The many lives of John Buchan

Up the stairs with flying feet,
You would burst upon us, cheering
Wellington’s funereal street.
Fresh as paint, though you’d been ’railing
Up from Scotland all the night,
Or had just returned from scaling
Some appalling Dolomite…
Pundit, publicist and jurist:
Statistician and divine;
Mystic, mountaineer and purist
In the high financial line;
Prince of journalistic sprinters —
Swiftest that I ever knew —
Never did you keep the printers
Longer than an hour or two…
Still I hope with kindly feeling
You recall the days of yore,
When I watched you gaily reeling
Off your folios by the score;
Self-effacing, self-suppressing
When your elder took the reins,
Though at half his age possessing
Twice and more than twice his brains.

In 1907, Charles Graves, who worked for The Spectator, wrote the above valedictory poem to mark the departure of his part-time colleague, John Buchan. This piece of high-class doggerel hits a number of nails firmly on the head: in particular Buchan’s modesty, fizzing vitality and remarkable intellect, as well as the speed at which he worked and the variety of his occupations and preoccupations.

He had first written for The Spectator (owned and edited by St Loe Strachey and based then in Wellington Street) in 1900, and worked for Strachey, off and on, between 1901 and 1907, becoming assistant editor in 1906. In all he wrote 800 articles, mostly anonymously, so that the full variety of his output has only recently been uncovered. His subjects ranged from foreign policy to Bergson’s philosophy to the glamour of mountaineering to new poetry.

Graves’s valediction was prompted by Buchan’s decision to leave The Spectator, as well as the Bar, in order to work for Thomas Nelson and Son, an Edinburgh publishing company with a London office. He was engaged to marry Susan Grosvenor who, though very sweet and intelligent, had no money of her own, yet by reason of her privileged upbringing was quite unable to boil an egg or sew on a button.