Draft:George Buchanan (journalist)

George Henry Perrot Buchanan (9 January 1904, Kilwaughter, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland - 28 June 1989, London) was a writer. During a lifetime as author of journals, novels, plays, poems, autobiographies and essays he returned regularly to certain themes. In The Times obituary, Frank Ormsby referred to them as: “the importance of common experience and of living sensitively in the present, the potential of journalism to be a new kind of literature, and the need for an unsentimental engagement with the life of cities. Buchanan believed in….the writer as revolutionary and anticipator. He himself wrote with clarity and coolness." Professor Stephen Bann said Buchanan "combined a high degree of dedication to the craft of writing with a strong sense of the public role which the 'man of letters' could be expected to perform". Of himself Buchanan said, "I don't know about being born out of my time – I'm deeply concerned about the here and now."

Biography
George Buchanan was born in 1904 near Larne, County Antrim and went to Larne Grammar School and Campbell College, Belfast. His career in journalism began in the early 1920s with the Belfast Northern Whig and continued in London. From 1930 to 1935 he served as a sub-editor on The Times and later became a columnist and drama critic for the News Chronicle. Having lived for some months in St. Ives, Cornwall, Buchanan joined RAF Coastal Command. During World War II he served in Sierra Leone as operational liaison with the Free French in French Equatorial Africa and back in Britain he helped direct night attacks on U-boats in the Bay of Biscay.

For nearly ten years after the war he lived in Limavady, Co. Londonderry. During this time, he broadcast for BBC radio and from 1949 to 1953 he was the chairman of the Northern Ireland Town and Country Development Committee. In 1954 he became a member of the executive council of the European Society of Culture (SEC) based in Venice. He was later president of its London centre. His obituary in 1989 in The Daily Telegraph described him as "the perfect chairman of literary bodies – unostentatiously firm, unshakenly good-humoured and adept at controlling or diverting the frenzy so often generated at gatherings of the literati". The publication of Passage Through the Present (a journal) in 1932 and A London Story (a novel) in 1935 marked the start of Buchanan's long writing career. Five other novels followed, most notably Rose Forbes (Part I, 1937; Parts I and II, 1950) and Naked Reason (1971). He wrote about his childhood in his first volume of autobiography, Green Seacoast (1959) and his early years as a journalist in Morning Papers (1965). A subsequent volume of autobiography, The Umbra, was never published. He had written poems in his teens and early twenties, but it was not until 1958 that his first full collection, Bodily Responses, appeared. The titles of some of the volumes – Conversation with Strangers, Minute-Book of a City, Inside Traffic, Possible Being – indicate his abiding concerns, which were further emphasised by his 1977 collection of essays The Politics of Culture. In 1953, Buchanan moved permanently to London, where he lived with his third wife, Janet, and later with Sandra, his fourth wife. He was a member of the Savile Club, whose members are connected to literature and the arts, and the Athenaeum Club, London. In Belfast, he had also been a member of the Ulster Club. As Frank Ormsby wrote in The Times obituary, he "had a gentle vision of people as 'world beings'. He spoke out for 'affectionate glances, tenderness in sips", recognised also the vulnerability of this ideal. His most fitting epitaph might be his own brief poem "Revolutionary Revolution:" (from Minute-Book of a City) Insidious in ways no gunfire touches, revolution must have revolution in it too, not be the same old murder The cry for a tender style has never been so truly from the heart, so treated as nothing much.

George Henry Perrott Buchanan was photographed by (Howard Coster) in 1935, 1936 and 1939. The portraits are in the Collection of the (National Portrait Gallery, London).

Chronological biography
A detailed biography appears in The Honest Ulsterman: George Buchanan - A Special Supplement, No. 59 March–June 1978; Ulsterman Publications, Belfast, Northern Ireland, pp. 19–21. Photograph Donald Sutherland.

Early life
George Henry Perrott Buchanan was born 9 January 1904 in Kilwaughter, Co. Antrim, the middle child of the Rev. Charles Henry Leslie Buchanan (1863–1939) and Florence Buchanan, née Moore (1874–1948). His older brother was Richard Moore (1901–1966) and his younger sister, Florence Mary (1905–1987), was known as Biddy. There is a headstone at St. Patrick’s Parish Church Cairncastle, N. Ireland, to honour the Rev. Buchanan and his family. Buchanan went to Larne Grammar School, Co. Antrim; Campbell College, Belfast, and Queen's University Belfast.

Journalism
Buchanan’s career in journalism began in the early 1920s with the Belfast Northern Whig and continued when he moved to London in 1925 with The Daily Graphic, The Sunday Times, The Outline (of which he was assistant editor) and the Daily Chronicle. In the early 1930s he was a sub-editor on The Times and later became a columnist and drama critic for the News Chronicle. He also contributed to The Times Literary Supplement in the days of unsigned reviews.

World War II
When war broke out in 1939, Buchanan went to live for some months in St. Ives, Cornwall (alongside artists Alfred Wallis, Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth), and in 1940, he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF). During the war he served as an operations officer in RAF Coastal Command between 1940 and 1945, first in Mount Batten, Plymouth and then Limavady and Ballykelly, Co. Derry. He then went to Sierra Leone to undertake operational liaison with the Free French in French Equatorial Africa. He returned to England in 1943 to work with US squadrons in Devon and Pembrokeshire on attacking U-boats at night in the Bay of Biscay and anti-submarine cover for the Normandy landings. He was then posted to Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides.

Writing and poetry
His first published work in 1932 was a journal called Passage Through the Present after which he wrote six novels. One of them, Rose Forbes: the Biography of an Unknown Woman became a cause célèbre on its publication in 1937, prompting V. S. Pritchett to say, "I think most novelists ought to get hold of a copy." He wrote four plays, notably in 1960 A Trip to the Castle and in 1965 War Song, all of which were produced on the London stage. Buchanan also wrote two volumes of autobiography, Green Seacoast about his childhood in Kilwaughter rectory, Co. Antrim, with his father, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and Morning Papers about his early years in journalism. Bodily Responses, his first collection of verse, appeared in 1958 and was soon followed by Conversation with Strangers (1961). He published seven collections of poetry including Annotations (1970) and Inside Traffic (1976). He assessed his poetry in his own words: "The book titles suggest preoccupations: passage through the present, bodily responses, conversation with strangers – mainly to do with the role of the imagination in submerged mass-life in a city, which implies also a permanent revolutionary intent." The Politics of Culture published in 1977 was a collection of essays which explored his ideas around the need for "poetic values" in society and for poets to be the new "revolutionaries". In 1978 Frank Ormsby published a special supplement in The Honest Ulsterman to Buchanan, whom he believed had been unjustly neglected: "George Buchanan has been an almost forgotten writer in Ireland. He is not mentioned at all in Terence Brown's study Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Gill and Macmillan) and his poems are included in only three of the recent anthologies of Irish poetry: Ten Irish Poets (Carcanet Press) – the volume that has done most to date to revive interest in him; and then The Wolfhound Book of Irish Poems for Young People (Wolfhound Press); and The Wearing of the Black (Blackstaff Press). Only two of his six novels are discussed in John Wilson Foster's Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Gill and Macmillan)."

Personal life
Buchanan mentored a number of young poets including Roger Garfitt and Val Warner.

Buchanan and Northern Irish poet John Lyle Donaghy both went to Larne Grammar School, where they became close friends.

In 1924, when Buchanan’s poem "An Irish pastoral" was published in The Dublin Magazine, it was admired by Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid and began a lasting friendship between them. Buchanan gave the same title "An Irish pastoral" to his review in The Honest Ulsterman of Forrest Reid's 1937 novel, Peter Waring (re-released in 1977).

The Stephen Gilbert Collection at Queens University Belfast, includes correspondence between the Northern Irish novelist and authors Walter de la Mare, George Buchanan, Forrest Reid and E. M. Forster.

Buchanan's Northern Irish artist friend Alicia Boyle painted a portrait of his second wife, Noel Pulleyne, who died in 1951. In 1952, Boyle painted two more portraits, one of Buchanan himself and the other of his new wife, Janet, which are in the family's private collection.

He married first (1938) Winifred Mary Corn (marriage dissolved 1945), secondly (1949) Noel Pulleyne Ritter (d. 1951), and thirdly (1952) the Hon. Janet Hampden Margesson (d. 1968), daughter of David Margesson, 1st Viscount Margesson and Frances H. Leggett. They had two daughters. In 1974, he married Sandra Gail McCloy.

Children

 * Florence Buchanan, b. 18 February 1955, advertising creative director, consultant, and filmmaker
 * Emily Buchanan, b. 7 October 1958, BBC correspondent and presenter

Death and afterward
Buchanan died, age 85, at The Royal Star and Garter Home, Richmond for Disabled Soldiers, Sailors & Airmen, in Richmond, Surrey, on 28 June 1989. He was cremated at Mortlake Crematorium. On 12 June 1990, the Poetry Society hosted A Celebration of the Poetry of George Buchanan with readings by Michael Longley and James Simmons with William Oxley. The compere was Anthony Rudolf, arranged by John Loveday. Keepsake Number 10 was published for the event by the Menard Press and contains two previously unpublished poems, "Oedipus" and "Dante".