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February 11th 1940 |
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John BuchanJohn Buchan was born in Perth on 26th August 1875, the eldest of six children of a free Church minister. The family soon moved on to Dysart and then to Glasgow where Buchan was educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School. While he was at school he spent many of his summer holidays in the Borders where his grandparents lived and he developed a love of the area which never left him. Buchan’s books are perhaps a little out of fashion today and he has been called both elitist and racist.His heroes were invariably upper class but he had the ability to tell an exciting well constructed tale, and The Thirty Nine Steps in particular started a new trend in detective fiction. Though writing was always his first love, he lived a full and varied life. He served in the Boer War as political private secretary to Lord Milner and was an official war correspondent in the first World War. In 1935 he was appointed Governor General of Canada where he remained until his death in 1940. He was very happily married to Susan Grosvenor. The couple had four children. Though he was very conscious of his Scottish roots, he chose to live in Elsfield, a small village in Oxfordshire, where he was later buried. Perth is hardly entitled to claim John Buchan as one of its illustrious sons. His connection with the town is, in truth, but an accident of birth. In adult life he showed no further interest in the place. |