GRAY MATTER: Writer John Buchan's lifelong devotion to Oxford

We fell to chatting in the festival’s Green Room at the Randolph after an introduction by her Oxford-based literary agent Felicity Bryan. Had this not been effected, I should still have known who she was, for she looks uncannily like her Aunt Alice with whom I had tea at the same venue exactly 40 years ago, an occasion I vividly recall.

Naturally, I told Ursula of this tangential connection with her family, which arose when I interviewed Alice Fairfax-Lucy, John Buchan’s eldest child, about her 1979 memoir, A Scrap Screen.

The one-time chatelaine of Charlecote Park, near Stratford-upon-Avon, had told me, I said, of a visit Virginia Woolf made to the Buchan family home, Elsfield Manor. She especially remembered how the great novelist – often thought remote and austere – enjoyed the company of children.

That all had not been entirely sweetness and light, however, was evident from Ursula’s reaction. And indeed, when I read the Buchan biography I learned of Woolf’s “characteristically waspish” account of the visit in a letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell.

“Happily John was in London being given a dinner, or seeing the King,” she reported, “and it wasn’t so bad. They’re rather out of elbows, and have holes in the carpet and only one family WC.”

Also mentioned are Mrs Woolf’s arguments with a fellow guest, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He was friendly, as I know from his letters, with a later owner of Elsfield Manor, the celebrated entomologist and flea expert Miriam Rothschild. I met her both in Oxford and on her estate at Ashton Wold, near Oundle. There were certainly no holes in her carpets, though she might have found the source of them, moths, a rich field for study.

Not having been born to money – his father was a Free Church minister in Scotland – Buchan was early apprised of the need to make it. And make it he did, in myriad ways throughout his life.

A published author while still an Oxford undergraduate, he went on to write more than 100 books – the best known of which, The Thirty-Nine Steps, became a bingo call – and 1,000-plus newspaper and magazine articles.

Qualified and practising as a barrister, he was also a colonial administrator in South Africa, a Conservative MP for eight years and ultimately a highly successful Governor General of Canada, raised to the peerage on his appointment, as Lord Tweedsmuir.

But as he earned, he also spent. There was expensive education (Eton) for his boys, the Elsfield establishment with its indoor and outdoor staff, and lavish financial provision both for his sister Anna and his parents who, once his father’s ministering days were over, had to fend for themselves.

His mother Helen emerges from Ursula’s book, for this reader at least, as an unsympathetic character – needy, prim to a degree and as fiercely proud of her son’s ascent in the world as she was resentful of those she suspected of impeding it.

Her attitude to John’s wife, the former Susan Grosvenor – as may be guessed, related the the Duke of Westminster – displays the sort of maternal jealousy explored by D.H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers.

No Oxford reader of the biography can fail to be struck by Buchan’s devotion to our city, which began on his first visit to sit a college entrance exam. He wrote later: “I recollect walking in the late afternoon in Merton Street and Holywell and looking at snow-laden gables which had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages. In that hour Oxford claimed me, and her bonds have never been loosed.” (He remains here in death; his ashes are buried in Elsfield churchyard.)

The college to which he successfully applied was not the Scotsman’s traditional choice (then) of Balliol but rather Brasenose where he wished to absorb the influence of the recently deceased fellow Walter Pater.

His enthusiasm for Pater matched that of Oscar Wilde, about which I have just been reading in Matthew Sturgis’s new biography. There are other similarities: both gained first-class degrees in Greats, both won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and both had early works published by John Lane (poetry for Wilde and short stories for Buchan).

But while Wilde had little interest in politics and sport, Buchan saw his Oxford career ‘crowned’ with the presidency of the Oxford Union and election to the elite Vincent’s Club. This was more for his social than sporting prowess, although he was a mountaineer and angler.

It might have seemed that he won all the university’s glittering prizes – except he twice failed the entrance exam for a fellowship at All Souls.

Wilde tried and failed at Trinity at the end of his Magdalen days. But in each case a wider world awaited.