William Buchan, 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir

[1] Brought up at Elsfield Manor, outside Oxford, he frequently wrote poetry as a boy and appeared as "Bill" in his aunt Anna Masterton Buchan's popular novels, written under the pen name "O.

[3] Visitors to the family home included a 15-year-old Jessica Mitford in the summer of 1932, T. E. Lawrence, a week before his death in 1935, and, that same year, Virginia Woolf, who called him "a simple".

A different picture of his personality was given by an obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post, which described him during his schoolboy period as "a shy and solitary figure, and this mood continued into New College, Oxford".

His salary as third assistant director was a token five shillings a week, so he lived off an allowance from his parents and lodged in London with the writer Elizabeth Bowen.

On the order of the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, the young Buchan was barred, along with his brother Alastair, from a nightclub outside Ottawa.

At one point he asked the critic Alexander Woollcott for a job but was told, "When I was a boy you were supposed to go to the bottom of the nearest tree and climb steadily until you got to the top.

"[1] At the suggestion of French film director and actor Michel Saint-Denis, Buchan visited Peggy Ashcroft,[2] who had acted in The 39 Steps, and the pair began a two-year affair.

He also co-founded The Pilot Press, which published his short (at 10,000 words) but admiring book on Winston Churchill (a stance at odds with that of his father), and later his brief history of the Royal Air Force.

By the time it arrived at Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), on the carrier Indomitable, the pilots were ordered to fly to RAF Station China Bay on that island.

On Easter Day, 5 April 1942, the squadron saw intense action against Japanese bombers from five aircraft carriers mounting a major attack against Colombo.

He was back in England in April 1945 to serve at RAF Training Command, where he compiled a history,[1] The Royal Air Force at War, an account of the daily lives of servicemen,[2] and was promoted to squadron leader before ending his service.

The reviewer wrote, "In writing to please himself, he will please others too, for his unselfconcious sympathies are easy to share, his young man's experience corresponds with that of half his generation, his turn for verbal music is quietly refreshing, and everywhere competent.

[3] Buchan wrote his first thriller, Helen All Alone, deliberately in the vein of his father's novels, but with a woman as the main character, a point which provoked criticism in The Times.