OBITUARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 36, 12 February 1940, Page 8

OBITUARY

LORD TWEEDSMUIR

FALL PROVES FATAL

CANADA'S GOVERNOR

(By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright.) (Received February 12, 2.30 p.m.) MONTREAL, February 11. Lord Tweedsmuir, GovernorGeneral of Canada, is dead.

Lord Tweedsmuir failed to recover from an injury he received when he fell in a faint at his home

in Ottawa early last week. Lord Tweedsmuir's death occurred at 7.13 p.m. at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he suffered a relapse this morning, resulting in a third operation which lasted four hours. Before and after the operation he was. given blood transfusions. The physicians believed that he withstood the operation well. This is the first occasion on which the King's representative in Canada has died in' office since the Confederation.

Lord Tweedsmuir, Canada's literary viceroy, was born John Buchan in 1875 and was educated at Glasgow University and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he won the Stanhope Historical Prize in 1897, the Newdigate Prize in 1898, was president of the Union in 1899, and took first-class honours in Literae Humaniores. In 1901 he became a Barrister of the Inner Temple and in the same year was swept up by the. net of Lord Milner, the names of whose "kindergarten" have studded the records of English history ever since Buchan was secretary to Milner when he was High Commissioner for South Africa in 1901-3.

Before he left Oxford his literary career had started with such books as "The Scholar Gipsies" (1896) and "John Burnet of Barns." He followed these books with a wide range of volumes. By the time he was 20 he was a Fellow of his college and by the time he was 25 he had published seven books. His learning quickly became a legend and he expanded in various directions. If he published such works as his ''History of the World War," "Oliver Cromwell," and "Lord Mintd," books which gave him "a good granite name" among historians, he also published the famous "Greenmantle" and "The Thirty-nine Steps," and the other tales of adventure, so that you never knew where you had him. He toiled on military history, on South Africa, on

Brasenose College, on the "Hannay" adventure series, and Sir Walter Scott and Montrose and the Massacre at Glencoe. "It is not blood the Buchans have in their veins, but ink," someone said of this very literary family.

In 1916-17 he was at the Headquarters of the British Army in France, and in the penultimate year of the war became Director of Information. In 1927 he entered Parliament as a Conservative member, representing Scottish Universities and he held the seat until 1935, when, the first literary man to be so honoured, he received viceregal rank. He was simultaneously created first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and two years later became both a P.C. and Chancellor of the University bf Edinburgh. In 1933 and 1934 he was Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland, and he was a trustee of the Pilgrim Trust, a Curator of the Oxford University Chest, and a J.P. of Peeblesshire. His honorary degrees are numerous and come mainly from universities in Scotland, Canada, and the United States; curiously he does not seem to have been honoured by an English institution other than the University of Oxford.

He married, in 1907, Miss Susan Charlotte Grosvenor and there are three sons and one daughter of the marriage. His heir, the Hon. John Norman Stuart Buchan, was born •in 1911 and began his career in the Colonial Office.