 Susie went with him and was mobbed by people in suburban Montreal, shouting ‘You mustn’t go away.’ They brought back their old friend Father Martin D’Arcy, the Catholic philosopher and Master of Campion Hall, the Jesuit college in Oxford, to stay the night. JB told Walter: ‘On Saturday [3 February] I am dining in high ecclesiastical circles, with the Cardinal, the new Archbishop and the Apostolic Delegate – fine company for a Presbyterian Elder!’84 He also told Anna that he had finished his novel and reminiscences and was almost at the end of his children’s book. ‘This will leave me with a clear field for farewells this summer.’ He ended his letter to Anna on Monday, 5 February, with ‘Take great care of yourself, and make Walter do the same.’85
The next morning, he suffered a slight stroke while shaving in his bathroom, fell backwards against the bath, hitting the back of his head badly and causing it to bleed. He was concussed and rendered unconscious. An hour later, James Cast found him. The bulletin issued that evening from Government House and signed by Dr Wilder Penfield, the world-famous neurosurgeon, and Dr Jonathan Meakins, having rushed from Montreal in a snowstorm to see him, said that he had steadily improved and was now conscious. He was able to recognise and talk to Susie and Alastair, and his aides. However, during the next day, pressure began to build up in his brain, and he became restless and fatigued. By lunchtime on Thursday, he was unconscious and his condition was causing grave anxiety ‘on account of increasing weakness’. The following morning his condition was so critical that Dr Penfield and his colleague, Dr William Cone, performed an emergency trepanning operation, to relieve the increased intra-cranial pressure.
The decision was then made to remove him to the Montreal Neurological Institute, and he was taken by ambulance to the station and put in the Governor-General’s carriage. An ordinary carriage was coupled to the engine in front to deaden any shocks and the tracks were cleared of other rail traffic to let the train pass unhindered.
That day, Penfield and Cone carried out two subtemporal decompression operations, which resulted in a slight but definite improvement, but his condition was still considered critical. On Sunday morning he suffered a relapse, and a further emergency cranial operation was carried out. The doctors thought then that they had seen him ‘entering a safe harbour’. However, early on Sunday evening, 11 February, an embolus entered his lung from his leg, and it was all over.86 The telegram to Bank House read: ‘John died in perfect peace at 7.13 this evening.’87 The doctors had not slept for three days and Susie told Alice that, when Dr Penfield came to tell her the news, he looked ‘an old, broken man’.88
That evening, Mackenzie King broadcast to the nation, referring to JB as ‘a great and good man’.89 Three days of national mourning were announced and
JB’s body was brought back from Montreal by train the next morning, 12 February. At Union Station the coffin and party were met by a crowd of officials, including Mackenzie King, his Cabinet and the Mayor. The coffin was placed in the Chamber of the Senate, where JB had opened Parliament four times. Here he lay in state, guarded by four soldiers of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards and the 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards, with Alastair taking three turns on guard. Some 15,000 people filed by in the two days before the funeral.
Ferris Greenslet, who came north for the funeral, recalled: ‘When I went to Ottawa … porters, conductors, small shopkeepers, men in the street, spoke of him with broken voices. Even the French press of separatist Quebec, which had greeted his arrival with epithets of agent provocateur and espion, spoke of him with remorseful eloquence.’90
On the day of the funeral, 14 February, flags flew at half-mast, schools closed, and provincial legislatures opened only for memorial meetings. Early in the afternoon, the coffin was put back into a hearse and, flanked by JB’s aides, was driven at walking pace down Wellington Street to the ‘old’ St Andrew’s Church at the corner of Wellington and Kent, where the Tweedsmuirs had worshipped most Sundays when in Ottawa. The snow was swept from the streets and, behind a double row of troops, people stood many ranks deep, bare-headed (the CBC commentator described ‘dense crowds of hushed, sorrowing people’), in an intense cold that measured zero degrees Fahrenheit (−18°C). In front of the hearse marched the band of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards, playing Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. Immediately behind was the Insignia bearer, carrying JB’s decorations on a black cushion.
The service, which was broadcast live by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and heard across the Commonwealth and the United States, was conducted by the Reverend Alexander Ferguson, the Scotsman from Falkirk whose sermons JB had liked (although not his affected parsonical delivery) and whom he used to invite to Sunday lunch at Rideau Hall.
Ferguson’s address began:
When, just over four years ago, Lord Tweedsmuir stepped ashore at Quebec he was to us an official … Today all Canada mourns him as a friend. There is not a home among us that is not saddened by his passing, not a heart that does not sorrow with his gracious wife and family because so rare a spirit has fled. From coast to coast, from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes, our Governor was loved by us all, known to us all as one on whose eager interest we might count, as one who cared for Canada and made her life his own. With dignity and patience and humour and self-forgetfulness, this great heart has put all his shining gifts of mind and character unreservedly at the service of the Dominion…
Deep-rooted in our Governor’s life was religion … His was no feeble sentimental faith but something robust, pure, unshakeable, that accepted in deepest humility the great gift of Divine atonement for his sins.
The minister quoted JB’s own words:
There is still for every man the choice of two paths and conversion in its plain evangelical sense is still the greatest fact in any life.
And he ended with the description of the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress, which Richard Hannay read over Peter Pienaar’s grave in Mr Standfast:
So he passed over and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.91
At the end of the service, the eight pall-bearers from the three branches of the Canadian forces, as well as the Mounties, strapped the coffin onto a gun carriage and covered it with a Union flag, while the band played ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Abide with Me’, and there was a nineteen-gun salute. The gun carriage was pulled by naval ratings back along Wellington Street and past the Parliament buildings to Union Station.
Susie did not attend the funeral. It is most likely that, after long vigils by her husband’s bedside and the shock of his death, she could not trust her composure when the eyes of the world were upon her. Instead she waited in the train, probably in the company of Joan Pape, listening to the broadcast. The coffin was loaded once more onto the train and, together with Alastair and her husband’s close aides, she left for Montreal once more. There, in the Mount Royal Crematorium, close to the Neurological Institute where he had died, JB’s body was cremated after a short, bleak service.
At the Neurological Institute, the doctors who had worked so hard to try to save JB’s life met to honour him. Dr Meakins spoke of his ‘beloved patient. Among all adjectives this is one which could not possibly be omitted by anyone who knew Lord Tweedsmuir … I have often heard it said that he was frail – yes, perhaps, frail as a rapier is, compared to a battleaxe. There was that fineness of quality of Toledo steel in things physical, mental and spiritual.’92
In the words of the historian J. P. Parry:
His send-off can be seen as the ultimate establishment accolade bestowed on Lord Tweedsmuir, the king’s representative in the greatest dominion of the greatest empire in the world. But it can also be seen as the last tribute of a plain, unfashionable, God-fearing, democratic people to plain John Buchan, who represented and propagated their values more accurately and genuinely than any other official Briton of his day.93
The newspapers speculated that his ashes might be sent for burial to Scotland, but in fact they were sent home to Elsfield, secretly, on the light cruiser HMS Orion, which was leaving Halifax for England with men of the Royal Canadian Air Force on board. Johnnie, William and Vincent Massey* travelled to Plymouth to collect the ashes and took them to Elsfield to stand in the chancel of the church, until Susie’s return.
A memorial service was held in Elsfield church the Saturday after JB’s death, for family, staff, neighbours and Oxford friends. We can easily picture the scene: the small medieval church packed with people, hunched in thick dark overcoats against the chilling cold in that first freezing winter in wartime. The service was devised by JB’s children. The congregation sang Psalm 23 (no doubt to the Crimond setting) as well as the lesser-known Psalm 15: ‘Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle: or who shall rest upon thy holy hill? Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life: and doeth the thing which is right, and speaketh the truth from his heart.’
William read the description of the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth from his father’s battered copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The lesson was from The Wisdom of Solomon: ‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace’*
The hymns would have been well known to the congregation: John Bunyan’s ‘Who would true valour see’ and the so-called Old Hundredth (psalm), ‘All people that on earth do dwell’. Professor Gilbert Murray, sombrely colourful in his scarlet and grey doctoral gown, gave an affectionate eulogy. Later that month, memorial services on a much grander scale were held at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, and in Westminster Abbey, London, where amongst the mourners were Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin and Lord Halifax.
Sir Shuldham Redfern wrote to Sir Alexander Hardinge to describe the struggles to save JB’s life, then he went on:
I saw him about an hour after he died. The lines had gone from his face** and he looked a young man, like those who ‘carry back bright to the Coiner the mintage of man’. And now I miss the welcoming smile he used to give me whenever I went into his room, his boyish enthusiasm, his instantaneous understanding of the one point in a subject that mattered, his kindly and scholarly wit, his simple dignity, his tacit but firm reproof of all the vulgarities, his restraint and tolerance and that inestimable gift of never interfering in anyone else’s job; and he never wore ‘the sepulchral integuments of an English peerage’ … I cannot finish this letter without saying something of Lady Tweedsmuir and her youngest son Alastair … I saw her very soon after the Governor General died. She spoke almost entirely of all the doctors and nurses had done, their skill and unselfishness … She has never faltered and those of us who have been near her through
out this heartrending epic, have been amazed and immensely fortified by her dignity and courage. The same may be said of Alastair who has been a tower of strength and in all the matters we have had to consult him about, many of them of a morbid nature, he has never failed to give us immediate decisions in the crisp manner so characteristic of his father. All this has made our task immeasurably easier.94
On 18 March, Susie, with Alastair (who had been appointed to General Crerar’s staff in England) and some of the English staff, slipped away unobtrusively in a warship from the harbour at St John, wartime conditions decreeing that her going should not be known until she was safely across the Atlantic. Her book scheme ended abruptly on her departure from Canada.
After she arrived home, JB’s ashes were buried in Elsfield churchyard in a private ceremony. Sir Herbert Baker, the architect, whom JB had first met in South Africa decades before, designed the gravestone. He suggested a circular stone, laid flat, with a cross in relief on the top encircled by the Greek words ΧΡΙΣΤΟC ΝΙΚΗΣΕΙ, which translate as ‘Christ will prevail’. Dougie Malcolm, the friend who had beaten JB to an All Souls Fellowship, devised a Latin couplet to go round the stone’s edge:
QUI MUSAS COLUIT, PATRIAE SERVIVIT AMICIS
DILECTUM INNUMERIS HIC SUA TERRA TENET.
‘His own earth here holds a man, who cultivated the muses, served his country and was loved by countless friends.’
Amos Webb, JB’s chauffeur, who was in hospital in Ottawa at the time of JB’s death, died a month or so after his return from Canada and was laid to rest close by. His upright gravestone was also designed by Baker and the inscription includes the words: ‘Friend to Lord Tweedsmuir for twenty years’. In March 1977, Susie’s ashes were buried with her husband’s.
After JB’s death, the editor of The Times told A. L. Rowse that the newspaper had never received so many tributes to a public figure. Rowse was clear that JB paid a price in energy and concentration of achievement for his readiness and willingness to help others:
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 49
