William Buchan, 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir

William Buchan, 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir

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William James de L'Aigle Buchan, 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir (10 January 1916 – 29 June 2008), also known as "William Tweedsmuir", was an English peer and author of novels, short stories, memoirs and verse. He was the second son of the writer and Governor General of Canada, John Buchan.

Brought up at Elsfield Manor, outside Oxford, he frequently wrote poetry as a boy and appeared as "Bill" in his aunt Anna Masterton Buchan's popular novels, written under the pen-name "O. Douglas".[2] His mother, Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, was a close relative of the Duke of Westminster.[3] Visitors to the family home included a 15-year-old Jessica Mitford in the summer of 1932, T. E. Lawrence, a week before his death in 1935, and, that same year, Virginia Woolf, who called him "a simple".

Buchan attended the Dragon School in Oxford, then Eton, and won the Harvey English verse prize there. At New College, Oxford, he "enjoyed a riotous year", according to an obituary in The Daily Telegraph, before dropping out. (A different picture of his personality was given by an obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post, which described him during his schoolboy period as "a shy and solitary figure, and this mood continued into New College, Oxford".[4] Visiting the set of Alfred Hitchcock's film version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, a novel written by his father, the young man became interested in the movie industry, and Buchan senior got him a job working with Hitchcock at Gaumont-British Motion Picture Corporation. His salary as third assistant director was a token five shillings a week, so he lived off an allowance from his parents and lodged in London with the writer Elizabeth Bowen. It was becoming clear to him that he was being edged out of his job at Gaumont-British when a throat ailment resulted in an operation, causing him to leave sooner. To recuperate, he went to Canada, where his father was serving as governor general. On the order of the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, the young Buchan was barred, along with his brother Alastair, from a nightclub outside Ottawa. King disapproved of Buchan's parents, in particular regarding his father as a "libertine".

He then moved to New York in 1937, where his father provided him with literary connections. At one point he asked the critic Alexander Woollcott for a job but was told, "When I was a boy you were supposed to go to the bottom of the nearest tree and climb steadily until you got to the top."

At the suggestion of French film director and actor Michel Saint-Denis, Buchan visited Peggy Ashcroft, who had acted in The 39 Steps, and the pair began a two-year affair. Buchan then returned to England at the age of 21, but soon spent three months in Florence, Italy, and on his return met Kenneth de Courcy, publisher of Intelligence Digest and carried dispatches from de Courcy to France. On one occasion Buchan visited Otto von Habsburg, claimant to the throne of Austria, who questioned him closely about British politics.

In 1939[2] Buchan married Nesta Crozier, and the couple had a daughter. He also co-founded The Pilot Press, which published his short (at 10,000 words) but admiring book on Winston Churchill (a stance at odds with that of his father), and later his brief history of the Royal Air Force.[1] He learned of the death of his father in 1940 from a news hoarding.

War service

He enlisted the Royal Air Force in February 1940 and joined No. 32 Squadron, flying Hawker Hurricanes on patrols in the Western Approaches. He was transferred to Egypt, then to No. 261 Squadron in Iraq. He flew over Palestine and served in the defence of Cyprus. He initially served in the ranks, and was a leading aircraftman prior to being commissioned as a pilot officer on probation on 20 January 1941 (with seniority from 14 January), the commission was confirmed, and he was promoted to war substantive flying officer, precisely a year later. After the Japanese invasion of Singapore, 261 Squadron was sent to reinforce the air force on Java. By the time it arrived at Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), on the carrier Indomitable, the pilots were ordered to fly to RAF Station China Bay on that island. On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1942, the squadron saw intense action against Japanese bombers from five aircraft carriers mounting a major attack against Colombo. When the Japanese force withdrew four days later, the carrier Hermes and two cruisers had been sunk, and only six of 261 Squadron's original 18 aircraft were serviceable. He was promoted to flight lieutenant on 20 January 1943.

Buchan twice had to bale out of his aircraft and came close to death on other occasions. At one point a cannon shell struck behind his cockpit seat; on another, a shell hit his ammunition reserve but didn't go off. After serving with air defence for Ceylon and Madras, he was transferred to air headquarters in Calcutta for six months, then returned to join No. 17 Squadron in Ceylon. He was back in England in April 1945 to serve at RAF Training Command, where he compiled a history, The Royal Air Force at War, an account of the daily lives of servicemen, and was promoted to squadron leader before ending his service.This was published by his Pilot Press, as mentioned above.

Later life and career

His marriage broke up during the war, and in 1946 he divorced his first wife and married Barbara Ensor, with whom he had three sons and three daughters, including the writer James Buchan and Ursula Buchan, gardening columnist for The Daily Telegraph. That marriage ended in divorce in 1960.

After the war, Buchan worked in Glasgow for the explosives division of Nobel Industries, then became London editor of Reader's Digest. He spent three years with the magazine and claimed that he came up with the story "How My Dog Taught Me to Pray". Buchan founded a public relations company, which went out of business by the late 1960s, then did work for Norwest Holst, a large construction company, and later for Elf Aquitaine, the French national oil company.

Simultaneously, Buchan pursued his literary career. A short story collection, The Exclusives, was published in 1943. He next published Personal Poems in 1952 and Kumari in 1955, a novel set in Calcutta. Two thrillers, Helen All Alone (1961) and The Blue Pavilion (1969), followed. He also edited the correspondence of John Masefield and the violinist Audrey Napier-Smith, Letters to Reyna, which appeared in 1982. He was best known for his John Buchan: a Memoir, also published in 1982, and his autobiography, Rags of Time, which appeared in 1990.

On the death of his brother, Johnnie, in 1996, William Buchan succeeded to the title, taking his seat in the House of Lords. There he spoke once, on the case for an elected mayor of London.

In 1960, the year his second marriage was dissolved, Buchan married a third time, to Sauré Tatchell, with whom he had a son. According to Buchan's obituary in The Daily Telegraph, in addition to the eight children of his three marriages "there was also another daughter." Buchan's eldest son, Toby (born in 1950), succeeded to the peerage.

Reception of his writings

The memoir of his father (1982) was regarded as his best book, but his autobiography, The Rage of Time (1990), had its admirers, according to an obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post.

His book of poems, published in 1952, was praised in the Times Literary Supplement, which described his voice as "winning and sincere". The reviewer wrote, "In writing to please himself, he will please others too, for his unselfconcious sympathies are easy to share, his young man’s experience corresponds with that of half his generation, his turn for verbal music is quietly refreshing, and everywhere competent."

Kumari, published in 1955, has been described as "a lush, complex novel about the experiences and romances of a young man in 1930s India". One reviewer wrote that the book tells the reader as much about India and British rule there "as a hundred official publications, or, it might be added, a dozen travel books".

Buchan wrote his first thriller, Helen All Alone, deliberately in the vein of his father’s novels, but with a woman as the main character, a point which provoked criticism in The Times. The reviewer declared, "Women in a thriller should be decorative, not pivotal." The TLS, in contrast, praised the book's description of atmosphere and scenery.

Works

Each year links to corresponding "[year] in literature" or "[year] in poetry" article:

1940: Winston Churchill, a short, admiring biography of Winston Churchill

1943: The Exclusives, a short-story collection

1946: The Royal Air Force at War, an account of the daily lives of servicemen

1952: Personal Poems, evoking life in Wartime India

1955: Kumari, a novel set in Calcutta

1961: Helen All Alone, thriller set in 1950 in the Balkans, thought to be the first involving a woman British spy as the main character

1966: The Blue Pavilion, thriller based on the early-1950s French sex scandal known as the Ballets Roses. A young businessman visiting Paris with his beautiful girlfriend becomes caught up in depravity and blackmail.

1982: Editor, Letters to Reyna, correspondence of poet John Masefield and Audrey Napier-Smith, a violinist with the Hallé Orchestra

1982: John Buchan: a Memoir, about his relationship with his father

1990: The Rags Of Time, autobiography

Buchan also wrote introductions for literary works — including Don Quixote and the 1994 Oxford Classics edition of his father's thriller Mr Standfast.

OBITUARY 4th July, 2008

Lord Tweedsmuir: Novelist and son of John Buchan who inherited his father's talent but was disappointed of literary fame

If all John Buchan's children had it hard, his second son, William, had it hardest. Endowed with his father's literary talent, he yet could not hope to match John Buchan in his other occupations of strategy, high policy, business, sport, action. Lacking his father's industry, he was burdened with his ambition, his restlessness, his romance of spirit and his weakness for tobacco. Though disappointed of his ruling passion, which was literary fame, William Buchan, third Lord Tweedsmuir, never let it sour his temper or diminish his enthusiasm for other writers or his encouragement to young people. For all his disappointments, he won through to a sort of luminous old age in a new century.

William de l'Aigle Buchan, was born in 1916, the second son of John Buchan and Susan Grosvenor. His father's blood gave him Calvinist vigour and Borders poetry, his mother's infused English pedigrees of fabulous romance and unfathomable antiquity. Restless and solitary at Eton, Buchan was sent down from New College, Oxford after two terms. His father, now in his plumed apotheosis as Governor-General of Canada, found his difficult son work at Gaumont-British in Lime Grove with Alfred Hitchcock, who had just completed his film of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and lodgings with no less a writer than Elizabeth Bowen.

This period ended in nervous collapse and convalescence in Canada. The fierce Calvinist Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, who thought John Tweedsmuir a libertine and the ethereal Lady Tweedsmuir no better than she should be, barred William Buchan from the only nightclub in Ottawa. As the Second World War approached, and his father's health deteriorated, Buchan enlisted in the RAF as an Aircraftman, 2nd Class, and trained as a pilot.

He flew Hurricanes in the Battle of the Atlantic, and his squadron was for a period, after the German parachute landing in Crete in 1941, sole aerial defence of the island of Cyprus. There followed service in Palestine, Iraq and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and then India, where he commanded a Hurricane squadron and served for a time on the air staff in Calcutta. India gave him his first novel, Kumari, and also his best verse (such as "Poem at 10,000 feet"). He once said to this writer that he had never to his knowledge killed anybody, but once, in the North-West Frontier Province, he saw an old man in a turban stumbling in terror across the road, and pulled out of his attack.

His first book of short stories, The Exclusives, published on bad wartime paper in 1943, was an act of revolt against the violence and tedium of camp and airfield and contains a notorious scene of embroidery. (John Buchan was safely dead.) There followed his only collection of verse, Personal Poems (1952), and three novels: Kumari (1955); Helen All Alone (1961); and The Blue Pavilion (1966). If John Buchan came late onto the scene for what he wanted to do, William Buchan found the stagehands already shifting the flats. His exquisite interest in social form, his suave or exotic settings and nostalgia for childhood seemed out of place in the age of Kingsley Amis and Stan Barstow.

The bills were paid somehow or other. From 1951 to 1954, Buchan was London editor of the Readers' Digest, in which role he was about as unsuitable as it was possible to be. He found a niche in public relations, where his beautiful manners, superb French and continental acquaintance made him useful to the likes of the Nobel Industries division of ICI and the French oil company Elf Aquitaine (now Total).

What William Buchan possessed in good measure was what his father did not, and that was an admiration for women that bordered on idolatry. This second passion brought him into scrapes from which he extricated himself with a mixture of good manners and good nature.

His first marriage to Nesta Parry collapsed in the chaos and temptation of war. His second, to Barbara Ensor, also came to grief, leaving six children to make shift as best they could. It was only in early middle age that William Buchan settled down with Sauré Tatchell.

In this domestic tranquillity, in 1982, he published his best book, a portrait of John Buchan (John Buchan: a memoir) in which he showed his sensitivity to the effect of time on both a life and society. The following year, he edited a selection of letters between John Masefield (whom he had known) and a young violinist, Audrey Napier-Smith (John Masefield: letters to Reyna, 1983). A better critic than his father, he wrote book reviews free of censoriousness or petulance. In 1990, he published a memoir, The Rags of Time, which sought to analyse his youth and hopes that were disrupted by the war. If this was indolence, it was Buchan indolence.

In 1996, he succeeded his beloved brother Johnnie as Lord Tweedsmuir. In entering at last his Valhalla in Parliament Square, he found not the spotless scions of Shakespeare's heroes – Bohun and Scrope, Percy and Plantagenet and Mortimer – but bustling life peers and dishevelled backwoodsmen up in town for the attendance allowance. William Tweedsmuir preferred his illusions. His maiden speech, in February 1997, was to support Lord Carnarvon's bill for a mayor and statutory authority for London.

Dismissed with his ghosts from the House of Lords in the Blair reforms of 1999, Tweedsmuir entered the most glorious period of his life, tending his Oxfordshire garden, receiving visitors, and reading French and English literature. Never having had much money, he now found he had enough. With the revival of John Buchan's reputation, he entertained German doctoral students and British television producers. Chin resting on the haft of his walking-stick, Tweedsmuir would turn his piercing blue eyes to his visitor or the camera in a look of almost superhuman benevolence.

At his 90th birthday party at his nephew's house, Charlecote Park in Warwickshire, the third Lord Tweedsmuir enjoyed his own apotheosis. In this famous house and park, shielded from the sodium glare of the retail park and the thunder of the Stratford by-pass, William Tweedsmuir could reflect on what his father called Providence and he Irony: that a man who sought only a lonely destiny as an artist should end up as a patriarch of nine children and 29 grandchildren of every nationality and character.

As his eyesight and hearing decayed, his life became to him a shade tedious. Yet as his powers declined, so his manners gained in precision. Nothing could be more exquisite than his concern for those about his sick-bed.

As often with long-lived men, his life receded to an earlier epoch. William Tweedsmuir became a Victorian. Amid the albums of his old Grosvenor-side great-aunts, the world emptied of all but the Iron Duke stooped for the caricaturist at the Congress of Vienna; or Looking up from Meiringen towards the Jungfrau; or great-uncle Reggie Talbot, the last descendant of that Shrewsbury who died with his son on the bloody sands at Castillon, showing his gardener the correct way to scythe a lawn at military headquarters in Cairo. Looked after by Sauré, and attended by his two youngest children, Lord Tweedsmuir died without great pain or much regret.

Mary Lovelace

William de l'Aigle Buchan, writer: born London 10 January 1916; succeeded 1996 as third Baron Tweedsmuir; married 1939 Nesta Parry (née Crozier; one daughter; marriage dissolved 1946), 1946 Barbara Ensor (died 1969; three sons, three daughters; marriage dissolved 1960), 1960 Sauré Tatchell (one son); died Hornton, Oxfordshire 29 June 2008.