BUCHAN’S politics always championed liberty, from free trade and women’s suffrage to the absolute sovereignty of the House of Commons, and he spoke out against the abuse of Jews in Nazi Germany, joining in calls to establish a State of Israel.* A proud Scotsman, born in Perth, he backed moving towards Home Rule, but warned that an excessively bureaucratic or anti-English Parliament would only exacerbate the country’s problems.*
In 1935, Buchan was created Baron Tweedsmuir, and appointed Viceroy and Governor-General of Canada. Amidst the abdication crisis* and the Great Depression, he toured Canada’s vast territory encouraging her sometimes inward-looking Provinces and immigrant communities to pull together for the sake of King and country, and organised a visit by newly-crowned King George VI in 1939 to win support for the Allies against Nazi Germany. Buchan continued to publish novels including ‘The House of the Four Winds’, but on February 6th, 1940, he suffered a head injury following a stroke, and died five days later.
The State of Israel was founded in 1948, and Buchan’s close friend Chaim Weizmann was chosen as the first President. Misled by dialogue in his novels, some have accused Buchan of anti-semitism: the most oft-cited passage occurs in the ‘Thirty-Nine Steps’. But this is part of a rigmarole told by a freelance American spy and later proved to be “eyewash”, a bluff intended to deceive a generation all too inclined to believe anything bad about Jews. Buchan’s own circle of friends and public policy statements tell the true tale of his beliefs.
Buchan felt that people expected too much from political ‘machinery’: a country’s cultural and economic prosperity comes from her public, not its Government. See A Parliament for Scotland.
In 1936, George V died and was succeeded by his son Edward VIII, but Edward abdicated a few months later in favour of his brother George VI rather than give up his relationship with Mrs Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Edward enjoyed popularity as a people’s monarch concerned with social issues such as unemployment, but he had also apparently been taken in by Adolf Hitler, who called the abdication ‘a great loss’.