Wee But Great

When King George V named little John Buchan to be his Governor General of Canada in 1935, Canadians knew him only as the prolific author of nearly 50 books. In England his fame rested chiefly on his immensely popular adventure fiction. "Mr. Buchan," a London newspaperman asked him, "how would you describe yourself?" "I am a typical Scot of the border breed," wryly replied John Buchan.

Actually, this border Scot had already packed five noteworthy careers into his amazingly versatile life, was fully equipped with energy and brains to start another at 60. A poor boy (his father was a Presbyterian parson), he had put himself through Glasgow University and Oxford with the help of scholarships and by writing, even before he left Oxford, his first book, Scholar-Gypsies. He went up to London, was admitted to the bar, then, on the strength of his brilliant record at Oxford, was made secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner. In South Africa he turned soldier, served for the last year of the Boer War as a trooper in the Rand Mounted Rifles. He stayed there for two more years, learning about colonial administration from Lord Milner and Lord Kitchener.

Back in England, he became a partner in a publishing house with an Oxford friend and wrote prodigiously. He wrote for money, turned out dozens of popular novels, popular biography, popular history. For fun he wrote poetry. When World War I broke out he turned war correspondent for the London Times, later joined up and got to be a lieutenant colonel. In 1917 and 1918 he was Director of Information in London. On the side he turned out a batch of highly literate thrillers like The 39 Steps, Castle Gay, The Three Hostages. It took him only two years after the war ended to produce a 1,500,000-word history of it.

From 1927 to 1935 he was M. P. for the Scottish Universities, living quietly at Oxford and writing still more books in a corner of a railway carriage between Ox ford and London. It was probably his his tory of the reign of George V (The King's Grace) that got him his appointment as Governor General. There was such a furor over the appointment of a commoner that the King made him Baron Tweedsmuir (for his home in Scotland) of Elsfield (for his house in Oxford).

In John Buchan's adventure stories, the brave and resourceful young Englishman so regularly and so thrillingly came through in the face of the direst subversive influences--and Author Buchan so obviously believed that he could and should--that to his Empire audience he and his heroes came to have a sort of Empire symbolism all their own. Coupled with his yeoman political and patriotic services, this gave Buchan a place on the list of Britain's public patriots not far down the line from Winston Churchill. As well indicated by their hearty welcome to George VI last summer, the Dominion is nothing if not patriotic. Hence the choice of Patriot Buchan for patriotic Canada was a particularly happy one, especially in view of the times that lay ahead.

Lord Tweedsmuir quickly made himself popular in Canada by traveling all over the Dominion. He went hundreds of miles by boat down the Mackenzie River to Aklavik in the subArctic, traveled across the northern part of British Columbia mostly on foot. He went down into mines, visited the poor fishermen of Nova Scotia, dined each Christmas with indigent veterans, joined five Indian tribes. In the middle of his term he broke precedent by taking a long vacation in England, during which he persuaded the new King and Queen to make their historic visit to Canada.

He went about making speeches, in beautiful English, for some of which he was criticized. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's friends did not like it when he stressed the importance of Canada's strengthening her defense forces at a time when the Government was doing little about defense. Empirists objected to his remark that "a Canadian's first loyalty is to Canada." But he seldom forgot the constitutional limitations of his office, stayed on friendly terms with Prime Minister King, made himself obscure during the Royal Visit. By the time the war began he was the most popular Governor General Canada had ever had, especially after both his sons signed up. At a Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner last year, newspapermen sang a song about him which began:

Oh, the Laird o' the Tweed, he's wee but he's great . . .

and ended:

. . . we'd like him tae stay here another five years.

After the most important act of his lifetime, the signing of Canada's proclamation of war with Germany, he went to New York to get a check-up on his health, which had been failing for several years. Although all Canada wanted him for another five years, he let it be known that he would retire when his term expired in the fall of 1940. But his last months in office were full of responsibilities. The war brought political crises, culminating in last month's dramatic adjournment of Parliament (TIME, Jan. 5) and call for Parliamentary elections March 26 on the issue of whether or not the Mackenzie King regime was prosecuting the war effectively (John Buchan said it was). Last week John Buchan was tired. He slipped and fell in his bathtub, from what his devoted wife thought was a fainting spell.

Actually a small artery in his overworked brain had been blocked. The fall added concussion and the brain began to swell. Three days later doctors performed an emergency trepanning operation to relieve the pressure, then carried him to a Montreal hospital for a second, more effective operation. This seemed to relieve the pressure, his physicians saw signs of returning consciousness, but 24 hours later he had a relapse and they operated again. The three operations, lasting ten hours, were more than frail John Buchan's tired old heart could stand.

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