2110-1-8-4

c/o The Lord Milner Johannesburg. S. Africa

Oct 17th 1901

Dear Mrs Malcolm

Many thanks for your kind letter which was forwarded to me by the last mail. I had a lot of doubt about coming out, when Lord M. asked me, but, after taking much advice, it seemed the best thing to do. I have got the most interesting kind of work to do, for I am not an official (but please tell Dougie that I am well-paid), and I work directly under M. My business is to be a sort of political Private Secretary, to help in dispatches home, and to prepare reports on subjects for His Exc^y - very much the

sort of work an industrious 'devil' at the Bar does for his leader. I have come out nominally for two years, and then I intend at present to return to the Bar, with, I hope, a knowledge of S. Africa unique among English lawyers, and chances of Colonial appeals. But of course if the work interests me and I do respectably I may be induced to stay on - so Lord M. warned me. My inclination was all for coming, for I love seeing the world & I much prefer politics to law. Whatever happens, I am, sure it is an experience one will always be glad to have had.

I like the town though it is very new & crude: but in this wonderful air a wooden shanty looks like a Doge's palace. Four of us - Craig-Sellar, Basil Blackwood, Wyndham & myself - have got a house 2 miles out, in a forest of pines & blue gums, with a

thirty miles view over the veldt to the Magaliesberg Mts. We have a large garden with an orchard and a mealie-patch, and a cow & 24 fowls. It is the only way to get fresh milk & eggs. We have an English housekeeper, an English maid & an English butler (all exported) and a lot of Cape boys to look after the house. It will be a pleasant rural life, I think, and very healthy. The country, now that Spring is here, is very beautiful - rather like the Scottish Borders, except that there are no burns, and the air and the sunsets are perfectly amazing. It makes me dislike office work and long to go and trek somewhere. Someday, when I get holidays, I shall go off on a shooting expedition to the Limpopo.

Now that I am on the spot, I feel a great deal more hopeful about the future of S. Africa. This dreary war is coming to an end, and I don't think that there will remain permanent elements of discontent, except among the rich Dutch

in Cape Colony, who have now had a beating. In any case we shall make the Transvaal so overwhelmingly English, that in the parliament of a Federated S. Africa we shall be easily able to control the disloyal elements. There is enormous latent wealth, both mineral & agricultural, and when we have great, well-governed industrial towns and the country districts leavened with English settlers and made prosperous by a scientific irrigation system, the land will be on the road to genuine prosperity. Meanwhile, of course, things are still in embryo, and the martial law regime retards our civil reconstruction.

Please thank Dougie for the letter & tell him that I shall shortly indite him a great epistle. You might tell him, too, that I should like my name to come up for the Bachelors' [Club] in the ordinary course. I am collecting & publishing my Blackwood stories this winter & shall ask the publishers to send you a copy.

With kind regards to all your household

Yours very sincerely

John Buchan