Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham

He grew up in London and Gartmore, Stirlingshire (the Graham family estate), and attended Harrow School for two years (1865-67). In 1870 he went to Argentina, and spent seven years in South America as a cattle rancher, travelling extensively. While in Paris in 1878 he married Gabriela de la Belmondiere, a Chilean poetess. They settled in Britain in 1881.

His father died in 1884, and Cunninghame Graham took charge of the Gartmore estate. He became Liberal M.P. for North West Lanarkshire (1886-92), aligning himself with the Radicals and campaigning for improved working conditions for miners. On 13 November 1887 the government banning of a mass demonstration by the unemployed led to a riot in Trafalgar Square in which Graham took part. He was arrested for unlawful assembly and jailed for six weeks in Pentonville Prison (together with the Socialist leader John Elliot Burns (1858-1943), who would later have the distinction of becoming Britain's first working-class Cabinet Minister).

With his friend and fellow miners' campaigner James Keir Hardie (born Legbrannock near Holytown, Lanarkshire 15 August 1856; died Cumnock, Ayrshire 2 September 1915), Cunninghame Graham founded the Scottish Labour Party on 19 May 1888, and was its first president. Hardie stood unsuccessfully as Parliamentary candidate in Mid-Lanark in that year, but was returned as Independent Labour Party M.P. for the London constituency of West Ham South (1892-95). Among the Socialist policies which Hardie and Cunninghame Graham advocated was home rule for Scotland and Ireland. The Scottish and Independent Labour Parties were effectively merged, becoming the Labour Party, whose first Prime Minister, incidentally, would be yet another Scot (James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Prime Minister from January 1924).

Cunninghame Graham left Parliament in 1892 (just as Hardie entered), and from 1893 to 1898 he spent much of his time in Spain, visiting Morocco in 1897 in an attempt to reach the forbidden city of Tarudant. In 1900 he sold the burdensome Gartmore estate, and the family moved to the smaller estate of Ardoch on the Clyde. His wife died in 1906.

With the outbreak of World War I the 62-year-old Cunninghame Graham volunteered as a Rough Rider, but was turned down because of his age. After the war he joined the Scottish Home Rule Association, became president of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, and on its amalgamation with the Scottish Party in 1934, Cunninghame Graham became the first president of the Scottish National Party. He died two years later, on 20 March 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was mourned there by a people he had embraced and celebrated in his South American travel writing. He was buried with his wife in the ruined Augustinian priory on the island of Inchmahome, Lake of Menteith. A monument was erected in June 1937 at Castlehill, Dumbarton, near Ardoch. It was later moved to Gartmore.

As a writer, Cunninghame Graham is best remembered for his essays and travel books; he also wrote biographies (including one of his grandfather Robert Graham), a seven-volume history of the Spanish conquest of South America, and a large number of short stories (e.g. "Beattock for Moffat"). His literary output is coming to be reassessed after a period of neglect. His writing progressed from Kailyard sentimentality ("The Ipane", 1899), through a more realist period ("Brought Forward", 1916), to nostalgic nationalism ("Redeemed", 1927). His close literary friends included Joseph Conrad (Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, 1857-1924) and the Argentinian-born naturalist William Henry Hudson (1841-1922). He was also friendly with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Henry James (1843-1916), and George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), who used Cunninghame Graham as a model for characters in "Arms and the Man" (1898) and "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" (1900). A fine bronze portrait bust by Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) can be seen in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery. AC

Note an the District of Menteith (1895); Father Archangel of Scotland and Other Essays (1896); Mogreb-el-Acksa (1898); The Ipane (1899); Thirteen Stories (1900); A Vanished Arcadia (1901); Success (1902); Hernando de Soto (1903); Progress and other Sketches (1905); His People (1906); Faith (1909); Hope (1910); Charity (1912); A Hatchment (1913); Scottish Stories (1914); Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1915); Brought Forward (1916); A Brazilian Mystic (1920); Cartegena and the Banks of the Sinu (1920); The Conquest of New Granada (1922); The Conouest of the River Plate (1924); Doughty Deeds (1925); Pedro de Valdivia (1926); Redeemed and Other Sketches (1927); Jose Antonio Paez (1929); The Horses of the Conquest (1930); Writ in Sand (1932); Portrait of a Dictator (1933); Mirages (1936).

Selected Writings of Cunninghame Graham (ed. C. Watts, Cambridge, 1981); The Scottish Sketches of Cunnighame Graham (ed. J. Walker, Scottish Academic Press, 1982).

A Modern Conquistador: Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, his Life and Works (H. F. West, London, 1932); Don Roberto (A. F. Tschiffely, London, 1937); Cunninghame Graham: a Centenary Study (H. MacDiarmid, Glasgow, 1952); Prince-Errant and Evocator of Horizons (R. E. Raymaker, Kingaport, Tennessee, 1967); Cunninghame Graham: a Critical Biography (C. Watts and L. Davies, London, 1979); Robert and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham (A. Maitland, Edinburgh, 1983).

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