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Buchan encountered racism in South Africa. Working there clearly had a great influence. Nevertheless, it had been much in evidence among some of Buchan’s close Oxford friends like Raymond Asquith, and inevitably he was influenced by that environment.

Nevertheless, it has been insufficiently noted that Buchan, aged thirteen to twenty (1888- 95) lived in Glasgow and walked its streets. The effects of Irish and Jewish immigration were already widespread. He hinted this in Castle Gay, where Dickson taxes Dougal with believing: ‘We’ve sold our souls to the English and the Irish.’ Later, Dougal maintains his position: ‘The cities filling up with Irish, the countryside losing its folk, our law and our letters and our language as decrepit as an old wife.’681 Groups of boys chancing on a contemporary would issue the challenge: ‘Billy, or a Dan or an Old Tin Can?’ Answered not to their pleasing, a roughing up would follow.682

As late as 1923, the General Assembly of The Church of Scotland received a Report entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality.’683 Roman Catholics in Scotland were accused of being part of a Papist conspiracy to subvert Presbyterian values, being the principal cause of drunkenness, crime, and financial imprudence. Calling for the end of immigration of Irish Catholics, the deportation of those convicted of criminal offences, or living on state benefits, and urging a ‘racially pure’ Scotland, the Report declared that ‘Today there is a movement throughout the world towards the rejection of non-native constituents and the crystallization of national life from native elements.’684

The main advocate of these views was John White, who in 1925 became Moderator, and was unanimously chosen again by both denominations at the Union Assembly of October 1929. Adopted nearly thirty years after Buchan had ceased to live in Glasgow, it showed the persistence of strong prejudice, despite loyal Irish Catholics in Scotland much praised in the

680 _{Redley, ‘Newbolt and Buchan.’} 681 _{Buchan, Castle Gay, 25, 49 (1}st_).

682 _{‘Protestant’, ‘Catholic’ or ‘Jew’; personal communication from William McCallum (1907-96), born and brought} up in Glasgow, as was his father, Charles; see also Taylor, ‘Billy or Dan’, 13.

683 _{Geoghegan, ‘Scotland and Ireland’: ‘Catholic Scots only achieved occupational parity in the 1990s.’}

684 _{Forrester, ‘Ecclesia Scoticana’, 80-89. The Report’s strictures noticeably excluded Scottish Catholics and Irish} Protestants.

armed forces and ship building during the War. There is a fine line between racism and sectarianism: Protestant Irish tend to be descended from immigrants, Catholics from the indigenous, so that racism is not far away.

Buchan was involved, for he spoke in Parliament as late as 1932 about the influx of Irish Catholics. ‘Our population is declining. We are losing some of the best of our stock through migration and their place is being taken by those who, whatever their merit, are not Scottish [….] the world cannot afford a denationalised Scotland.’685 His point may have been subtly different from the Report, but eighteen months later he spoke at the pro-Jewish Shoreditch meeting on May Day.686 Both such addresses tended towards racial exclusivity, but we shall find he revised that view, and was quicker than many to see where Fascism was leading.

5. ‘Kaffirs’ and ‘Niggers’

Lisa Hopkins maintains that Buchan persistently associated the Irish with Blacks ‘whom he also despised habitually terming them “kaffirs”.’687 _{This is a gross misrepresentation. Buchan}

will have learnt the word in his duties in South Africa. Commonly used by the administration to describe some of the local population in reports and other documents during the Dutch and British colonial periods, it carried no derogatory meaning. To him they were one of the race families of the Bantu. 688Academics, as well as missionaries, also used the word in a neutral way. Many exhibits in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford (founded in 1884) were first labelled as ‘Kaffir’ and as late as 1911 the Encyclopaedia Britannica had an article under that heading. There had been a colony and a Presbytery called Kaffraria. Buchan reviewed The Essential Kafir (1904) where Kidd states unequivocally that in its ‘broadest sense’ the word included all the dark-skinned races of South Africa, that is ‘the Bantu.’ There was nothing pejorative in Buchan’s use of ‘kaffir’.

685 _{Quoted by Finlay, ‘National Identity,’ 307.} 686 _{SJB, 317.}

687 _{‘Irish and Germans,’ 71.}

688 _{‘The Ovampas and people of German South Africa; the Bechuanas and Basutos; and the great mixed race of the} Zulus and Kaffirs of Eastern Cape Colony.’ African Colony, 11.

However, in 1976 the South African Supreme Court ruled that the word ‘has over the years taken on an additional meaning’ for ‘if you call a member of the Bantu race a kaffir this may well constitute an insult.’ 689

The word ‘nigger’, from ‘negro’, has similarly passed from simply meaning ‘dark- skinned’ in Buchan’s day to an insulting term now. It is unthinking to ascribe today’s meaning to Buchan: ‘the past is a different country; they do things differently there.’690 Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers (1939) was still being republished for The Crime Club forty years later, though soon afterwards the title was changed to And Then There Were None Gertrude Himmelfarb expressed a common sense view:

Today, when differences of race have attained the status of problems - and tragic problems - writers with the best of motives and finest of sensibilities must often take refuge in evasion and subterfuge. Neutral, scientific words replace the old charged ones, and then, because even the neutral ones - “Negro” in place of “nigger” - often give offence […] disingenuous euphemisms are invented - “non-white” in place of “Negro”. It is at this stage that one may find a virtue even in Buchan: the virtue of candour, which has both an aesthetic and an ethical appeal.691

Seeing that ‘there is in all men, even the basest, some kinship with the divine, something which is capable of rising superior to common passions and the lure of easy rewards’692 Buchan implied a relevant question in Prester John: if people can worship the same God, how much difference can there be? For Buchan, ‘Laputa is pulled in two by his African inheritance of Prester John and his colonial inheritance of Christianity.’ These opposing demands ultimately destroy him. Buchan warned that the responsibility of Empire

must be borne by the white man, through Crawfurd. “That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule […] wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and for their bellies.”693

Two years in South Africa gave Buchan contact with Boer Christianity, much less with the work of Missions among the indigenous. He had greater empathy with Afrikaners than many of his countrymen. ‘Britain can ill afford to lose [....] a force so masterful, persistent and

689 _{South African Law Reports, 4, 247 (1976): A disparaging meaning is recognised in Webster's International} Dictionary (1966).’

690 _{Hartley, The Go-Between (1953).} 691 _{Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds, 260.} 692 _{Men and Deeds, 278.}

sure’ since ‘for the Veld farmer I acquired a sincere liking and respect.’ That was less true of the black Africans who he classed as ‘mentally as crude and naïve as a child.’696 While some might be fit for involvement in local affairs, it would take many years before they were ready for national politics. He also realised that African independence was then something to be feared,697 and ‘He wrote on many occasions about the duty of man to develop a sense of brotherhood.’698