Lord Tweedsmuir  - Telegraph
Obituaries
Lord Tweedsmuir
THE 3rd Lord Tweedsmuir, who died on June 29 aged 92, was the second son of    the writer John Buchan and himself the author of novels, short stories and    verse; but although he never wrote a best-seller, William Buchan made his    mark with a touching memoir of his father
Buchan: when London editor of Reader's Digest, he came up with the story 'How My Dog Taught Me to Pray' 
3:00AM BST 08 Jul 2008
The 3rd Lord Tweedsmuir, who died on June 29 aged 92, was the second son of the writer John Buchan and himself the author of novels, short stories and verse; but although he never wrote a best-seller, William Buchan made his mark with a touching memoir of his father (with whom he did not always get on) and "a fragment of autobiography", which recounted his efforts to escape from the great man's oppressive shadow.
William De l'Aigle Buchan was born on January 10 1916, the second of the three sons and a daughter who were expected to match their father in winning glittering prizes. William was brought up at Elsfield Manor, outside Oxford, and developed an exasperated affection for his father, whose unslackening pace of writing, publishing and public service culminated in appointment as Governor-general of Canada in 1935.
William was a dreamy, unadventurous boy whose sole desire was to be a writer. When he showed some youthful poems to his stern grandmother at Peebles she asked: "Is he not a wee bit young to be writing love poems?"
"Oh, he's a versatile sort of lad, you know," replied his father.
At Eton William won the Harvey English verse prize. John Buchan nonetheless liked to quote Sir Walter Scott's dictum about writing being a good stick but a bad crutch.
On escaping to New College, Oxford, William enjoyed a riotous year before it was suggested that he should go down. Another interest was kindled when he and his father visited the set of Alfred Hitchcock's film version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. William was particularly taken with the lighting, which prompted him to write a short story about a studio that was published in Isis.
His father then found him a job working with Hitchcock at Gaumont-British Motion Picture Corporation. The salary for a third assistant director was five shillings a week.
He was involved in Secret Agent, a film based on Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories, and then the less impressive Lady Jane Grey, for which he was deputed to rehearse extras on horseback in pouring rain before being transferred to the script department. Although William's parents had left to take up viceregal duties in Ottawa, he was not entirely bereft.
He had an adequate allowance, and lodged in London with the writer Elizabeth Bowen. But just as it became clear he was being edged out of British-Gaumont, he had to have a throat operation.
Taken to recuperate in Canada, Buchan was taught how to make a dignified bow at Government House and barred, with his brother Alastair, from a nightclub outside Ottawa on the orders of the prime minister, Mackenzie King.
He was then sent to New York, armed with dollars and introductions. But when he broached the subject of a job with Alexander Woollcott the critic told him: "When I was a boy you were supposed to go to the bottom of the nearest tree and climb steadily until you got to the top."
In New York he began a passionate two-year affair with Peggy Ashcroft, who had been in The 39 Steps; and on returning to the dominion he enjoyed writing a short story about the city, which was later published in the London Mercury.
When he returned to England he was 21, and uneasily aware that, at the same age, his father had published his first novel, an edition of Bacon and a volume of his own essays; the Parable of the Talents hovered in William's mind.
As Peggy Ashcroft broke off their affair he set off for Florence, where the ebullience mixed with foreboding among the international set reflected the approach of war.
After three months Buchan returned home to meet Kenneth de Courcy, the dubious publisher of Intelligence Digest, who developed private contacts across Europe to report the worsening political situation. Soon Buchan was carrying dispatches to France and, on one occasion, to a Belgian castle, where Otto von Habsburg, the rightful Emperor of Austria, grilled him about British politics.
Shortly before the declaration of war he married Nesta Crozier, with whom he had a daughter. He also co-founded The Pilot Press, which published his 10,000-word book on Winston Churchill and then his brief history of the RAF.
Just before receiving his father's last letter, which declared that nothing would have kept him from the air if he were a young man, Buchan joined the air force in February 1940.
After training as a fighter pilot he joined No 32 Squadron, flying Hurricanes on convoy patrols in the Western Approaches. But since there was little action he was transferred to Egypt before moving to No 261 Squadron, based in Iraq.
Following the Japanese invasion of Singapore, the squadron was sent to reinforce the RAF's depleted squadrons on Java. But when it arrived at Ceylon in the carrier Indomitable Buchan and his fellow pilots were ordered to fly to the island's China Bay airfield.
On Easter Sunday, April 5 1942, the squadron saw intense action against Japanese bombers from five large aircraft carriers which mounted a major attack against Colombo. By the time the Japanese naval force withdrew after four days the carrier Hermes and two cruisers had been sunk, and only six of
No?261's original 18 aircraft were serviceable.
Buchan had some lucky escapes, once surviving a cannon shell which struck behind his cockpit seat and another which hit his ammunition reserve without going off; twice he had to bail out.
After helping to provide air defence for Ceylon and Madras, Buchan served at air headquarters in Calcutta for six months before returning to join No 17 Squadron in Ceylon. He returned home in April 1945 to serve at HQ Training Command, where he was involved in compiling a history before coming out as a squadron leader.
By then his first marriage had broken up, and he married Barbara Ensor, with whom he had three sons and three daughters, of whom one is Ursula Buchan, The Daily Telegraph's gardening columnist.
Settling down to providing for his family, Buchan came up with some imaginative treats, such as tea at the Ritz, which he said was cheaper than the cinema and enabled the boys to play cricket in the corridors.
Buchan worked with the explosives division of Nobel Industries in Glasgow, then became London editor of Reader's Digest for three years, where he used to claim he came up with the story "How My Dog Taught Me to Pray". He set up a public relations company and later joined Norwest Holst, whose owner, Noel Le Mare, urged his staff to put money on his horse Red Rum, which won the Grand National three times. In later years Buchan worked for Elf Aquitaine, the French national oil company.
At the same time Buchan continued with his literary career. His short story collection, The Exclusives, was published in 1943. He next published Personal Poems (1952) and Kumari (1955), a widely admired novel set in Calcutta; two thrillers, Helen All Alone (1961) and The Blue Pavilion (1969), followed. He also edited Letters to Reyna (1982), the correspondence of John Masefield and the violinist Audrey Napier-Smith.
But it was John Buchan: a Memoir (1982) and his autobiography, Rags of Time (1990), which attracted the greatest attention. In them he elegantly described his childhood recollection of the library at Elsfield Manor, with his father's bound manuscripts behind his chair, and the great man moving neatly around his dressing room, then standing naked and lost in thought before briskly getting into his pyjamas.
On rare occasions the two of them would spend the day together walking and fishing in Scotland. He recalled his father assuring him that only uncreative people seriously worried about money because they knew that if it dwindled they would never know how to replace it.
"I thought, but did not say, that this was all very well for people possessed of his own creative voltage," William recalled. His father's reputation did not awe everyone, however: there was the occasion when William was asked if he was the son of the great Buchan, and then discovered that his questioner meant Charles Buchan, the Sunderland centre-forward.
Following the death of his brother Johnnie in 1996, Buchan succeeded to the title and took his seat as a cross-bencher in the Lords, where he spoke once, on the case for an elected mayor of London.
He also talked three times to the John Buchan Society, of which he was an honorary president, though he did not always relish the critical spirit of inquiry which came with the renewed interest in his father.
William Tweedsmuir is survived by the seven children of his first two marriages and by his third wife, Sauré Tatchell, and their son; there was also another daughter. His eldest son, Toby (born in 1950), succeeds to the peerage.