The Right Honourable The Lord Tweedsmuir CBE CD FRSE FRSA |
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Baron Tweedsmuir | |
In office 11 February 1940 – 20 June 1996 |
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Preceded by | John Buchan |
Succeeded by | William Buchan |
Personal details | |
Born | 25 November 1911 |
Died | 20 June 1996 | (aged 84)
Parents |
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Susan Charlotte Grosvenor |
Alma mater |
Eton College Brasenose College, Oxford |
John Norman Stuart Buchan, 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir CBE, CD, FRSE, FRSA (25 November 1911 – 20 June 1996), commonly called Johnnie Buchan, was a Scottish peer and the son of the novelist John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir. He was a colonial administrator and naturalist, but also a true-life adventurer. He has been described as a "brilliant fisherman and naturalist, a gallant soldier and fine writer of English, an explorer, colonial administrator and man of business."
Buchan was born in London the son of Baron Tweedsmuir and Susan Grosvenor.
He was educated at Eton and in 1930 he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated with a fourth class degree in History. Buchan subsequently went on to study at the Dundee School of Economics.
After a period in the Colonial Administrative Service in Uganda he contracted dysentery and was forced to leave Africa on health grounds. He went to join his parents in Canada in 1936. Here he joined the Hudson's Bay Company. He drove a dog-sled 3000 miles and spent the winter of 1938/9 at the remote Cape Dorset in Baffinland.
In September 1939 at the onset of war, he joined the Governor General's Foot Guards in Canada, and was with the first Canadian troopship to reach England in December 1939. In February 1940 his father died and he became Baron Tweedsmuir. In 1941 he saw active service with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment (with whom he started as second in command), ultimately in Sicily for which he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1946 New Year Honours.