THE impression with which one is left in Mark Smith's interview with Ursula Buchan ("First of 39 Steps taken in Gorbals", The Herald, March 11) is that her famous grandfather, John Buchan, was a straightforward author and journalist who was deeply involved with solving the problem of concentration camps in the Boer War and was a newspaper reporter in the First World War. Such a limited view of his life serves only to cover up his deep and lasting association with the most powerful Oxford men, led by Lord Alfred Milner.
John Buchan was one of Milner's special team of chosen Empire loyalists who took charge of the country after 1916.
The worst of the horrendous conditions faced by imprisoned women and children was already being addressed before John Buchan arrived in South Africa, thanks to the outcry in Britain led by Millicent Fawcett.
John Buchan was approached by the man in charge of British propaganda, his wife's cousin, Charles Masterman, to be part of the massive assault on Germany and his fiction was sucked into the vortex of justification for Britain's declaration of war against Germany. Oddly, though he never fired a rifle or fought in the trenches, he ended the war with the rank of Colonel (Richard Hannay made it to Brigadier).
Gerry Docherty,
19 Shillinghill, Tillicoultry.
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