Item 0018 - Letter, to Mrs. Helen Buchan

John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir, was born August 26, 1875, at Perth, Scotland. Buchan lived in Pathhead, Fife from 1876 to 1888, when his family moved to Glasgow. In 1892, after attending Hutcheson's Grammar School, he received a bursary to Glasgow University. Three years later he won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Buchan began contributing to periodicals and publishing books. In 1899 he took rooms at the Temple in London and read for the bar. Two years later, he joined Lord Milner's staff in South Africa, working on refugee camps, land settlement, and the administration of the Orange River and Transvaal Colonies.

Buchan returned to London in 1903 and spent the next three years working as a barrister while continuing to pursue his literary career. In December 1906 he joined Nelson's publishing house, where he would remain until 1929. With the outbreak of the First World War, he began a serial history of the war for Nelson's. From 1916 to 1918 he worked for British Military Intelligence, eventually becoming Director of Intelligence in the U.K. Ministry of Information under Beaverbrook. In 1927 Buchan was elected to the British Parliament as Conservative member for the Scottish Universities. He was re-elected in 1929 and 1931. In 1933 he became High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Two years later he was appointed Governor General of Canada and was thereafter known as Lord Tweedsmuir.

A popular Governor General, he travelled widely throughout Canada and endeavoured to make the office accessible to a broad spectrum of society. In 1937, the year which saw him become the first Governor General to tour the Arctic, Buchan instituted the Governor General's Literary Awards. The author of more than 60 books, Buchan was both a world-famous novelist and an accomplished historian and biographer. He died in Montreal on February 11, 1940.