The Cunninghame Graham Society
celebrating the life and work of Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham
~ politician, writer, traveller, horseman, visionary and humanitarian ~
Life
“He achieved the adventure of being Cunninghame Graham …”
~ GK Chesterton
“… an achievement so fantastic that it would never be believed in a romance.”
~ George Bernard Shaw
Born in London in 1852, RBCG spent much of his childhood in Scotland, although he was educated at English boarding schools. He was a teenager when his father's mental health crisis resulted in the family leaving the ancestral home, and RBCG being removed from mainstream education. He resolved to restore the family fortune, and in 1870, aged not quite eighteen, he sailed for Argentina.
​RBCG's adult life can be seen in three principal phases. Most of his twenties were spent in South America, adventuring and pursuing unsuccessful money-making schemes. Following his return, he was elected Liberal MP for North West Lanarkshire, aged thirty-four, but served for only six years, until defeated in the general election of 1892. Now aged forty he entered the literary phase of his life which lasted until his death in 1936, aged eighty-four; although travel and politics were never far from his mind.​​
Childhood
RBCG and his mother, 1858
Seen here aged six with his mother, RBCG was born at 5 Cadogan Place, London, on 24 May 1852. Within a year the family had moved to Finlaystone, a mansion on the banks of the Clyde, where RBCG spent his early years. In 1863, on his grandfather's death, they moved to the Graham family seat, Gartmore, overlooking the Lake of Menteith. Here, RBCG and his younger brothers, Charles and Malise, were free to spend their holidays roaming the countryside.
The same year, RBCG was sent to Hill House, a boarding school near Leamington Spa, where he proved himself a diligent and energetic student. Aged thirteen he moved on to Harrow School, but anxiety about his father's mental health affected his behaviour and studies.
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After only two years, as his father's condition deteriorated and the extent of the family's debts became apparent, he was removed from Harrow. A period of private tuition followed, first in London, then in Brussels where he began to learn Spanish and his interest in South America was aroused. In 1870 he sailed for Argentina, intent on becoming a cattle rancher.​
Aged 16
South America
Between 1870 and 1877, RBCG spent three separate periods of a year or more in South America. Adventurous and often dangerous – though financially unrewarding – these were amongst his most formative experiences. They marked him deeply and were instrumental in shaping both his political and literary careers.
In May 1870 he sailed from Liverpool to Montevideo on the SS Patagonia, spending his eighteenth birthday on board. From the Uruguayan capital he travelled by river to the Argentine province of Entre Rios where he was to work on the Santa Ana estancia. On arrival he found the estancia in chaos and the country in the grip of both a severe drought and a brutal civil war. For the next eighteen months he rode with the local gauchos, explored the country and investigated a number of money-making schemes.
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By January 1872 he was back in Britain, returning to South America the following December for a second spell of just over a year. Much of this he spent in Paraguay, commissioned by a firm of London traders to research possible concessions to grow mate, the green tea of the region. During this period he also became interested in the Jesuits and their influence in the region, leading later to the book A Vanished Arcadia.​
His third spell in South America lasted from January 1876 until spring of the following year. An unsuccessful ranching venture in Argentina was followed by an equally unsuccessful attempt to buy horses in Uruguay, drive them north and sell them to the Brazilian army, as later described in the story Cruz Alta. By May 1877, the time of his twenty-fifth birthday, he was back in Britain again and would not return to South America for nearly forty years.
The young gaucho
Portrait by John Lavery
Marriage
Gabriela by Percy Jacomb-Hood
RBCG & Gabriela at Gartmore
In 1878, one year after his return from South America, RBCG married Gabrielle de la Balmondiere, a half-French, half-Chilean actress whom he had met in Paris.
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But Gabriela, as she was known in the family, was not at all who she purported to be. A doctor's daughter from Yorkshire, named Caroline ('Carrie') Horsfall, she had run away from home aged seventeen. Everything about her story from that point until she met RBCG, three years later, remains a mystery to this day.
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Together they struggled to keep the debt-ridden Gartmore estate afloat. She joined RBCG in his political activities and travelled alone to remote parts of Spain as she researched her biography of St Teresa of Avila. Although they were apart a good deal of the time, they appear to have been deeply attached to one another. Their marriage was childless.
When Gabriela died aged only forty-eight, in 1906, RBCG was devastated. Together they had maintained the deception of her identity throughout her life. She is buried on the island of Inchmahome in the Lake of Menteith.
Politics
The new MP by 'Spy'
The convict by 'Tom Merry'
RBCG was heir to a solid tradition of political radicalism. Both his Graham and Elphinstone Fleeming forebears had been Whig politicians. By the time he was in his early thirties he was ready to enter politics, his desire for social justice aroused both by his experiences in South America and, closer to home, by the plight of the Highland crofters, Ireland's agricultural tenants, and Scotland's mine- and steel-workers.
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After a failed attempt at the general election of 1885, he was elected in 1886 as Liberal MP for North West Lanarkshire, with the industrial inferno of Coatbridge at its heart. He had campaigned, among other things, for nationalisation of land and key industries, abolition of the House of Lords, and an eight-hour working day. An anti-monarchist and anti-imperialist, his maiden speech caused a sensation.
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A tumultuous six years followed, during which he was twice suspended for unparliamentary conduct, and jailed for six weeks for his part in the Bloody Sunday protests in Trafalgar Square of November 1887. By that time he had declared himself a socialist, the first British parliamentarian ever to do so.
He had also met Keir Hardie and they had formed, first, the Scottish Home Rule Association, then the Scottish Labour Party. Standing as Scottish Labour candidate for Glasgow Camlachie, he was defeated in the general election of 1892 and left frontline politics for good. Parliament he referred to as the 'national gasworks'.
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Over the next thirty years it was his writing, predominantly, which gave expression to his political views. In his seventies, generally disenchanted with Labour, and its abandonment of Scottish Home Rule in particular, he turned to nationalism. In 1928 he was elected president of the National Party of Scotland, and in 1934, two years before his death, was appointed honorary president of the newly formed Scottish National Party.
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RBCG was a progressive and much of what he stood for continues to resonate strongly today. The eight-hour day, decent conditions of employment, universal suffrage, a party of labour, a parliament in Edinburgh and a vigorous Scottish independence movement – these are just a few aspects of contemporary life which bear his fingerprints.​​​​ More here.
Writing
From the time he first entered politics, in 1886, RBCG wrote for political journals, but it was not until he was forty-three years old that his first book, the quirky Notes on the District of Menteith, was published. Over the next forty years he published over thirty books, ranging from stories and sketches drawn from his life in Scotland and his travels abroad, to biographies of the Spanish conquistadors. During this period he also contributed numerous press articles and book prefaces.​
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Frank Harris, publisher of the Saturday Review, and Edward Garnett, a brilliant young publisher's editor, championed RBCG's writing although he himself never believed fully in his own ability, despite rubbing shoulders with other emerging writers such as GB Shaw, HG Wells and his great friend, Joseph Conrad.
RBCG's preferred form was the sketch in which, usually through the voice of an anonymous narrator, he recounted incidents from his own lived experience, principally in South America, North Africa and Scotland. He was not widely read, but greatly admired by his peers. On a good day, suggested Harris, his writing bore comparison with that of de Maupassant.
He continued writing until he died. Today there is growing recognition of his role as an important and highly original figure in late 19th and early 20th century Scottish literature.​ More here.
Final years
Riding in Rotten Row
Buenos Aires, 1936
In his later years, RBCG divided his time between Ardoch, where he retreated to write, and London where he spent time with his new companion, Elizabeth 'Toppie' Dummett. The pair travelled widely, often accompanied by Toppie's sister, Louisa Miéville.
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In 1936, he made a final pilgrimage to Argentina and the house where his friend WH Hudson had been born, at Quilmes in Buenos Aires province. There he caught pneumonia and on 20 March 1936, aged nearly 84, he died in his Buenos Aires hotel. His body was laid out in the Casa del Teatro (formerly the Cervantes Theatre) where the President and Ministers of the Republic came to pay their respects and the British Ambassador, Sir Neville Henderson, gave an oration.
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The coffin was returned to Britain on the Almeda Star, the ship on which he had booked his passage home. On arrival in Scotland it was taken to the Lake of Menteith and transported across to the Island of Inchmahome where he was buried, in the ruins of the Augustinian Priory, beside Gabriela.
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"He was a Master of Life, a King among Men," reads the inscription on the stone memorial in Gartmore village.
Newsreel footage of RBCG's funeral procession, Port of Menteith, April 1936