John Buchan (1875-1940) is regarded as the father of the modern spy novel, and exercised a huge influence over the young Ian Fleming. His celebrated `The Thirty-Nine Steps’ (1915) captured the admiration of no less a figure than Alfred Hitchcock who rendered it into film in 1935. It was filmed subsequently two more times by others, and made into a tv series. Its immense popularity is probably as much to do with the verve and conviction in which the story of Richard Hannay is told, as well as the almost impossible situations he finds himself in and manages to flee from as he evades and outwits a group of sinister Germans, and, initially, the British police, in the Scottish highlands.
Buchan himself lived a life almost as dramatic as his best known character. Born in Scotland, the son of a Free Church Minister, he was educated at Glasgow and then Oxford universities, and worked successively, and sometimes simultaneously, as a barrister, the private secretary to the High Commissioner of South Africa, a war correspondent, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s Director of Information. His politics was evidently flexible, because he then went on to be a Conservative MP, before moving to Canada where, as Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, he served as Governor General till his death. As if all this were not enough, he managed to write a vast amount – 30 novels, 65 non-fiction books, and seven collections of short stories. `The Thirty-Nine Steps’ is the most popular, selling a million copies in his life alone.
Kent figures not in the start of the work, or its main escapade – the flight to Scotland and the various adventures there – but in the book’s denouement. There was a very specific reason for this. In August 1914, just as the First World War was starting, Buchan brought his family to Broadstairs. The main reason was, according to an article by Martin Charlton in `Bygone Kent’ (`Buchan, Broadstairs and the 39 Steps’, www.bygonekent.org.uk/article/buchan-broadstairs-and-thirty-nine-steps/) to help his daughter Alice recuperate after a mastoid operation, and to gain some rest himself. The family took lodgings at the no longer extant St Ronan’s Guesthouse, 71 Stone Street. As Buchan’s wife was later to write: `We had some quite nice lodgings at the seaside and should have enjoyed ourselves, as Alice’s health improved all the time, but the war precluded all happiness and comfort…’ Bored and looking for something to do, Buchan was inspired to start sketching out ideas for a thriller. Charlton continues:
`Also in Thanet at the same time were Susan’s cousin, Hilda Grenfell, and her family. They were renting a cliff-top villa half a mile away at North Foreland which had a set of steps cut into the chalk that led down to a private beach. The villa was called St Cuby and is believed to be the inspiration for Trafalgar Lodge, where the book’s hero, Richard Hannay, meets the villainous Mr Appleton. However, it was the steps that most caught Buchan’s imagination. Back then there were 78 wooden steps, which zigzagged through two shafts and three tunnel sections. As is still the case today, the upper entrance was surrounded by bushes that, as in the novel, obscured the passage from view, while the beach entrance was accessible only at low tide.’
Back in London, Buchan attempted to enlist in the army but was refused on health grounds. But he did manage to write his story, which was published the following year.
Bradgate, which occurs towards the end of the book, is accepted as being based on Broadstairs. `The big chalk headland in Kent,…’ a coastguard quizzed by Hannay in the middle of the night in London while trying to work out where Applegate and his villainous group had fled to to escape Britain, `It’s got a lot of villas on the top, and some of the houses have staircases down to the private beach. It’s very high-toned sort of place,’ he goes onto say, `and the residents there like to keep it by themselves.’(`The Thirty-Nine Steps,’ Polygon edition, 2011, 96). Making their way quickly to the place they have finally identified, Hannay refers to standing in Bradgate `looking from the Griffin Hotel over a smooth sea to the lightship on the Cock sands.’ The hotel and sands are probably the Albion and the Godwin Sands respectively. Scouting around the town, he spies Trafalgar Lodge, a `red-bricked villa with a verandah, a tennis lawn behind and in front the ordinary seaside flower garden full of marguerites and scraggy geraniums’ (99). It is here that he confronts, and tries to disrupt, the trio of treacherous Germans, before one of them manages to run down the steps of the title, and escape to sea. War follows. From small events, great ones issue.
Buchan was probably inspired by the atmosphere of Broadstairs that autumn – a place usually of placid restfulness, but even then figuring as part of the frontline against an at the time hostile European continent. This was a theme that was to resonate with Ian Fleming, and figure in his own book `Moonraker’ which is set in a similar geography. The idea of the coast of Kent being a place of defiance, and a key strategic boundary, despite its status too as one for recuperation and rest, evidently appealed to Buchan. That is the place memorialised, and fictionalised, in his phenomenally successful short book.