Seventy years ago today, 11th February, 1940, John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada, died in the fifth and final year of his appointment. Although he had had a distinguished career as a writer and in government, he is mostly remembered here for establishing the Governor General’s Awards for Literature and by people in the several schools and an Orangeville church that are among his Canadian memorials.

Just as he was appointed in 1935, movie goers were watching Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Buchan’s 1915 novel, The 39 Steps. In it Robert Donat, later ‘Mr Chips’, played a business man who becomes a refugee from both the police and an international spy ring.

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that Lord Tweedsmuir was the best governor general Canada ever had. That was, of course, because he got to know him personally. He was the first Canadian head of state to pay an official state visit to Washington and the only one, I think, to address the U.S. Senate.

On the fifth of February Tweedsmuir had fallen in his morning bath – officially while he was shaving – struck his head and lain unconscious for an hour before being found. A blood clot had formed on his brain. Despite emergency surgery at Rideau Hall by the eminent neurosurgeon, Dr Wilder Penfield, and a subsequent procedure at the Montreal Neurological Institute, the viceroy died just five months after the beginning of the Second Great War, alias WW2. He was succeeded by the Earl of Athlone, the last member of the Royal Family thus far to hold that office. Athlone’s wife, H.R.H. the Princess Alice, was a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria.

John Buchan had for 40 years before his arrival in Canada been a public servant in the U.K. and an author (he preferred ‘story teller’) of considerable international repute. He had known Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King since 1919. King had had some difficulty sharing constitutional powers with “one not belonging to one’s own country”, particularly with Governor General Lord Byng. He found that task easier with a Scotsman and a fellow Presbyterian.

As a Scot, an Oxonian, lawyer, former M.P., civil servant and a writer, Buchan had a wide circle of friends, the most notable of whom are remembered in his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door. The best biography known to me is Andrew Lownie’s John Buchan [McArthur & Co., Toronto, 1995].

After the 1926 “King-Byng thing” and the Statute of Westminster (1931) the G.G. had no responsibility for British Government business in Canada. That was henceforth handled by the British High Commissioner, the intra-Commonwealth term for ‘ambassador’. The job of proconsul, as Lownie dubs it, was to interpret Canadian opinion to London and that of the rest of the Empire/Commonwealth to Ottawa.

The Governor General had regular communication with the monarch. Tweedsmuir’s tenure included parts of three reigns – the last year of George V,

the short reign of Edward VIII who abdicated and the first two years of George VI. His first report to Buckingham Palace mentioned W.L.M. King’s visit to F.D.R. in Washington. It had included a swim in the presidential pool. “Those two men, neither of whom possesses an elegant figure, wallowing in the White House swimming bath would have been an excellent subject for an historical painting”, wrote the proconsul.

When Lord Tweedsmuir advised Prime Minister King to consider the creation of an Order of St Lawrence by which to honour deserving citizens, the grandson of the 1837 rebel William Lyon Mackenzie noted privately in his diary “It is not the business of the G.G. to advise, but to accept advice”. The viceroy, however, continued to make his thoughts known within the confines of what he called “Governor Generalities”.

He was an advocate of a more active role for post-colonial Canada in international affairs. He had a clear vision of the contribution he could make: 1) in his role as a nonpolitical ambassador between this country’s disparate regions, 2) as the interpreter of the importance of the North, the needs and potential of which were common to “practically all” of the provinces and 3) as stressing the important intermediary role of Canada in the fact that “the future of civilisation lies in the co-operation of Britain and the U.S.A.”.

Perhaps more important to Canadians than anything Buchan published is the posthumous collection of 40 speeches, Canadian Occasions [The Musson Book Company, Toronto, 1941]. It includes discussion of international relations and thoughts on Canadian history, culture and resources spoken to a range of audiences. Most of them are now somewhat dated but it is as important to understand where we have been as it is to think of where we should be going.

The characterisation of persons in the Buchan novels has been criticised, as has been a perceived anti- Semitism. He was accused of a supposed ‘cult of success’. His heroes not only live adventurously; they are or become millionaire lairds or business moguls living in manor houses in the Cotswolds.

Although after 1919 he supported a national home for the Jews in British-mandated Palestine and valued “the Jewish genius”, the people in his ‘stories’ often express the pre-Hitler view that Jews are either devious international financiers or plotting Bolsheviks. However, when the Nazis published a list of Britons whom they accused of pro-Jewish sympathies, Buchan’s name was included.

Canadian Governors General hold the life-long title of ‘The Right Honourable’ and of “His/Her Excellency’ during their term of office. His Excellency the Right Honourable John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, died in his 65th year. There had been lifelong health issues. A childhood accident left a sinister scar on his brow. There was a period of nervous exhaustion in his thirties and he suffered periodic gastric problems.

In his last and only Canadian novel, Sick Heart River (1939), Edward Leithen is told he has only a year to live. He reconsiders his priorities during an excursion into Canada’s Northland. Another year or so of Buchan’s life might have produced further published reflections on life in ‘the Dominion’. It was not to be.

His ashes are buried in the churchyard at Elsfield, Oxfordshire.