[5] Though raised in "genteel poverty", Buckle was interested in his extensive network of relations (some of them high aristocracy) and formed some close relationships with them.
[8][9] He then attended the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London for a short time, having developed an interest in ballet,[8] to which he dedicated himself, although his family had hoped he would pursue a stable career in banking – or even in the stage design he had studied.
[10] Buckle founded the magazine Ballet in 1939, and revived it after the Second World War, in which he served with the Scots Guards, being mentioned in despatches in 1944 during the Italy campaign.
Having begun to suffer from poor health (yet producing some of his best work – the biographies of Nijinsky and Diaghilev – during this period),[8] Buckle left London in 1976 and settled in Wiltshire in an isolated cottage, made more so by the fact that he did not drive.
He regularly visited his home village of Warcop, Cumbria, in the 1980s, sharing his recollections of the place fifty years earlier.