Buchan originals
Sir: Perhaps it was exile in Berlin, and the baneful influences of the spirit of Colonel Stumm, but fancy Richard West (`Green- mantle's revenge', 19 April) mixing up Sir Walter Bullivant, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle and Standfast, and retired as Lord Artinswell in The Three Hostages, with John Scantlebury Blenk- iron, the American mining agent turned British agent, who could go through hell with a pack of patience cards and some bismuth tablets.
me about the originals of those two charac- ters? It is generally accepted that Sandy Arbuthnot was modelled on Aubrey Her- bert, and that Hannay drew much from `Tiny' Ironside, the soldier who had the gift for languages and for secret missions, like General Vernon Walters in our time. But who, if anybody, were the models for Bullivant and for Blenkiron? Bullivant sounds more like Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence during the first world war, than like Sir Stewart Menzies. Janet Adam Smith, in her life of Buchan, suggests that Blenkiron was generically drawn from American businessmen and journalists. But might there not have been something in him, too, of Herbert Hoover? There are legends, too, that William Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, was a British agent during World War I. Did Buchan know him?
Godfrey Hodgson
27 Polstead Road, Oxford
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