The Macnab Challenge, fact and fiction
John Buchan’s 1925 novel John Macnab featured a fictional Highland challenge that has become part of shooting folklore – even if it didn’t include a grouse
Ursula Buchan explains how her grandfather’s famous novel has become shooting folklore
In 1897, a young soldier named James Branderdunbar, of Pitgaveny in Morayshire, sent a gentleman’s challenge to Lord Abinger at Inverlochy Castle, betting him £20 that he could not stalk and kill a deer on his land without being caught. This tale of impudent bravado by a larger-than-life regular British Army officer, who saw active service in the Boer War, the Sudan campaign of 1903-4 and the First World War, was plainly still doing the rounds of Highland bothies and shooting lodges in the 1920s.
Certainly John Buchan, by then a bestselling author of adventure stories (among many other things) and a keen stalker and fly fisherman, caught wind of it and used the tale for the starting point of his novel, John Macnab. After the book was published in the summer of 1925, Brander-dunbar sent
Buchan photographs of the head of the stag he had killed at Inverlochy and of the cheque for £20. He must have been amused by the book and the minor fame it brought him for, when Buchan was appointed Governorgeneral of Canada in 1935, he wrote to congratulate him, beginning his letter: “My dear John Macnab”.
John Buchan (1875-1940), eldest child of the Reverend John Buchan and his wife, Helen, the daughter of a Tweeddale sheep farmer, grew up in tough environments: first in an industrial suburb of Kirkcaldy in Fife and then close to the Gorbals in Glasgow, where his father was minister of the John Knox Free Church.
After studying at the University of Glasgow and Brasenose College, Oxford, John Buchan steadily climbed the social and professional ladder, thanks to his charm, gifts and appetite for hard work (Edwardian England was not so adamantine in its
class structure as we like to think; brains and talent opened doors, even then). In 1907, the year he married, he became a partner in a publishing house, Thomas Nelson and Sons of Edinburgh and London; he combined this work during the First World War with a spell as a war correspondent and then as director of information in 1917. By 1920, he was also well-established as a writer of adventure, historical and spy novels, supernatural short stories and heavyweight non-fiction.
His leisure was as organised and intense as his work. He had fished and mountaineered since he was a youth but, in his thirties, he also took up stalking in the Highlands, staying with friends at Ardtornish in Morvern, Achnacloich on Loch Etive in Argyll, Letterewe on Loch Maree in Wester Ross and Kinlochbervie in Sutherland.
He was almost ideally suited to the pursuit. He was thin, wiry, quite short but strong and with immense stamina, despite intermittent acute pain from a stomach ulcer. He had a wonderful eye for topography, which he had learned early when ‘walking the hill’ with his shepherd uncles, and then refined when touring the Western Front battlefields.
He was an excellent amateur field naturalist with a keen interest in conservation. He was no ‘head hunter’; he would sometimes refrain from shooting a stag in his rifle sights, tipping his hat to it and walking away. It was the stalk, not the kill, that appealed to him more and more as he grew older. His varied upbringing meant he was at ease with gillies and keepers, quite as much as lairds and politicians.
All his love of wild landscapes, good fellowship, strenuous exercise, the thrill of the chase and the intellectual challenge involved in out-thinking an animal in its element, came together on those summer holidays between the First World War and 1935, when he was appointed the King’s representative in Canada. And because, as a writer, all experience was grist to his mill, the fact that he once found himself with a deer in his rifle sights but the wrong cartridges in his pocket, became a crucial element in the dénouement of The Three Hostages (published 1924), when the hero, Richard Hannay, is ‘stalked’ by the evil genius Dominick Medina amongst the crags of a Scottish deer forest.
From 1921, he was writing a novel every year, timed to be published as the reading
public began to think about their summer holidays. These stories often concerned the activities of Hannay, his most famous creation, thanks to his 1915 novel The Thirtynine Steps, but sometimes either Dickson Mccunn, the romantic Glasgow grocer, or Sir Edward Leithen, the bachelor lawyer and senior politician with a keen analytical mind.
John Macnab tells the story of how three middle-aged friends – Sir Edward Leithen, an MP and lawyer; the Earl of Lamancha, a cabinet minister; and John Palliser-yeates, a banker, discover they are all suffering from a paralysing ennui. A young friend, Sir Archibald Roylance, tells them the story of successful challenges made by a man named ‘Jim Tarras’ (Brander-dunbar). They decide to write letters to the occupants of three estates in north-west Scotland, proposing to poach two stags and a salmon (a grouse never featured in the book) on designated dates in early September, paying a handsome fee for the privilege but promising to give up the spoils. The letters are all signed ‘John Macnab’.
They are aided by Roylance, a birdwatching war hero, who has taken a house for the summer nearby, since he is the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Wester Ross. (A political meeting involving Sir Archie and Charles Lamancha provides one of the comedic elements in the book.)
Their scheme is risky, especially because one of the proprietors, Lord Claybody, a pompous businessman, threatens legal action, so these eminent men are putting their reputations, perhaps even their liberty, in jeopardy. Many of John Buchan’s adventure stories have a strong subversive element to them (a necessary antidote, no doubt, to the highly respectable and worthy life he led) but none more so than John Macnab. These three pillars of the establishment lie like troopers, dress up as tramps and, when provoked, get into a fight. But they never go too far. The gentleman’s code is never breached.
John Buchan obviously had great fun writing John Macnab, as he did all his adventure stories. He always said he wrote them for his own amusement and that of his fam
These three pillars of the establishment lie like troopers, dress up as tramps and get into a fight
ily (reading chapters as he went along to his wife and children in the evenings), although the novels also gave him extra money and considerable fame. They are full of his characteristic dry wit and elegantly expressed descriptions of landscape and weather.
Although these novels are light-hearted and written to be enjoyed by holidaymakers, there is a serious element to John Macnab. At one point, Janet Raden, the clear-eyed daughter of an impoverished laird, declares: “The old life of the Highlands is going, and people like us must go with it… Nobody in the world today has a right to anything which he can’t justify. That’s not politics, it’s the way nature works… People should realise that whatever they’ve got they hold under a perpetual challenge, and they are bound to meet that challenge.”
Two unlikely heroes of the book are Raden, who wins the heart of Sir Archie, and an itinerant fish seller named Benjie, a resourceful young lad with a razor-sharp intellect and a useful pony and cart. The character was based on a boy Buchan got to know at Kinlochbervie. Benjie has similar characteristics to members of ‘the Gorbals Diehards’, Buchan’s much-loved gang of grubby urchins first encountered in Huntingtower (1922); they were the kind of street children that the young Buchan observed in the Gorbals slums in the 1890s and, I believe, the objects of his generous private philanthropy.
REAL-LIFE CHALLENGE
In the summer of 1927, soon after he became a Conservative MP, the family stayed in a fishing lodge at Ardura on the Isle of Mull. Just as they were packing up to go home, Buchan received a letter with a challenge from three sporting Scottish Labour MPS, along the lines of the fictional John Macnab. He was disappointed he couldn’t take them up on it. So, sad to say, it was not a trio of ‘Red Clydesiders’ who carried out the first real-life Macnab challenge.
Having spent several years writing a biography of John Buchan, I am confident that he would be highly amused that the name ‘Macnab’ lives on nearly a century after he wrote his exuberant and sunny tale – pleased, too, that people of an adventurous cast of mind, like him, should try to emulate those fictional deeds of daring and resource.
Moreover, he would applaud the role that the Macnab Challenge plays in the life and economy of Scottish sporting estates by providing opportunities for people – legally – to pit their strength and skill against the elements, the midges and the wits and instinct of game in its natural environment.
As Lord Claybody’s son says, disapprovingly, to the three gentlemen at the end of the book: “There may be a large crop of Macnabs springing up, and you’ll be responsible.” How very true.
Ursula Buchan’s biography of her grandfather, Beyond the Thirty-nine
Steps: A Life of John Buchan, is out now in paperback from Bloomsbury, (£10.99). John Macnab is published by Polygon (£8.99)