Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Tweedsmuir
Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment

Barely thirty years of age, soft-spoken, kindly, with a slight tendency to stutter, he was a tall, fair-haired English romantic out of another age … his famous father’s perhaps. “Tweedie,” as we called him behind his back, had as a youth sought high adventure as a Hudson’s Bay Company trader in the Arctic, then as a rancher on the African veldt, and finally as a soldier in a Canadian infantry battalion. But until this hour real adventure in the grand tradition had eluded him.

(Farley Mowat, And No Birds Sang, 111)

Born in London, England on 25 November 1911, John Norman Stuart Buchan, 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir was son of the Governor General of Canada and the famous author John Buchan (1875–1940). Educated at Eton, he served in the colonial administration of Uganda before moving to Canada in 1936. Following a stint with the Hudson’s Bay Company in the far north, Buchan volunteered on mobilization in September 1939. He inherited his father’s title on 11 February 1940.

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