Word: buchan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Jocularly Canadians were remarking that John Buchan's new title, Baron Tweedsmuir, "sounds like some new kind of suiting," but most of them were in a mood to greet indulgently the smallish, sharp-nosed, pucker-lipped Scot. Due to land at Quebec on Oct. 24 from the Empress of Britain, Lord & Lady Tweedsmuir were the prey of seafaring autograph hunters this week. Bandied merrily were the Scottish jokes which the brilliant historian, novelist and Governor-General is so adept at working in at a captain's dinner...
...Knows What Kings?" John Buchan's useful mission is to redeem the Governor-Generalship from the slough of Canadian distaste into which it sank under his predecessor, the Earl of Bessborough. If Canadians are to go on paying $43,799 a year to an official from overseas whose legal status is "the Person of the King in Canada," then they want to get something for their money. Admirers of the first Baron Tweedsmuir, while generous in their tributes to John Buchan's intellectual gifts, single out his extreme flair for effective flattery, conveyed with canny Scottish tact...
...Jack Buchan, in his romantic novels like The Path of the King, successfully flatters his middle-class public and also their beloved sovereign with such turns as: "We may all of us have King's blood in our veins. The Dago who blacked my boots in Vancouver may be descended in some roundabout way from Julius Caesar. . . . And we fools rub our eyes and wonder when we see genius come out of the gutter! It did not begin there . . . Shakespeare . . . Napoleon . . . who knows what kings and prophets they had in their ancestry...
People who cite insomnia as their reason for reading John Buchan's romances and detective stories are flattered and disarmed by Lord Tweedsmuir's story that he also devotes his serious working hours to historical biographies, business trading and politics. Troubled with insomnia himself, he scribbles his novels in the wee hours to put himself to sleep. His reason for entering politics is that after the War he felt that every able man should put his best abilities at the disposal of King & Country for Reconstruction. Said he in 1920: "It looks as if some kind of politics...
...Silver Jubilee book on the Empire & King, Mr. Buchan achieved his final masterpiece of subtle flattery. When Canadian Premier Richard Bedford Bennett then advised Buckingham Palace that "Mr." Buchan would make a fine Governor-General (part of Canada's reason being that, after 14 peers, the Dominion wanted a commoner), His Majesty proved so oversold on the nomination that he not only made Commoner Buchan his Governor-General but enthusiastically dubbed him Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael & St. George, then capped this knighthood and vexed many Canadians by raising him to the peerage...