Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00"- Are you coming in to tea, sir? Have a ride along."
00:04The 39 Steps, the most famous manhunt in all of fiction.
00:08The first truly modern spy novel.
00:11"- The first and the best. It's one of the great, greatest thrillers ever written."
00:20"- The appeal lies in the sheer storytelling ability.
00:24It is, in his argo, a ripping good yarn."
00:29It's been filmed three times since its publication in 1915.
00:33It's never gone out of print and still sells some 10,000 copies per year.
00:38"- You are there. You're on the hillside.
00:41You're being chased by the monoplane.
00:43You're clinging onto the train or whatever it is across the bridge."
00:48The novel's hero, Richard Hannay, became an icon.
00:51The courageous gentleman adventurer upholding British values of decency and empire.
00:57"- Well, Richard Hannay is an enduring character
01:00simply because we all want to be Richard Hannay.
01:03You want to be James Bond? Yes, you do.
01:05Do you want to be Richard Hannay? Yes, you do."
01:07The 39 Steps and Richard Hannay were just part of a body of work by John Buchan
01:13who became the founding father of the all-action modern spy
01:17and an accompanying gallery of gung-ho adventurers.
01:20"- You know, there are moments when you're at the blackest pit
01:23when suddenly in comes the person you think is going to be the torturer
01:26and then suddenly he whips off his turban and pulls off the mask
01:29and, whoa-ho, it's...
01:31Sandy, that's not from school."
01:35But beyond Buchan's daring do lie deeper undercurrents.
01:40His thrillers reflect the growing fault lines of a rapidly changing world.
01:45"- It's far more to John Buchan than boys' own style adventures.
01:49They're about human weakness. They're about human wickedness.
01:52They're about the appropriate responses.
01:55They're about the triumph of good.
01:57There's a great deal more there than just swashbuckle."
02:10In 1938, two years before his death,
02:13John Buchan sat for the famous portrait photographer, Youssef Koch.
02:19Today, this one severe image and one exciting story,
02:23The 39 Steps,
02:25are all that most people would recognize of Buchan.
02:30Yet he was one of the most celebrated men of his time.
02:35From a modest Scottish Presbyterian background,
02:38he rose to be Governor-General of Canada.
02:42Alongside his public career,
02:44he produced a staggering range of books.
02:47Biographies, short stories, poetry,
02:50historical and supernatural novels,
02:53which went well beyond the thriller.
02:57"- People are often surprised when I tell them
02:59that he wrote a great many more books than that and some better.
03:02They won't have that."
03:06But it's for the thrillers that Buchan is remembered.
03:09And at their heart is an enigma.
03:12The figure of the austere, dutiful public servant
03:15who inspired a century of British spy fiction.
03:19"- I mean, on the surface, there's an incompatibility, isn't there,
03:22between Buchan, the very uptight, hard-working, quiet,
03:27personally rather unassuming, Scott,
03:30and the secret agent character, Richard Hannay."
03:39John Buchan was born in 1875 in Perth,
03:42where his father was a free church minister.
03:45The family soon moved to Fife and then Glasgow.
03:50"- He himself in his memoirs said
03:52he grew up with a very, very powerful sense of sin.
03:56You know, and the sin isn't out there, it's within.
04:00Just beneath the surface of Buchan is this sense of sin."
04:07The person who instilled this sense was not Buchan's father,
04:12a dreamy, reflective man, but his mother, Helen.
04:16She wanted John to go into the church.
04:19But even then, the young Buchan was caught
04:21between scholarship and adventure.
04:25"- Father's parish is a very poor district
04:28and Buchan teaches in the Sunday school.
04:30At the same time, the summer holidays are spent in Tweeddale,
04:34running almost wild, playing war games with his brothers."
04:40The great place of refuge for Buchan,
04:42really right through his life, is the borders,
04:44is the security of this maternal family home
04:48with an extended family of cousins.
04:50He's able to relax there in a way he perhaps can't at home.
04:58One could say that the cities reflect a more corrupt lifestyle.
05:03There's menace in the cities.
05:07Whereas there's almost a self-renewing element in the country.
05:11And I suppose everyone is equal in nature.
05:16"- Wood, sea and hill were the intimacies of my childhood
05:20and they've never lost their spell for me.
05:23But the spell of each was different.
05:26The woods and beaches were always foreign places
05:29in which I was at best a sojourner.
05:31But the border hills were my own possession,
05:34a countryside in which my roots went deep."
05:40You cannot read Buchan without being able to smell the heather,
05:43without being able to feel your feet going into a peat bog.
05:48You just can't do it.
05:49I mean, the descriptions of Scotland,
05:52the chases that take place over its moorland,
05:56the panting uphill, people riding horses across the moors
06:00and coming upon remote houses,
06:03all this sort of thing, Buchan knew.
06:06I mean, Buchan did.
06:11"- In the 39 steps, there's a passage which I read when I'm lecturing
06:16as an illustration of how to do descriptions of landscape.
06:20I sat down on the very crest of the pass
06:23and took stock of my position.
06:25To left and right were round-shouldered green hills
06:28as smooth as pancakes.
06:29But to the south, there was a glimpse of high, heathery mountains.
06:33In the meadows below the road, half a mile back,
06:36a cottage smoked, but it was the only sign of human life.
06:40Otherwise, there was only the calling of plovers
06:43and the tinkling of little streams.
06:45There was no cover for a tomtit in those bald green places."
06:53Buchan's Scottish roots and love of its countryside
06:56would always mark him, however high he rose.
07:00"- Everyone sees him as a consummate insider,
07:02a member of the establishment.
07:03I see him writing more about moorland heroes than clubland heroes.
07:07He was always an outsider.
07:09He was the Scotsman in England."
07:15Buchan was no public schoolboy.
07:17His parents couldn't afford that.
07:19But he did win a scholarship to Hutchison's grammar school in Glasgow.
07:24Then a further scholarship took him to Glasgow University.
07:29"- He's obviously a bright, bright kid
07:32from a lower-middle-class background.
07:35But in those days,
07:38university was the place where those bright kids
07:42acquired the polish that they needed
07:45if they were actually going to enter the establishment.
07:49In Glasgow University, he worked very hard indeed.
07:52I mean, one of the things about Buchan is that, you know, work is good.
07:57That's part of the thing you've got to justify your existence.
08:00Work is good."
08:05In 1895, Buchan, now age 20, won a third scholarship
08:10to Brazenose College, Oxford.
08:12The final staging post for the grammar school boy on the make.
08:19He was introduced to a circle of aristocratic friends
08:22who would shape his career.
08:25Among them, Raymond Asquith,
08:27the brilliant son of the future prime minister,
08:30the poet, Hilaire Belloc,
08:32and the adventurer, Aubrey Herbert.
08:34"- He fell in love with Oxford
08:36and, in a sense, probably with the English upper classes as well."
08:40"- What one's struck by is these are all high achievers
08:43and they're all-rounders.
08:45They're all people who get firsts,
08:47who play for the university rugby team or box the university.
08:51So these heroes that he creates later on
08:53are actually the people he's met at Oxford.
08:55It's not something that comes out of his imagination."
08:59Buchan's friends were wealthy.
09:01He was not.
09:02There was no rich father to pay his bills.
09:06"- Buchan had to earn money.
09:08I mean, he published five books while he was an undergraduate.
09:11He was quite remarkable.
09:13In a sense, of course, this confirmed him
09:15in the belief that, you know, of his abilities.
09:19The fact that he could support himself,
09:21he could live on equal terms with these people."
09:28While at Oxford, Buchan drew up this extraordinary list
09:31of honours already gained and to be gained.
09:35He could already cross off collections of essays,
09:37the Nudigate Prize for English firsts,
09:39and novels like John Burnett of Barnes.
09:43Among them were further prizes and books he already had in mind.
09:49By the time he left Oxford, aged 24,
09:52Buchan had even secured an entry in Who's Who.
09:55Under occupation, his entry read simply,
09:58Undergraduate.
10:06In 1901, Buchan left Britain for the first time.
10:10The Boer War in South Africa had been raging
10:12for almost two years,
10:14as the independent Boer republics refused to submit
10:17to British colonial rule.
10:21The guerrilla tactics employed by the Boers
10:23had proved devastatingly effective.
10:26But by 1901, the British had recovered
10:29and the war was all but over.
10:33Buchan was introduced by an Oxford contact to Lord Milner,
10:37the British High Commissioner in South Africa,
10:39who offered him a job as his private secretary.
10:43Well, he was put in as one of a group,
10:46the Milner Kindergartens, as they were known,
10:49to clean up the place after the mess that many among them Milner
10:53had got into after the war with the Boers,
10:55which, of course, was one that greatly humiliated the British.
11:02Buchan was brought face to face with the brutality of the Boer War.
11:07There had been the appalling business of the concentration camps
11:10in which Boer women and children were literally concentrated,
11:14but sanitation collapsed.
11:17That's the thing, there was an appalling death rate,
11:19about 20,000 died.
11:24Despite these horrors, Buchan fell in love with South Africa,
11:27both the people and the landscape.
11:31Once in a poem, a dedicatory poem in one of his books,
11:35he speaks of the fairest country under the stars,
11:38and that was South Africa.
11:41Many of his characters are South African,
11:43like Peter Pienaar and Richard Haney.
11:45It's very interesting that they are...
11:47These outsiders, they're not members of the British establishment.
11:52In South Africa, Buchan started writing
11:55what would become his first truly successful novel,
11:58Prester John.
12:00The story tells of a young Scottish man, David Crawford,
12:04who struggles to prevent an educated and charismatic black man,
12:08John Laputa, from leading an indigenous revolt.
12:11Prester John's a very ambiguous novel.
12:13It's the chief literary coming of his South African experiences.
12:17Prester John, however, is a novel which does seem to look forward
12:21to a black Africa,
12:23and ultimately the figure of John Laputa is a heroic figure.
12:27He's even given the last lines of Antony in Antony and Cleopatra
12:32when he dies.
12:35Anar, Meros. The long day's task is done.
12:46While in his fiction, Buchan allowed himself
12:49to articulate the African desire for independence,
12:52he himself had no doubts of the white man's role.
12:57I think his experience in the Boer War
12:59gave him a very strong commitment to empire.
13:02He was a great imperialist, was Buchan,
13:04and that suffuses all his novels.
13:06I mean, Richard Hannay himself has an imperial background.
13:09After all, Richard Hannay had spent his youth in South Africa.
13:16I mean, John Buchan wrote, when Britain,
13:19though not quite at the top and beginning to go downhill,
13:23still felt itself at the top,
13:25and where people like Buchan, deadly serious in their hearts,
13:28thought that that was where we deserved to be,
13:31provided we behaved according to certain rules.
13:34And this comes through in the stories,
13:36comes through in his political life.
13:38It was part of him.
13:40He was a deeply serious patriotic man
13:42at a time when Britain was quite different from what it is today.
13:49If Buchan's time in Africa had inspired him,
13:52it also disturbed him.
13:55His experiences of the Boer War
13:57alerted him to the growing fault lines in the old order,
14:00which would provide an important motif in his thrillers.
14:05I think that he felt this was an example of the enemy within,
14:09that although the British population of South Africa,
14:13the English-speaking population, was quite large,
14:16there was another...
14:20..substantial section of the community there,
14:23namely the Dutch-speaking one,
14:25who did not hold the same loyalties,
14:27although they lived in South Africa,
14:29did not hold the same loyalties as the English-speaking sections.
14:34After his two-year adventure in South Africa,
14:37Buchan returned home, keen to put down roots.
14:41Characteristically, he wasted little time in doing so.
14:45He was invited by Tommy Nelson, an Oxford friend,
14:49to join the family publishing firm,
14:51and he married into the aristocracy his bride, Susan Grosvenor,
14:55a cousin of the Duke of Westminster.
14:58There were soon two children, Alice, born in 1908,
15:02and John, born in 1911.
15:09While Buchan cemented his place in the English establishment,
15:12Europe was beginning to fracture,
15:14mirroring the cracks within empire
15:16which Buchan had observed first-hand in South Africa.
15:21The ugly clashes within old and new worlds
15:23brought new protagonists,
15:25who began to ignite Buchan's imagination.
15:28Really, at the beginning of the 20th century,
15:31people are becoming aware of spies and espionage.
15:36They really make their first appearance in invasion novels,
15:41which was a genre of novel which took hold in Britain
15:45after the Franco-Prussian War and with the rise of Germany.
15:49The German scare had been brilliantly exploited
15:52in a revolutionary thriller, The Riddle Of The Sands,
15:55by Erskine Childers, in which two men on a boating holiday
15:59stumble across plans for a German invasion of Britain.
16:04With The Riddle Of The Sands, which was published in 1903,
16:07Childers wrote a type of book that had never been written before.
16:11It was a story which was entirely driven by suspense.
16:15The principal characters were in danger almost from the start
16:18and the book ended more or less when they got out of danger.
16:21That's the definition of a novel of suspense.
16:24And The Riddle Of The Sands was the first.
16:32In creating a novel of suspense,
16:34Childers reinvented the adventure story
16:36in a new and nerve-tingling way,
16:38where constant jeopardy and menace drove the narrative.
16:46The threat Childers introduced, a German invasion,
16:49was further exploited by William Tufnell Lequeux.
16:55He is really a writer of very poor quality, Lequeux.
16:58His books sold well because they were sensational.
17:01They warned people of the threat from Germany.
17:06Lequeux wrote that 5,000 German spies,
17:09controlled directly from Berlin, were secretly operating in Britain.
17:14His books were popular but paranoid.
17:17German spies in Britain were mostly myth.
17:21But given the anxieties of the Edwardians,
17:24they were seen as an enormous threat and challenge.
17:28And when William Lequeux wrote his book Spies Of The Kaiser,
17:32he was flooded with letters from people saying,
17:35you know, I've seen German spies.
17:37I mean, after all, there was a German population in Britain.
17:40These letters, perfectly innocent people.
17:43But, of course, in times of anxiety, as we well know,
17:47it's very easy to project onto foreigners,
17:51or people who are different than yourselves,
17:54these tremendous fears.
17:56This new type of novel, and the threat of a changing world order,
18:00jolted Buchan into action.
18:02In 1913, he wrote his first thriller, The Powerhouse,
18:06published as a serialisation for Blackwood's magazine.
18:11It gave the world Buchan's first truly three-dimensional character,
18:15Edward Lethan, who was largely modelled on Buchan himself,
18:19and would reappear in a number of later adventures.
18:22I mean, Lethan is a very hard-working,
18:26slightly dull barrister,
18:29but a man of tremendous compassion.
18:32You can't imagine Lethan being nasty to anybody.
18:36In The Powerhouse, the megalomaniac villain,
18:39who passes himself off as an English gentleman
18:42while actually trying to undermine the country,
18:44taunts Lethan with the chaos he can inflict on the world.
18:49Did you ever reflect, Mr Lethan,
18:51how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?
18:55I should have thought it fairly substantial, I said,
18:58and the foundations grow daily firmer.
19:00He laughed. That is the lawyer's view.
19:03But believe me, you are wrong.
19:05Reflect and you will find that the foundations are sand.
19:08You think that a wall as solid as the earth
19:11separates civilisation from barbarism.
19:14I tell you that the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.
19:18A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.
19:28It's the first film where you have this thing about the crust of civilisation,
19:32Lethan's realisation of, you know,
19:35how you could disappear under the ice, in a sense,
19:39be dragged down very easily.
19:46I do think he put his finger on something
19:49that has remained a very powerful theme in spy fiction
19:52and makes us keep turning the page
19:54because we need to know who the traitor within is.
19:57I mean, at one point, these things were very sure
20:00that a British gentleman could be trusted.
20:02We could trust people of our own nationality.
20:05We can't trust them now. We cannot trust them now.
20:12Eight months after the serialisation of the powerhouse,
20:15war broke out in Europe.
20:17The crack in civilisation of which Lethan had been warned was real.
20:25Buchan, now aged 39, immediately tried to join the army
20:29but was rejected on the grounds of age and ill health.
20:32He was suffering from a duodenal ulcer
20:35that would plague the latter part of his life.
20:38A combination of family anxieties and public activities
20:42had played havoc with my digestion,
20:45so I went to bed for the best part of three miserable months
20:49while every day brought news of the deaths of my friends.
20:54Depressed, frustrated and bored,
20:56Buchan turned his attention to writing the novel that would make his name.
21:05Don't you understand? The peace of the world is in danger now.
21:10Six months later, just before the publication of The 39 Steps,
21:14Buchan described to his friend, Tommy Nelson,
21:17how the novel had come about.
21:19My dear Tommy, you and I have long cherished an affection
21:24for that elementary type of tale which Americans call the dime novel
21:28and which we know as the shocker,
21:30the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities
21:33and march just inside the borders of the possible.
21:37During my illness last winter,
21:39I exhausted my store of these aids to cheerfulness
21:42and was driven to write one for myself.
21:48Despite Buchan's modest claim of mere escapism,
21:51his spy novel allowed him to articulate his fears about the modern world.
21:55In so doing, he perfectly captured the zeitgeist.
22:00It's a timeless book, it's about the man on the run,
22:03right back to Odysseus,
22:05but, of course, at the same time, it's very much of its time,
22:08this paranoia, war has just broken out,
22:11this idea that the spies are still there and what could they be doing,
22:15that the establishment has been subverted.
22:18I need sanctuary for perhaps 24 hours. Can you help?
22:22In The 39 Steps, Richard Hannay stumbles over a plot
22:28to assassinate the Greek prime minister.
22:30My information convinces me that on the 15th of this month,
22:34an attempt will be made to assassinate Carolides.
22:38The Greek premier?
22:39Hannay is told of the plot by a mysterious spy named Scudder
22:43who seeks refuge in his apartment.
22:47Scudder's information is all carefully catalogued in his encrypted notebook.
22:51My research is all in here, Mr Hannay.
22:54I need time to collate it.
22:57But then Scudder is found murdered on Hannay's floor.
23:01You know, you've got a few enigmatic clues and a book
23:05and then you come back to find this character
23:07who's given you these clues sprawl dead in your flat
23:10and you're suddenly under surveillance
23:13and it's just, you know, you're right in there.
23:21Hannay realises that both the police and whoever did that
23:25are going to be on to him, so he decides to disappear,
23:29but chooses to disappear not in London,
23:31which would be the obvious place, you'd think,
23:33but to go up to Scotland.
23:35He's remarkably inept, actually.
23:38You know, he's on the run and where does he decide to hide out?
23:42On the barren, open hills of Scotland,
23:44where, of course, you can spot anything, a mile away.
23:49But sending Hannay to the borders
23:51took Buchan into the landscape he loved and knew best.
23:56My stratagem had given me a fair start, call it 20 minutes,
24:00and I had the width of a glen behind me
24:02before I saw the first heads of the pursuers.
24:05They hallooed at the sight of me and I waved my hand.
24:09Two dived into the glen and began to climb my ridge
24:13while the others kept their own side of the hill.
24:16I felt as if I were taking part in a schoolboy game of hair and hounds.
24:21Ah, well, he's disguised as a tramp.
24:23Buchan had introduced two powerful new themes in spy fiction,
24:27the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted
24:30and the illusion of safety in familiar surroundings.
24:33Greg Green once said of Buchan's novels
24:38that he thought they were so powerful
24:40and had been so important to the genre
24:43because Buchan had put his finger on one important thing,
24:47that nothing was ever quite what it seemed.
24:51So the man wearing the police uniform
24:53might not actually be a policeman, he might be an enemy.
25:02Pursued both by agents of the sinister German spy network,
25:05the Black Stone, and by the police,
25:08Hannay must avoid capture,
25:10all the while attempting to unravel and foil
25:13a conspiracy to steal British naval secrets.
25:19The novel culminates on the Kent coast,
25:22where the German spies intend to leave the country at high tide
25:26from a staircase in the cliffs, a staircase with 39 steps.
25:30The end comes in a sort of massive denouement
25:34The end comes, good prevails, the baddies get their comeuppance
25:38and Hannay is the hero.
25:41The 39 Steps was published in October 1915.
25:45For British readers,
25:47subdued by the mounting losses on the Western Front,
25:50it was a welcome antidote.
25:52For Buchan, an astonishing commercial success.
25:5525,000 copies were sold in the first three months.
26:01Buchan later recalled...
26:03I had no purpose in such writing except to please myself,
26:07and even if my books had not found a single reader,
26:10I would have felt amply repaid.
26:17After writing The 39 Steps,
26:20Buchan moved back from fiction to fact.
26:23He embarked on a massive history of the war
26:26for his publishing company, Nelsons.
26:28Then he landed a job as a war correspondent for The Times.
26:34But a few months after he arrived in France,
26:37he was invited by the British commander, General Haig,
26:40to join his intelligence staff.
26:42He's walking the corridors of power, he's seeing how power operates,
26:46it's a great inspiration for him as a writer.
26:49Somehow, Buchan managed to find time to write another thriller,
26:53Greenmantle.
26:55It brought back Richard Hannay,
26:57now a major commanding a battalion on the Western Front.
27:01There's no question that the development of Richard Hannay
27:04from book to book, to some extent,
27:07follows John Buchan's rise through the ranks of English society.
27:12In The 39 Steps, Richard Hannay is very much an outsider.
27:16He's a little bit chippy.
27:18But it doesn't last long,
27:20and I'm sure Buchan felt a little bit this way about English society.
27:25Greenmantle includes some old friends from The 39 Steps,
27:29but it also introduces a range of new characters.
27:33I gave Hannay certain companions,
27:36Peter Pienaar, a Dutch hunter,
27:38Sandy Arbuthnot, and an American gentleman,
27:41Mr John S Blenkein.
27:43It was huge fun playing with my puppets,
27:46and to me, they soon became very real, flesh and blood.
27:51Hannay doesn't thrust himself forward as a sort of James Bond figure,
27:56completely self-centred.
27:58On the contrary, he's rather the person around whom other people,
28:02more exciting people, cluster.
28:04That works rather well, I think.
28:06And that's why it's lasted rather longer than perhaps Bond will.
28:10Sandy Arbuthnot is an old Etonian adventurer
28:13who immersed himself completely in Middle Eastern culture,
28:16and sometimes dress.
28:18Come to think of it, though, I do recall one example.
28:21A guru lived at the foot of the Shanzee Pass as you go over to Kaikand.
28:25If he's not your favourite Buccan character after Green Mantle,
28:28then you must have missed a bit.
28:30He's fantastic.
28:33John Blenkein is an American spy who works for the British government.
28:37He seems to have been based on an American newspaper man Buccan knew.
28:42His duodenal ulcer and love of playing patients
28:45are both drawn directly from Buccan himself.
28:48In fact, Blenkein in some ways is almost more British than Hannay and Sandy,
28:53which is odd for an American that he should be fighting for the British Empire,
28:57but that's how Buccan painted him.
29:00Hannay's oldest and most trusted friend was the Boer hunter Peter Pienaar.
29:05He was the man that taught me all I ever knew of veltcraft
29:08and a good deal about human nature besides.
29:11He was prospector, transport rider and hunter in turns,
29:15but principally hunter.
29:24In Green Mantle, Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office
29:28recalls Hannay from the front and issues him with a new set of orders.
29:32Now you may wonder why Turkey was dragged into this war against England.
29:38Hannay is to gather his friends and undertake a dangerous mission
29:42through Germany and into the Middle East.
29:45At the heart of the mystery is the enigmatic prophet called Green Mantle.
29:49And he's told that the Germans have found some means,
29:54nobody quite understands what means,
29:57of inciting the Arab nations into a jihad,
30:03a holy war against the Allies.
30:07The adventure culminates in Turkey where Hannay, Sandy and the others
30:11find themselves caught up in the Russian campaign to take Erzurum.
30:15We came to destroy Green Mantle and your devilish ambitions.
30:18Make no mistake about it, madam, that folly is over.
30:22The people wait today for a revelation.
30:28Buchan drew on his own knowledge of military intelligence
30:31and was the first author to set his adventures
30:34against the backdrop of real events in the war.
30:37You may kill us if you can,
30:40but we shall at least have crushed you.
30:43But we shall at least have crushed Ally and done service to our country.
30:49Despite the odds, Hannay and his team overcome the German menace
30:53and returned victorious.
30:55It's the Famous Five, isn't it?
30:57I mean, he had blight and stolen it all.
30:59Do you think it's the Famous Five joining him at the Foreign Office?
31:08Hannay's group of chums in fact represented something fundamental to Buchan.
31:13The First World War instilled in him
31:15a strong wartime sense of comradeship.
31:18The idea of a close-knit group of dependable companions
31:21was one that Buchan held dear.
31:24Crick, old fellow!
31:26God! Sandy, our butler!
31:28Well, it is good to see you.
31:31Of all the chums, it was Richard Hannay himself
31:34who truly captured the reader's imagination.
31:38The Honourable English gentleman, whose word is his bond,
31:41he behaves well in all circumstances,
31:44he's loved by his servants and inferiors,
31:48he's had a good education, he belongs to a good club,
31:52he gets on well with all his fellows under all circumstances,
31:56and he's not afraid to call a spade a spade
32:00and to do what he thinks is right,
32:02no matter how heavy the opposition may be.
32:06HE SCREAMS
32:10He has a very clear sense of right and wrong, Hannay.
32:14I don't think he has a great sense of humour, which is fine.
32:19I would like my spies generally not to waste too much time on gags
32:23and to get on with saving the country,
32:25which is by and large what Hannay gets on with
32:29without too much arsing around.
32:33Buchan had a purpose for his characters
32:35that went beyond mere storytelling.
32:38As the destruction of the World War spread,
32:41he also used them to articulate the values he held most dear.
32:46Buchan is right there in the middle,
32:48whether or not he's Sandy Arbuthnot or Richard Hannay,
32:51or whether he's a bit of both, or whether a bit of him is in each of them,
32:55these are undoubtedly vehicles for his disquiet about.
32:59The state of Britain as a power in the world,
33:01but also about the state of Britain itself.
33:10By the beginning of 1917, war weariness was setting in in Britain.
33:15The government, desperately worried about morale,
33:18set up a department for information.
33:21Buchan's literary talents found a new purpose.
33:25He was appointed its director and recalled from France.
33:29He was given the job of starting the First Ministry of Information,
33:33and so it was intelligence work to some extent,
33:36but principally it was propaganda.
33:39Yes, he did believe that what was being put across to people
33:45was a managed version of reality.
33:49I think he was quite conscious of this,
33:52and at the end of the war he was, I think, in two minds
33:55about what the success of this had been.
33:58It had obviously been successful in certain respects,
34:01but it had also damaged the faith that people put in true reporting,
34:06in historical rationality.
34:09In April 1917, Buchan's new public role was subsumed by private tragedy.
34:15On the morning of April 9th, his younger brother, Alistair,
34:20a second lieutenant in the Royal Scots Fusiliers,
34:23led his company into action at the Battle of Arras.
34:27Almost immediately, he was killed.
34:30He was taken to hospital, where he died.
34:35Alistair, who was a delightful, very amusing, bubbly boy,
34:42and he was killed almost the minute he got there.
34:47Churchill wrote him a very nice letter about him.
34:50He was colonel at that time.
34:52He wrote him a very nice letter about him.
34:55He wrote him a very nice letter about him.
34:58He wrote him a very nice letter about him.
35:01Churchill wrote him a very nice letter about him.
35:03He was colonel at that time.
35:07Buchan learned of Alistair's death from his wife, Susan,
35:10who rushed to see him at the Foreign Office, bearing the fateful telegram.
35:15When I got into his room, he sprang up, smiling to greet me.
35:19All my carefully prepared words deserted me,
35:22and I held out the telegram to him, simply saying,
35:26Alistair.
35:29The couple returned home to receive a second shock.
35:33Another telegram awaited them,
35:35with news that Buchan's friend and business partner, Tommy Nelson,
35:39had been killed in the same battle.
35:41All the people he cared for practically were killed,
35:45with a few exceptions.
35:47Not that this was at all strange, it happened to everybody.
35:53There was a dreadful war.
35:56Within a period of six months,
35:59four or five of his very best and dearest friends
36:03were killed on the Western Front.
36:06And I think this marked him very powerfully
36:09and, in a way, lent force to his writing.
36:15Though the war tested Buchan's imperial mettle to the limit,
36:19neither he nor Hannay faltered in their commitment to the war effort.
36:23Buchan's resolve, and his anxieties,
36:26would find expression in his next Richard Hannay novel,
36:29Mr Standfast.
36:32I have something to say to you, Richard Hannay.
36:35Are you willing to trust me?
36:38Written in the last year of the war, it's a classic spy novel,
36:42with the hero employing the usual combination of courage,
36:45resilience and true British grit
36:47to foil the seditious activities of a German spy ring
36:51operating behind Allied lines.
36:54But the threat in Mr Standfast is not simply posed by a foreign power.
36:59Buchan also targets pacifism at home,
37:02which Hannay is sent undercover by his glamorous controller
37:05to investigate, using the alias of Cornelius Brand.
37:09You won't live in an old manor like this,
37:12but among Jim Crack little arty houses.
37:15You will hear everything you regard as sacred laughed at and condemned,
37:20and every kind of nauseous folly acclaimed,
37:23and you must hold your tongue and pretend to agree.
37:27I detested my new part and looked forward to naked shame.
37:31It was bad enough for anyone to have to pose as a pacifist,
37:35but for me, strong as a bull and sunburnt as a gypsy,
37:39and not looking my 40 years, it was a black disgrace.
37:43Cornelius Brand, aka Richard Hannay,
37:47has to sort of dig his fingernails into his palms
37:50every time somebody voices anything against the Western Front.
37:56And he remembers choking back tears
37:59of all the gallant soldiers he's witnessed giving their lives.
38:03And Buchan's job in real life is as director of propaganda
38:07to keep the war effort going.
38:09And I think in Mr Standfast,
38:11he really pours out all his worries that it might not
38:15and tries very hard to explain to his readers
38:20that while they may also have reservations,
38:23nonetheless, the war is worth it.
38:26It has to be fought out to the bitter end.
38:34The finale of Mr Standfast finds Hannay caught up in the bitter fighting
38:38as the war on the Western Front moves towards its end.
38:42His great friend, Peter Pienaar, dies heroically.
38:46It was perhaps Buchan's memorial
38:48for the numerous friends he had lost during the war.
38:51I don't think either Buchan or Hannay were broken.
38:54I think they were worn out. That's different.
38:56Michel Schoch, in the metaphorical sense of the word.
39:00I think that all that is true.
39:03I think seeking peace, seeking a quieter existence,
39:08but not, I would have said, broken.
39:10He survived when many of his closest friends have died.
39:13There's a sense of being displaced,
39:16that all the dreams of that Oxford generation of his have gone.
39:20And it's interesting, for about four or five years after the war,
39:24he writes nothing except books, really, about the First World War.
39:28And I think there's a suggestion almost of a nervous breakdown,
39:31certainly exhaustion.
39:41In November 1919, Buchan found the retreat he needed,
39:46Ellesfield Manor, four miles north of Oxford.
39:51Susan had given birth to two more boys,
39:54William, in 1916, and Alistair,
39:57named in memory of Buchan's younger brother, in 1918.
40:04When he was at home, at any holiday time,
40:07he was absolutely perfect.
40:09He saw to all the things we did,
40:12joined in various sports that we were interested in.
40:16He was one of those people who created an atmosphere around them
40:21which wouldn't allow for idleness or disagreeableness
40:25or anything of that sort.
40:27So, in his company, we were always happy.
40:30But the inner Buchan,
40:32so hard for those around him to detect,
40:35was constantly tormented by anxieties about the world beyond.
40:40Buchan toyed a lot with that phrase,
40:43which has continually come up,
40:45about the thin division between violence and order.
40:50And I think at the end of the First World War,
40:53he felt that humanity was no better at the end of it.
40:56Things had become a lot more problematic.
40:59The boil of violence had not been landed.
41:02It had become actually more toxic than it was.
41:06The Three Hostages, Buchan's first post-war thriller,
41:10portrayed the evil lurking beneath the New World.
41:13The adventure, Hannae's fourth,
41:15begins by finding him, very much like Buchan,
41:18enjoying the post-war calm in the Cotswold countryside.
41:22Who's that? I'm afraid it's MacGillivray.
41:25Oh, Lord.
41:27It starts with Hannae,
41:30It starts with this wonderful domestic idol.
41:33There they are at Foss Manor, they've got a baby in,
41:36it's all marvellous and it's cosy
41:38and there's a fire burning in the grate and all that sort of thing.
41:43You don't know what I want.
41:45To jockey me into some queer job where I'll make an ass of myself.
41:50Now married with a young son,
41:52Hannae is drawn out of retirement to help the police solve a sinister crime.
41:56Find three people, that's all.
41:59Before they're murdered.
42:01Armed with only a few cryptic clues,
42:04Hannae must attempt to free three hostages,
42:07children of prominent figures,
42:09who have been kidnapped by a ruthless gang.
42:12The important thing about that book
42:15is that it represents something that wasn't going to happen
42:19for some years to come yet,
42:21which was the kidnapping of the children of celebrated people
42:25for political purposes.
42:28I mean, that was really a horrible idea, but it came true.
42:34A boy. Ten years old. The son of Sir Arthur.
42:37The three hostages undoubtedly reflect anxiety about the post-war world.
42:41You have once again the enemy within, the corruption of morals,
42:45the lack of a sense of direction,
42:48the lack of a sense of responsibility,
42:51as it is of the things that he sees there,
42:55and the ruthlessness of the people
42:58who wanted to tear down civilisation and had nothing to put in its place.
43:11He has no time, of course, for the decadent young of the 1920s,
43:15people who live for pleasure and who are disreputable
43:18and, you know, who have no moral fibre.
43:21There's the scene in the nightclub in The Three Hostages
43:24where you're just full of people like that and Hanny is disgusted by them.
43:31Let's go!
43:33The book's villain, Dominic Medina,
43:36is shown to be all the more evil and dangerous
43:39because he is such an accepted figure in society.
43:42When Hanny first suspects that Medina is a wrong-on,
43:46the immediate thing is nobody will believe that.
43:51You know, this man is admired everywhere.
43:56After German spies and traitorous pacifists,
43:59the criminal Medina is the new enemy within.
44:03Unless you wish to sleep.
44:06To sleep.
44:08It was really terrifying, actually. I remember it being properly scary,
44:11Dominic Medina being a figure
44:14that recurred in nightmares for years afterwards.
44:18Ow!
44:23Evil is evil in Buckingham.
44:25In The Three Hostages, you've got a very nasty man in Dominic Medina,
44:28a very nasty man indeed.
44:30Yes, I mean, there are echoes there of Biggles and Bulwark Drummond, I suppose,
44:35and as much as always, Hanny is very chivalrous.
44:40I mean, there's that bit where he actually tries to save Dominic Medina at the end,
44:44but if he was a modern hero, I would have just let him go and been only too grateful.
44:48Now, come on. Let's go. Take it.
44:57Hanny!
45:03There is, for want of a better expression,
45:06an old-fashioned boys' own approach to that extent.
45:09Oh, but I think the works go way beyond that.
45:11They're about justice, they're about human wickedness,
45:14they're about the appropriate responses, they're about the triumph of good.
45:27The literary life at Ellesfield was, for Bucken, a sort of paradise,
45:32but his sense of duty and ambition tugged.
45:36There's always a tension in both Bucken's own life and in his characters
45:40between public duty and private contemplation,
45:43and Bucken, I think, is drawn back into public life when he becomes an MP in 1937,
45:49and in the same way, Hanny is drawn from his country idol, Foss Manor,
45:54to go back and do his duty for his country.
45:59Bucken was elected Tory Member of Parliament for the Scottish universities.
46:04He expected to get into the Cabinet, but would be disappointed.
46:08I think he'd have liked to have been Secretary of State for Scotland,
46:11but he didn't get it.
46:13Partly, he wasn't a good party man.
46:15He had a lot of friends on all sides of the House.
46:21As a writer, Bucken continued to flourish,
46:24and within his prolific output,
46:26it is the thrillers which display a real prescience and modernity.
46:30But they are also of their time,
46:32and in recent years, he has been accused of anti-Semitism,
46:36a charge that stems from views expressed by some of his characters.
46:42The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the back stairs to find him.
46:47If you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss,
46:51ten to one, you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath chair,
46:55with an eye like a rattlesnake.
46:58He tends too much to be damned by people who just read one or two excerpts from his novel.
47:04It's, after all, Scudder who talks about everything in Europe
47:07being controlled by a little old Jew in a wheelchair with an eye like a rattlesnake.
47:12This is Scudder, the paranoid American, who's saying that.
47:15That is then undercut and actually contradicted
47:18by Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office,
47:20true bluff British gentleman who says,
47:22oh, he used to believe a lot of nonsense,
47:24you shouldn't believe any of that stuff, it's not true.
47:27MUSIC
47:32He was actually a Zionist.
47:34I mean, his name is inscribed in the list of friends of Israel.
47:38And, in fact, it is very difficult for someone reared in Scots Presbyterianism
47:43to be anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish,
47:46because the Scots Presbyterians, particularly the 17th-century ones,
47:50almost saw themselves as a covenanted people, like the Israelites.
47:58The evidence from Buchan's own words is conclusive.
48:02His letters from the 1930s castigated those in Britain
48:06who went along with Nazi vilification of Jews.
48:12It is abominable at a time when the wretched Jews
48:15are suffering almost the cruelest persecution in history
48:18that Englishmen should give currency to these silly libels
48:22which are all invented in Germany.
48:27When Hitler was lining up all the people he was going to kill when he came across,
48:32Buchan was on that list for his pro-Jewish activity.
48:35So I think it's very unfair to say he was anti-Semitic.
48:44Despite Buchan's failure to get into the Cabinet,
48:47the achievements piled up.
48:49He was created a Companion of Honour in 1932
48:52and then appointed High Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
48:57His public life was crowned in 1935
49:00when he was appointed Governor-General of Canada.
49:04He was made a peer, the first Lord Tweedsmuir of Ellesfield.
49:10Just before he left Britain, there was a farewell treat.
49:13He and Susan were invited to the premiere
49:16of Alfred Hitchcock's film version of The 39 Steps.
49:19Darling, how lovely to see you.
49:22Hitchcock changed the story, added love interest and subverted the ending.
49:27But Buchan's revolutionary thriller gave him the perfect inspiration.
49:32I was desperate. I'm terribly sorry. I had to do it.
49:35My name's Hedley. They're after me. I swear I'm innocent.
49:38You've got to help me. I've got to keep free for the next few days.
49:41Well, you've seen a man passing in the last few minutes.
49:45This is the man you want, I think.
49:48Hitchcock owed an enormous debt to Buchan.
49:51There he goes!
49:54Buchan and Childers invented this form of storytelling
49:58and Hitchcock is all about suspense.
50:01It's all about suspense.
50:03And, of course, in visual terms, he was the all-time master of it.
50:08What are the 39 Steps?
50:10The 39 Steps is an organisation of spies.
50:14Hitchcock takes the deception,
50:16the disguise behind gentility,
50:19that kind of thing,
50:21that Buchan had absolutely worked away at in his Hannay novels,
50:26and he refines it exquisitely, pairs it down.
50:29She was killed by a foreign agent who was interested too.
50:33Did she tell you what the foreign agent looked like?
50:35There wasn't time.
50:36There was one thing, part of his little finger was missing.
50:38Which one?
50:39This one, I think.
50:41You're sure it wasn't this one?
50:47Hitchcock always said he enjoyed Buchan, he'd read all these novels.
50:52On the other hand, he also said that when he was adapting anything,
50:55he wasn't adapting it, he was redoing it,
50:58he was reimagining it for the screen.
51:00And there was this peculiar photograph of the two of them,
51:03Buchan looking like a heron
51:05and Hitchcock looking like a small fish,
51:08looking very distrustfully at one another.
51:11But, in fact, Buchan was said to have liked the adaptation.
51:14I thought it was very good.
51:16There was a lot of intelligence in it, good ideas.
51:19My mother hated it.
51:20She thought it was an offence against a very good book.
51:25But Buchan is entranced,
51:27and it's part of the sort of generous nature of the man,
51:29that he actually liked it,
51:31he could see that in some ways it was very different but very good,
51:35and he's determined to stay to the end to find out what happens.
51:39Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada,
51:41visited President Roosevelt at the White House.
51:43The close feeling of kinship between Canada and the United States
51:46is a happy link in the chain of greater friendship
51:48between Britain and America.
51:50Despite the demands of being a governor general,
51:53and the duodenal ulcer which had made him a sick man,
51:56Buchan, as always, found time to write.
52:00He brought Richard Hannay out of retirement
52:03for a final adventure in the Island of Sheep.
52:06It gets quite difficult to see this retired major general,
52:11who's also an MP,
52:13dashing about doing heroic things on this Danish island.
52:18The more I think about it,
52:20the more I feel it isn't part of a sequence,
52:23it's not really taking us anywhere, it's an adventure.
52:25It's good versus evil again.
52:27I don't think it has a particular significance.
52:37Far more important was Buchan's last novel, Sick Heart River,
52:42written in 1939, the year before his death.
52:45It's an unusually introspective book,
52:48in which Buchan reflects on his own life and achievements.
52:52The protagonist is Edward Lethan,
52:54the hero of his first venture into thrillers nearly 30 years earlier.
53:00It's probably the most personal and profound of the books.
53:03Edward Lethan is told that he has a year to live, he has tuberculosis.
53:07He's also asked to go and find Francois Galliard
53:10in the frozen north of Canada and bring him back.
53:13Lethan goes to this pastoral idol, the sick heart, and finds him.
53:17In doing so, he comes across these Hare Indians who are dying
53:21and he rescues them, but at, in a sense, the cost of his own life.
53:34Sick Heart River does give you a tremendously painful, gut-wrenching sense
53:39of what it is to be a very sick man in terrible physical conditions,
53:44and this was something he obviously saw from his own poor health at that time.
53:49But the notion of Lethan, who is suffering from TB,
53:52dying, going through these conditions in the north-west of Canada,
53:58is brilliantly envisaged.
54:00It is very much Buchan's last things and it has that religious quality to it.
54:05Well, Lethan, I think, begins as a conventional character, almost.
54:09And, of course, by Sick Heart River,
54:11he has become Buchan's alter ego without a doubt.
54:14You know, how have I justified my life is the question.
54:17Have I justified my life?
54:20And, of course, there he turns away from success and it's self-sacrificing.
54:25I think Buchan himself never really knew
54:29whether Hanne or Lethan, right up probably until Sick Heart River,
54:33whether Hanne or Lethan was his real hero.
54:37I don't think he knew himself. I think they were two sides of him.
54:41And I don't think he knew.
54:43And it would have been very easy, as an older man,
54:46to have looked back to the exploits of youth,
54:48which were very considerable in his case,
54:51and to have elected Hanne.
54:54Instead, he elects, for Sick Heart River,
54:57the much more thoughtful, quiet guy,
55:00the duller guy, if you like.
55:02I think that's significant.
55:14On the morning of February 6, 1940,
55:17John Buchan slipped in his bathroom
55:19and struck the back of his head on the edge of his bathtub.
55:22Five days later, he was dead.
55:31One headline in the paper said,
55:33Beloved Vice-Soy, gone.
55:38And that's really all I felt about it.
55:42They gave him this really magnificent funeral.
55:45The body of the first Governor-General to die in office
55:48was placed in the Parliament buildings
55:50for the ceremonial lying in state.
55:52Thousands waited in the bitter cold to pay homage to his memory.
55:57Buchan's death made front-page news around the world.
56:00His memorial service in Westminster Abbey
56:02had all the members of the Cabinet,
56:04representatives of the royal family,
56:06and the editor of The Times said that he had never seen
56:09such an outflowing of grief for any man at that time.
56:14Buchan, the grammar school boy from a modest home
56:17who became a Governor-General,
56:19achieved huge success in both public and literary life.
56:23But it's the thrillers that have made him endure.
56:28Well, there are elements in Buchan's writing
56:32that have survived just because they're literary quality.
56:37You know, the idea of the enemy within,
56:40regardless of its political resonance,
56:43it's a literary conceit that just works so well.
56:48It's like the 12-bar blues.
56:50You can do it again and again and again,
56:52and it always sounds great.
56:55Buchan not only inspired a century of British spy writing,
56:59he succeeded in isolating themes and stories
57:02that touch our world every bit as much as his.
57:05Well, Green Mantle, of course, was due to be broadcast
57:08on Radio 4 last year, just after the July bombings,
57:12and the subject matter was thought to be so volatile
57:16and so close to the actual issue of the jihad
57:20that they felt it was insensitive to broadcast it,
57:24which I think, if that isn't telling, I don't know what is.
57:28I mean, that Buchan is still considered so contemporary,
57:31so contemporarily dangerous,
57:33and so contemporarily dangerous material.
57:36It shows that he was writing with fantastic prescience.
57:39Oh, I think the ultimate tribute to any author is
57:43if decades after their death
57:45and a century after they were writing,
57:48that work is still considered
57:50not something which sits on a library shelf
57:53and is read by a student of literature,
57:55but rather is something that still has application
57:59to the mainstream of life.
58:01I think that is the ultimate tribute.
58:11A quest to win heart and hand,
58:14Clash of the Titans, coming up next.
58:32Copyright © 2020 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
58:35No part of this recording may be reproduced
58:38without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent.