The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Writer led extraordinary life as strange as any story found in work of fiction
John Buchan is best known for penning classic novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. As Graeme Strachan discovers, the Perthborn author had more strings to his bow
John Buchan, acclaimed author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, led an extraordinary life which was stranger than fiction.
He was born on August 26 1875 at 20 York Place in Perth, which at the time was the manse of the Knox Free Church (South Street) where his father was minister.
The author of more than 100 books and 1,000 articles, Buchan was also a scholar, antiquarian, colonial administrator, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, a Unionist MP, and, at the time of his death, the governor-general of Canada.
But it is for the creation of the patriotic and noble Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps for which he is most remembered.
The forerunner to James Bond, Hannay must prove his innocence when charged with murder as he is pursued by police and foreign spies the length of Britain.
Buchan called this style his “shocker”.
The Thirty-Nine Steps first appeared as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form that year by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.
It was being granted the Freedom of Perth in 1933 at the City Hall which filled Buchan with just as much pride as anything he achieved in his literary life.
He said there was nothing “more gratifying than the kindly approval of his own people”.
The ceremony made front page headlines when he was conferred the freedom alongside insurance company director Francis Norie-Miller
“There is nothing which a man can attain in this uncertain world more gratifying than the kindly approval of his own people,” said Buchan.
“You have given one reason, which, of course, is the chief one, and which I am glad to think is strictly true.
“I am one of yourselves. It is the infant of more than half a century ago you are honouring today.
“It is true that my residence here was brief, and that after six months, I left Perth for the windy shores of Fife.
“My notion of Perth was drawn wholly from Sir Walter Scott, and it seemed to me a magical place, which must confer a unique distinction upon its natives.”
Buchan said he would take Perth “as a keynote in all the story of Scotland”.
The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first of five novels featuring Hannay, who had a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations.
Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version in 1935 captured the public’s imagination and elevated the story to classic status.
Hitchcock took many liberties with the book including the setting of the Forth Bridge for Hannay’s daring escape from a train on to the girders.
At the premiere in 1935, Hitchcock came up to Buchan at the interval and said to him: “Are you enjoying it, my lord?”
Buchan replied: “Fine so far, but do tell me how it ends.”
Buchan told Hitchcock afterwards that the film was much better than the book.
Buchan was born in Perth in 1875 and brought up in Kirkcaldy, where he went to schools first in Pathhead, then finally to Kirkcaldy High, walking three miles each way every day.
Buchan’s father’s profession as a Free Kirk minister led the family from Kirkcaldy to Glasgow, where he lived from the age of 13 until he was 20.
A big fan of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, Buchan attended Hutchesons’ Grammar and then went on to Glasgow University where he successfully tried for a scholarship at Oxford and never lived north of the border again.
He was writing reviews, articles and novels throughout.
After graduating, Buchan studied law for his bar exams while continuing to write books and work as a journalist.
At the age of 26, he went to South Africa to assist Lord Milner, the High Commissioner, and spent two years there as the country recovered from the Boer War.
In 1903, he returned to the UK, working as a barrister and then at a publishing company. In 1907, he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, a cousin of the Duke of Westminster.
Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1914 and it was published in 1915, the same year he was war correspondent for The Times where he covered the second battle of Ypres.
The following year he joined the staff of Sir Douglas Haig as an intelligence officer and was present at the Battle of the Somme.
Buchan was recalled to fill the post of
“My notion of Perth was drawn wholly from Sir Walter Scott, and it seemed to me a magical place, which must confer a unique distinction upon its natives
the government’s director of wartime propaganda under Lord Beaverbrook in 1917.
He wrote a 24-volume report of the First World War and later was elected the MP for the Scottish Universities from 1927 to 1935.
He was sworn in as Canada’s governor-general in 1935 and was given a state funeral in Ottawa after he suffered a haemorrhage in 1940, aged 64.
He was cremated and his ashes were sent home secretly, because it was during the war, on a destroyer to be buried in Oxfordshire.
He had just signed contracts for five books and had planned to leave Canada that autumn and return to Oxfordshire to write.