Item 14 - Correspondence, with Governor-General Bessborough

Vere Brabazon Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessborough, was an Anglo-Irish businessman and politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 14th since Canadian Confederation.
Born and educated in England into 'the Ascendancy', the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, he graduated with a law degree from Cambridge University before entering politics as a member of the London County Council and then, in 1910, as a member of the British House of Commons. Upon the death of his grandfather 10 years later, Ponsonby succeeded as Earl of Bessborough and took his seat in the House of Lords. He was in 1931 appointed as Governor General by King George V, on the recommendation of British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, to replace The Earl of Willingdon as viceroy, and occupied that post until succeeded by The Lord Tweedsmuir in 1935. Lord Bessborough is remembered for promoting new communication technologies as well as giving support to the Canadian population during the Great Depression.
After the end of his viceregal tenure, he returned to London, where he continued in business and also work with the Dominions Office and the Foreign Office before his death in March 1956.
The 9th Lord Bessborough was the last Earl of Bessborough to own Bessborough House, the Ponsonby family's ancestral seat near the village of Piltown in the south of County Kilkenny in Ireland. The country house was largely built in the 1740s for the 1st Earl. It was gutted by fire during the Irish Civil War in February 1923. The 9th Lord Bessborough had the house rebuilt in the late 1920s. However, he sold the house in the late 1930s as he largely lived in Britain. The house now forms the main part of Kildalton Agricultural College.

John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir, was born August 26, 1875, at Perth, Scotland. Buchan lived in Pathhead, Fife from 1876 to 1888, when his family moved to Glasgow. In 1892, after attending Hutcheson's Grammar School, he received a bursary to Glasgow University. Three years later he won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Buchan began contributing to periodicals and publishing books. In 1899 he took rooms at the Temple in London and read for the bar. Two years later, he joined Lord Milner's staff in South Africa, working on refugee camps, land settlement, and the administration of the Orange River and Transvaal Colonies.

Buchan returned to London in 1903 and spent the next three years working as a barrister while continuing to pursue his literary career. In December 1906 he joined Nelson's publishing house, where he would remain until 1929. With the outbreak of the First World War, he began a serial history of the war for Nelson's. From 1916 to 1918 he worked for British Military Intelligence, eventually becoming Director of Intelligence in the U.K. Ministry of Information under Beaverbrook. In 1927 Buchan was elected to the British Parliament as Conservative member for the Scottish Universities. He was re-elected in 1929 and 1931. In 1933 he became High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Two years later he was appointed Governor General of Canada and was thereafter known as Lord Tweedsmuir.

A popular Governor General, he travelled widely throughout Canada and endeavoured to make the office accessible to a broad spectrum of society. In 1937, the year which saw him become the first Governor General to tour the Arctic, Buchan instituted the Governor General's Literary Awards. The author of more than 60 books, Buchan was both a world-famous novelist and an accomplished historian and biographer. He died in Montreal on February 11, 1940.