Circle | Cunninghame Graham Society

His circle

'You are rather like an Arthurian knight abroad in the great forest of the world, in quest of adventure and ready at a moment's notice to lower your lance and joust at any evil-minded person that may turn up.'

~ WH Hudson to RBCG

Portrait by Sir John Lavery, RA

Kelvingrove Museum & Art Gallery

RBCG enjoyed an enormous circle of friends and acquaintances. On the political left, his connection with William Morris put him in touch with such figures as Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx Aveling, the Fabians Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the anarchist Prince Kropotkin. Many others, from the world of arts and letters, he first met at his mother’s salon in Chester Square: writers including Aubrey Beardley, Oscar Wilde, John Galsworthy, WB Yeats, GB Shaw, Wilfrid Blunt; artists such as Max Beerbohm, Will Rothenstein, John Lavery, Joseph Crawhall, James Whistler, Percy Jacomb-Hood. In Scotland he was known widely in political, cultural and social circles, and was a frequent visitor to neighbours and tenants within the purlieu of the Gartmore estate. The following six relationships, among his closest, exemplify his gift for friendship with people from almost every walk of life.

Joseph Conrad

In 1897 RBCG met Joseph Conrad after writing to compliment him on a short story in Cosmopolis magazine. It was the start of the closest, most enduring literary friendship of both their lives, ending only at Conrad’s death in 1924. They had much in common – an aristocratic heritage, earlier lives of adventure and travel – though where RBCG was flamboyant, confident and energetic, the Pole was prone to illness, anxiety and self-doubt; and where Conrad was deeply conservative, RBCG was a self-declared enemy of the establishment. Yet they enjoyed an almost fraternal affection and challenged one another constantly in matters literary, political and philosophical, their correspondence wide-ranging and candid to the last. RBCG was a frequent visitor to the Conrad home in Kent, where he entertained Conrad’s young sons by climbing trees and shooting thrown apples with a revolver. His presence at Conrad’s funeral is imagined in David Miller’s short novel Today.

John Lavery

In 1888, the year RBCG and Keir Hardie formed the Scottish Labour Party, John Lavery, Belfast-born and now a leading figure in the Glasgow School of artists, was commmissioned to paint the state visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition. This launched his career as a painter of society portraits and he moved to London. He and RBCG met, possibly at one of RBCG’s mother’s gatherings in Chester Square, and became close friends. Lavery soon became very successful and bought a house outside Tangier, which became RBCG’s foothold in Morocco. He, Lavery and the artist Will Rothenstein travelled together into the interior of the country. Lavery painted RBCG a number of times and RBCG confided in him when financial difficulties at Gartmore brought him to thoughts of suicide. Lavery portraits of both RBCG and Gabriela are on display at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery.

Keir Hardie

James Keir Hardie, the coal-miner turned activist, came to RBCG’s aid when he first took to the stump as a prospective Liberal Party candidate in northwest Lanarkshire, in 1885. Hardie introduced him to local mine and ironworks leaders, taking him down the pits and into foundries, and showing him the desperate conditions of the workers. Their political ambitions grew with their friendship. In 1887 they formed the Scottish Home Rule Association, and one year later, together founded the Scottish Labour Party with RBCG as president and Hardie as secretary. In 1892, RBCG’s reputation among London dockers and his role in Bloody Sunday helped the future leader of the Labour party to his first electoral victory, in West Ham. On Gabriela’s death in 1906, Hardie wrote to RBCG sharing his grief; and on Hardie’s death in 1915, RBCG wrote a sombre account of his Glasgow funeral in With The North-East Wind (Brought Forward, 1916)

WH Hudson

‘I could no more dine at Chester Square with you and your friends than with the fairies or the angels!’ wrote the Anglo-Argentine novelist and naturalist when invited by RBCG to a gathering at his mother’s house, in the early 1900s. Hudson, who would eventually find fame with novels such as Green Mansions, had emigrated from Argentina in his thirties and now lived in Bayswater, eking a living as a writer. RBCG found in him someone with whom he could share his experiences of the Pampa. They became fast friends and RBCG grew to admire his work more than that of any other writer. Following Hudson’s death in 1922, RBCG chaired the committee which commissioned a memorial stone panel in Hyde Park by the sculptor Jacob Epstein. On his final trip to Argentina, in 1936, RBCG made a pilgrimage to Hudson’s birthplace, a smallholding near Quilmes, in Buenos Aires province. He died a few days later.

Edward Garnett

Edward Garnett was a young editor at the publishers T Fisher Unwin when he spotted RBCG’s writing in Frank Harris’s Saturday Review, and invited him to contribute to a new series of collected writings, The Overseas Library. It was 1898 and the start of a professional relationship and friendship which would last until RBCG’s death in 1936, by which time Garnett had himself long been a major figure in the literary world. In 1899 he published RBCG’s first collection of sketches and stories, The Ipané, and over the next thirty years guided and encouraged RBCG in his work, while tolerating his indecipherably hand-written manuscripts. As his friend, it was Garnett to whom RBCG turned with a request that his mother be contacted, when Gabriela was dying at Hendaye on the Spanish border; Garnett, along with Lavery, in whom he confided his fears for the future of Gartmore.

RBCG as depicted in the Great Tapestry of Scotland

George Mansel

Dark and nervous, with round prominent eyes, a sparse moustache, a skin tanned to a dark brick brown and thick brown hair, George Mansel was as rough-tongued and irascible as he was fearless and loyal. So RBCG described his ranching companion and lifelong friend. RBCG met Mansel, a young naval officer who came from a landed Dorset family, when visiting his brother Charlie on station in Gibraltar in 1875. He and Mansel at once set off on a sea journey down the African coast. Later they rode together and attempted unsuccessfully to ranch in Argentina. Mansel’s death in 1907, relatively young, was a severe blow to RBCG, who imagined him on his estate in Dorset, to which he had retired, drinking in ‘the wide expanse of down, nothing but grass and sky, like the south Pampa, [which] stretches out to Portland Bill.’ (A Hatchment, 1913)