The Cunninghame Graham Society

Caroline Stansfield Horsfall was born in January 1858, the second of thirteen children of Henry Horsfall, an area medical officer, and his wife Elizabeth Stansfield, of Masham, Yorkshire. An intelligent, spirited and stagestruck child, known to her family as 'Carrie', she ran away from home aged fifteen, but was brought home and gated for several months. Two years later, in 1875, she ran away a second time. This time, so the story goes, she reached London and the doorstep of Henry Irving, the actor-manager, where she was intercepted by his wife and turned away.

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Three years later, in 1878, and to his mother's lasting displeasure, she appeared in London as RBCG's wife. The story went that they had met in the Bois de Boulogne when, improbably, his horse had shied and she had fallen in front of him. Now, a few months short of her twenty-first birthday, she gave her name as Gabrielle de la Balmondière, and her age as nineteen. She spoke French, Spanish and strangely accented English. What she had been doing and how she had survived for the three years from 1875 to 1878 remains a mystery to this day.

 

​The couple honeymooned in Texas and Mexico, where they investigated ranching opportunities, then joined a wagon train travelling from San Antonio to Mexico City. Following the honeymoon they settled in Vigo, in Spain, for two years before returning to take over Gartmore, following RBCG's father's death in 1883.  Once RBCG was elected to parliament they divided their time between Gartmore and London, where she became known in RBCG's circle as Gabriela. Although she decried the world of politics, she turned to activism alongside her husband, speaking at socialist and women's events, and writing furiously to the newspapers in his defence following the events in Trafalgar Square of Bloody Sunday, November 1887.

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Meanwhile she preceded RBCG into print by a year, with her two-volume biography of the Spanish medieval mystic, Santa Teresa of Avila, published in 1894. The result of several years' travelling to remote corners of Spain in search of ruined Teresan convents and other foundations, the book received mixed reviews. Two years later she contributed three sketches to Father Archangel of Scotland, co-authored with her husband, whose first published collection this was; and in 1905 she translated St John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul from Spanish. In the years following her death, RBCG arranged publication of a collection of stories and sketches, The Christ of Toro, including her description of the perilous journey undertaken on their honeymoon, The Waggon Train; and a collection of her poems, Rhymes from a World Unknown.

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Fortunately for RBCG, who lacked commercial acumen, Gabriela proved an astute businesswoman, importing textiles and leather goods from Spain and Morocco, and shrewdly managing the accounts of the debt-ridden Gartmore estate; although this was merely to prolong the inevitable and Gartmore was eventually sold in 1900. By this time Gabriela's health was deteriorating, an underlying condition of diabetes exacerbated by a heavy addiction to cigarettes. She died of pleurisy on her return from a trip to Spain, at the French border town of Hendaye, in 1906, aged forty-eight.

 

Her false identity was maintained until the last. She was buried in the ruined Augustinian priory on the island of Inchmahome in the Lake of Menteith. ​​​​​​​​RBCG is said to have dug her grave. The plaque above it, naming her as Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, reads Los muertos abren los ojos a los que viven, a Spanish proverb meaning The dead open the eyes of the living.

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The questions of Carrie/Gabriela's missing years and assumed identity are explored extensively in James Jauncey's Don Roberto: the Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham; also in Jad Adams' Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives.