John Buchan

Scottish · 1875 to 1940

Born on 26 August 1875 at York Place in Perth, Scotland, John Buchan was the eldest child of John Buchan, a Free Church of Scotland minister, and Helen Masterton, and was brought up in Kirkcaldy with long summers at his grandparents' farm in Broughton in the Scottish Borders; his walks across the hills above Leithen Water furnished the moors of his fiction. He won a scholarship to the University of Glasgow at seventeen, studied classics under Gilbert Murray, then went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he took the Newdigate Prize, the Stanhope Essay Prize, and the presidency of the Union, and published six books before he had graduated. Called to the Bar in 1901, he served as private secretary to Lord Milner in southern Africa at the close of the Boer War, joining what was known as Milner's Kindergarten. The Thirty-Nine Steps, written in 1914 while he was convalescing from a duodenal ulcer, introduced the colonial mining engineer Richard Hannay; the novel sold in vast numbers among British soldiers in the trenches and founded the modern spy thriller. During the First World War he served as Director of Information under Lloyd George and ran Britain's propaganda effort. He was elected Unionist MP for the Scottish Universities in 1927, and in 1935 King George V, on the advice of R.B. Bennett, appointed him Governor General of Canada, raising him to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir. He wrote over a hundred books in all. He died at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on 11 February 1940 after a fall, aged sixty-four; he was given a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to Elsfield.