The Scot who became more Canadian than the Canadians

When John Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada in 1935, the country was deep in depression, the western provinces a dustbowl and a quarter of a million people on public relief, while the prospect of war in Europe threatened great stresses in a newly independent country and its relations with Britain. Many or even most Canadians wanted one of their own and a commoner. They were given a Scot and a Lord Tweedsmuir.

In his four and a half years as Governor-General, Buchan/Tweedsmuir had to take care. Canadians, from Prime Minister Mackenzie King downwards, were alert to any sign the self-governing cominion was being put back ‘into any colonial status’. King, a fellow Scot who dreamed of sitting with Buchan at Rideau Hall in Ottawa and arranging the affairs of church and state, found his hero was ‘a Tory [with] a sort of royalty complex’ (King liked to be known as ‘Rex’ and was not immune to the second of those failings.)