Trafalgar School - Echoes Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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the society of my elders . In August 1901 he accepted the invitation of Lord Milner to go with him to South Africa and work on the reconstruction there. This was the begin- ning of his great public career which ended in the Government House of Canada. But fame and publicity made very little difference to Lord Tweedsmuir. He retained all his old heroes in history and wrote his three great biographies upon them — Cromwell , Montrose ' , and Augustus . The stern Calvanism of his boyhood was mellowed and broadened, but lost none of its vigour. He retained too all his boyish zest for adventure which had led him to walk from Cambridge to Oxford (eighty miles) in twenty-four hours, on a dare. And when he came to Canada it was more the minister ' s son going on a rich adventure with friends and equals, than an English Baron coming as the representative of the Crown to a great Dominion. I only once had the opportunity of seeing Lord Tweedmuir and of hearing him speak. It was a hot evening late in June, but the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul was filled. What impressed me most was not his scholarship, although that could scarcely be overlooked, but his clear thinking, the mellow tone of his voice, and his quiet, half- hidden, but keen sense of humour. When Louis XIII learnt of the death of Cardinal Richelieu he said A great states- man has departed . We might well say this of Lord Tweedsmuir for he was undoubtedly the most outstanding Governor-General Canada ever possessed. But we will never for- get that, besides being a great politician, a great historian, and a great novelist, he was also a great man. He possessed those very qualities which he most admired in others. Realism, coloured by poetry: a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy; a shrewd and kindly wisdom. Allana Reid, Senior Matriculation, Barclay House. [23]

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LORD TWEEDSMUIR CANADA, and the entire British Empire, suffered a severe loss on the eleventh of February 1940 in the death of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir. As a statesman, an author, and a lawyer, he had won wide-spread distinction, but it was as a man that he gained the affection and loyalty of the Dominion of Canada. Wherever he travelled, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Ocean, he left behind him an impression of kindliness, courtesy and genuine interest. I think everyone in Canada must have been struck by the amazing versatility of Lord Tweedsmuir. He could address a church court or open a session of parliament: he could chat with fishermen in the far-north, or attend a ball in Montreal with equal ease and equal dignity. Yet he always remained the same man. He had an immense capacity for work, and great reserves of vitality even when in ill-health. When one thinks of his many trips across Canada, his unceasing social duties and his never-flagging interest in the lives of those he met, it seems incredible that dur- ing the four years he spent among us he found time to complete his great biography Augustus , to write his own Memoirs , and to compile material for a book on Canada, which, unfortunately, was never written. Yet with his brilliant reputation in politics and letters, with all his amazing know- ledge and equally amazing industry, it is doubtful if, in such a short time. Lord Tweedsmuir could have won such a large place in the hearts of the people of Canada, had we not felt that, though infinitely above us, he was yet one of us. John Buchan was the son of a Scotch Presbyterian minister and he grew up, in his own words, mixing on terms of comradeship and utter equality with children from every kind of queer environment. His bosom pal was the son of the village ne ' er do well, and together they used to wage war upon the sone of the local gentry . He never attended a public school, but began his education at a Dame School where he was taught to knit and from which he was expelled for upsetting a pot of broth on the kitchen fire. From here he went to high school and thence to the University of Glasgow and later to Oxford. In the winter he was a very diligent student, being chiefly engrossed in Latin and Greek. The summer, he spent on the banks of the Tweed, in blessed idleness . In addi- tion to the classics he was interested in history. His heroes were Caesar, St. Paul, Charlemagne, Henry of Navarre, Cromwell, Montrose, Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee. His aversions were Brutus, Henry VIII, Napoleon, all the 1688 Whigs and the whole tribe of French revolutionaries except Mirabeau. While at Oxford he made a great number of friends. Many of these were killed in the Boer War, still more in the first Great War, but he kept in touch with those who remained until his death. One of them. Professor Archibald Main, wrote John Buchan never forgot a friend, and he never lost one. From Oxford he went to London to study at the Bar. There he came under the spell of London, enjoyed his apprenticeship to its full and made my first real entry into [22]

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THE PLEASURES OF RESEARCH ORD TWEEDSMUIR has written in his memoirs that to be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life . We know that the happiest moments he spent were the short periods he could snatch from official duties to devote himself to the pursuit he loved — writing. Of his prowess, his books are living witnesses. It is not given to all of us to succeed as he succeeded, but it seems to me many of us could in a smaller way achieve an equal amount of happiness, if we too would give ourselves some permanent intellectual interest in life, whatever the field. Whether we dig up the past or delve into old manuscripts, whether we classify bacteria or search for butterflies, I firmly believe that there is no happier body of people in the world than the humble searchers after truth in these many fields. Their individual contributions to learning may be slight, but their pleasure in adding their mite to the common fund of knowledge is immeasurably great. They gain personally too in that they create for themselves an interest which no outside event can touch; a refuge in times of stress, a bond with life through the passing years. To many the recreation of the past through a study of its documents has proved a fascinating occupation. There are few joys equal to the discovery of a set of MSS. that will tell the story of some episode in which you are particularly interested. For myself, I can imagine few greater pleasures than to discover the whereabouts of some docu- ments relating to that study which I hope to make my contribution to historical research — the history of the great Fleet prison in London. The prison was, alas, burnt down several times, and its records probably perished with the buildings, but I still hope that in the attic of some old English country house, or in some solicitor ' s office, there lie hidden those old calf-bound books and rolls of sheepskin that will help me to piece together the history of one of the most fascinating and notorious of English prisons. [24]