Beyond the Thirty-nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan, by Ursula Buchan
Peters had managed to register at Magdalen, but problems over his undergraduate record (this time a London First) got in the way.
When Magdalen got letters from bookshops and libraries about unpaid bills, Peters prevaricated, playing the sickness game. The president of Magdalen was a peppery old Scotsman who chased this up, and discovered that the whole business was fraud.
Not even Peters’s date of birth was known until, in 2017, Sisman discovered his pauper’s grave in Norfolk. By then, Peters had gone through all the AngloSaxon countries, married six times (twice bigamously) and several times been deported.
He had served time twice, all the time bobbing up with charm and an Oxford accent, passing himself off to academic institutions that were terribly short of qualified manpower, so that, if he turned up in Canada representing himself as an Oxford First in Theology, they immediately hired him. One post lasted more than a year; most collapsed much sooner.
Though very obviously a bad egg, he was supported by two Anglican grandees: Patrick Collinson, Regius Professor at Cambridge, and Gordon Rupp, Professor of Church History at Manchester, who let Peters into a PHD programme and supported him with testimonials.
Meanwhile, Peters cunningly churned out articles and reviews on religious history. His CV at first sight must have looked magnificent, with well-known referees and longish lists of achievements in various places. When I get that sort of thing in perfect form, I am inclined to throw it away.
Adam Sisman might have asked how on earth was this all paid for? Peters impressed with his dog collar and huge library, assembled at the expense of innocent booksellers. There must have been government grants for research.
Though physically unimpressive, he appealed to women. And adopting a grand accent must have won tricks in the colonies.
On and on he went, with small-time deceptions, while the fascinated Regius Professor of Modern History maintained a huge file on him.
This is a splendid book – even a little classic – and, if at nearly 78, I can give a particular endorsement, it made insomnia worthwhile. But his great rival, A J P Taylor, would not have spent time on this sort of thing, and he joins any anthology of 20th-century English writing. Will Trevor-roper?
See History, page 65 Beyond the Thirty-nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan
By Ursula Buchan Bloomsbury £25
Late in 1928, T E Lawrence, stationed in Waziristan, cheered himself up between wireless signals, reading a friend’s book ‘inch by inch’. This book, a life of the 17th-century ‘Presbyterian Cavalier’, the Marquess of Montrose, was by John Buchan.
Mostly remembered today for what he called his ‘shockers’, especially The Thirty-nine Steps and Greenmantle, Buchan was, as his granddaughter and latest biographer Ursula Buchan is keen to demonstrate, a man of much more varied parts.
Lawrence – who, along with another adventurer, Aubrey Herbert, is considered a model for Sandy Arbuthnot, the polyglot hero of Greenmantle – professed himself delighted with Buchan’s Montrose, but added a doubleedged appraisal: ‘I like it streets better than anything else of yours.’
In 1935, when he heard that Buchan had accepted the Governor-generalship of Canada, Lawrence scribbled in still cattier temper, ‘A high office, to which I grudge you immensely…you are too good to become a figure.’
The essence of Ursula Buchan’s book is the story of how her grandfather proved Lawrence wrong. Rather than settling down as a wooden worthy, he remained until his fairly early death, at 65 in 1940, so untypical and versatile a public entity that much of his best work has been unjustly forgotten.
Buchan showed his talent early in an earnest, 19th-century youth, absorbing and transforming his parents’ Free Kirk atmosphere in Fife and Glasgow. The adult Buchan’s style and opinions married the rhetorical force, structure and logic of the Church of Scotland with the easy-going romanticism of the Jacobites. In a reflection on Robert Louis Stevenson that applies in every syllable to himself, Buchan would ponder ‘the lights and glooms of Scottish history; the mixed heritage we drew from Covenanter and Cavalier; that strange compost of contradictions, the Scottish character’.
At the University of Glasgow, young Buchan, a notional Tory, came under the influence of those Liberal do-gooders, Professor Gilbert and Lady Mary Murray, who helped his swift translation to Oxford. Buchan’s broad ambitions and his particular brilliance tugged him throughout his life and careers in varying professional and political directions. While a young, Tory would-be lawyer, Buchan could not contain himself from writing most of the then Liberal Spectator.
The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) was the novel that turned Buchan into a publishing phenomenon and from whose shadow his granddaughter now fights to free him. Ursula Buchan is firmly proportionate about the book’s proper stature – foundational in its genre, forgettable beyond it, and by now much overshadowed by the Hitchcock film. She is also usefully clear about the need to distinguish the protagonist Richard Hannay from his creator. Hannay lacks Buchan’s airy expanses of book-learning; Buchan – who was often ill – Hannay’s youth and vigour.
Buchan’s political career – or rather drift – between the wars might from some angles look rather embarrassing, and his granddaughter acknowledges this. She rebuts ill-informed charges of racism, anti-semitism and fascist sympathy with thorough dispatch, while conveying the evident truth that her distinguished ancestor was not as well-suited to politics as he thought.
More instinctive and professional political beasts such as Churchill and Lloyd George openly distrusted Buchan, while Stanley Baldwin, the oleaginous Canadian premier William Lyon Mackenzie King, and even the Scottish Nationalist Communist poet Hugh Macdiarmid all exploited his friendship; then later betrayed him. Yet, in his last incarnation as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-general of Canada, Buchan lent real purpose to a position Lawrence was surely right to denigrate as at least potentially ornamental.