This Scotsman represents everything to which our country aspires today

The National

28-04-2025

AFTER failing to win the seat of Camlachie in Glasgow for the Scottish Labour Party in 1892 and now free of the constraints of parliamentary life, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham began to write.
At first he penned polemical pieces in political periodicals, turning his fire on targets such as the Liberal Party; British foreign policy and empire (he referred to Queen Victoria as the 'Empress of Famine' and Rhodesia as 'Fraudesia'); and the US government for their treatment of native Americans, notably the Sioux and their massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890.
His writing was soon spotted by Frank Harris, the influential Irish-American publisher of the Saturday Review, and by the mid-1890s Robert was a regular contributor, rubbing shoulders with other such rising stars as HG Wells and GB Shaw. He was free to write more or less whatever took his fancy. 'I was the Saturday Reviewer in the theatre,' wrote Shaw, 'Cunninghame Graham was a Saturday Reviewer in the universe.'
As in politics, so in writing, Robert went his own way. Over the following 40 years he published more than 30 books, guided – as far as he would permit it, which was not generally very far – by Edward Garnett, the most brilliant of the new wave of young English editors.
His subjects ranged from the lives of conquistadors to episodes and encounters from his travels to portraits of quaint Scottish characters from his childhood, his settings ranging from South America to Spain, North Africa and Scotland.
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No follower of literary tradition, Robert developed his own genre, the sketch, in which he presented incidents drawn from lived experience through the voice of a third person narrator, almost as if they were stories. Although not widely read, he was admired by his peers. On a good day, said Harris, he could give De Maupassant a run for his money.
Now in middle age, he spent time partly in London and partly at Gartmore, the Graham family seat in Stirlingshire, where he and his wife Gabriela struggled in vain to cope with his father's legacy of debt.
Bowing eventually to the inevitable, he sold Gartmore in 1900 to the shipping magnate Sir Charles Cayzer, although it broke his heart to do so. He later described his final 24 hours in the old house in A Braw Day, one of his most touching sketches.
Robert was not given to revealing himself in his writing, despite his frequent assertion that everything one needed to know about him was there to be read. This sketch was one of the very few in which he invited the reader into his heart.
Travel had always been the panacea for Robert's ills. In the 1890s he had begun to turn to Morocco for the excitement and adventure that Argentina had offered him in youth. Tangier, at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, thrilled him with its shifting cast of travellers, diplomats, merchants, artists, indigent aristocrats, phoneys, fixers and chancers of all stripes.
Cunninghame Graham during his trip to the 'forbidden' city of Taroudant in Morocco
'Thirteen miles from Europe as the gull flies, millions of miles in feeling and in life …' he wrote, immersing himself in the Arab world as the guest of John Lavery, who had painted Robert a number of times and, now wealthy and famous from his society portraits, had a house on the edge of the city.
In 1897, Robert resolved to travel to the southern city of Taroudant, forbidden to foreigners on account of unrest among the local tribes, who were in revolt against the corrupt and collapsing sultanate.
Despite warnings from British consular officials he set off, disguised as a local sheikh and accompanied by two guides. Climbing a pass through the High Atlas, he was captured by armed men and taken to the mountain fort of a local warlord, the Caid of Kintafi, where he was held for three weeks before talking his way to release.
Why he went is unclear – on an intelligence-gathering mission for the British government; in search of trade concessions from the southern tribes; or simply for the hell of it? Whatever the reason, his subsequent book about the journey, Mogreb-el-Acksa, broke the mould of contemporary travel writing and was hailed by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid as 'the travel book of the century'.
Cunninghame Graham drinking mateThe First World War saw Robert on the move again. His experiences in South America, particularly Paraguay which he reached soon after the end of a savage war against its neighbours, had left him deeply opposed to violence, yet he accepted a War Department commission to buy horses in Uruguay.
This war, waged by a great and malign power against small nations, had to be resisted, he believed. Yet he knew what fate awaited the horses when they reached the European front, where they would haul weapons, munitions and supplies and last three weeks if they were lucky.
For a supremely skilled horseman and lover of all things equine, this was just one of the host of contradictions which characterised him, which he wore with apparent ease, and which have fascinated every scholar or biographer who has approached his life.
By the end of the war, with the Russian Revolution just a year old, it was this same aversion to violence that left Robert ultimately wary of John Maclean and the Red Clydesiders. Despite their shared socialist principles, Robert could not bring himself to support a movement with Bolshevik associations, one that advocated outright revolution.
Back in Britain after the war, he continued to divide his time between Scotland, where he retreated to write, and London where his formidable nonagenarian mother still held court to a circle of prominent writers and artists.
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Here, after the death of Robert's wife Gabriela, his new companion, a wealthy widow named Elizabeth Dummett, also entertained members of the cultural elite at her home.
But Robert had not yet given up on politics. From earliest days, he had believed that Scotland should be running her own affairs. Home rule had been a central policy of his Scottish Labour Party. But now, in the 1920s, Labour under Ramsay Macdonald seemed to lose interest in Scotland, and a disenchanted Robert turned his attention to the small but growing nationalist movement.
In 1928 he was present as chairman at the formation of the National Party of Scotland, which was one of two forerunners of the Scottish National Party, founded eventually in 1934, with Robert as honorary president.
'The enemies of Scotland are not the English,' he declared, 'for they were ever a great and generous folk, quick to respond when justice calls. Our enemies are amongst us, born without imagination …'
In modern parlance, he was a civic nationalist, forward and outward looking, in marked contrast to the inward and backward-looking fascist tendency which characterised nationalism elsewhere in Europe at that time.
Scotland's dire social ills – poverty, ill-health and disease, poor housing and dire working conditions – would only ever be alleviated by a parliament in Edinburgh, run by Scots for Scots, he believed. Robert was also an internationalist by instinct and experience, believing that self-determination was an essential step towards taking one's place among the great family of nations. Robert continued to write and to speak at political meetings until the end, an elderly though upright, patrician figure, arm raised and white locks stirred by the breeze.
In 1936 he sailed to Argentina on a final visit to the country he loved almost as much as Scotland, and a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the writer he most admired, the Anglo-Argentine naturalist and novelist, WH Hudson. There, in Buenos Aires, he caught pneumonia and died. The president and ministers of the republic paid their respects at the Casa del Teatro, where his body lay prior to being returned to Scotland. He was buried beside Gabriela on the island of Inchmahome in the Lake of Menteith.
In 2018, I interviewed the recently retired director of the Argentine National Library, Alberto Manguel, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. In our pre-festival correspondence I mentioned Robert. 'Ah, Cunninghame Graham,' he replied. 'Say no more! I should like to talk with you about his importance, and perhaps about how Borges read him.'
At the time I had not begun to write my biography and still knew relatively little about Robert, a good deal less about Borges. In the event I was able to keep our conversation to the more fruitful topic of my guest's life and work. Since then I have come to learn that the great Argentine writer did indeed admire Robert, as he admired the writing of many British travellers, but Robert especially for his unsentimental, unromanticised description of the gauchos in the final days of their ancient way of life.
That Robert should continue to this day to be better known in Argentina than in Scotland is a stain on his native country, although with the recent publication of a critical study of his politics and writing, my own biography, and a new edited collection of his Scottish stories, there is a certain groundswell of appreciation.
It's pleasing to note that Professor Alan Riach is now including Robert on his reading list for the first year of the Scottish Literature MA course at Glasgow University.
With a few deft strokes of the pen, Robert could vividly capture the spirit of a place, the mood of a moment, the timbre of a conversation. Add to this his gift as a chronicler of people and places recently lost to history, and he is more than worthy of inclusion in the canon of late 19th/early 20th-century Scottish writers.
But here also is another of those paradoxes which so characterise the man, and which have made him so hard for so many people to grasp.
In almost everything he wrote or said or fought for, he was a progressive, yet in so many of the subjects he tackled as writer, not least the gauchos and their dying way of life, he can be clearly seen to deplore progress and its effects on those least able to resist it.
The aristocratic socialist (hence his absence from Labour Party history), the Scottish laird with the manners of a Spanish hidalgo, the hard-riding dandy, the romantic realist, the cosmopolitan nationalist, the anti-imperialist, anti-racist admirer of the Spanish conquest, the moderniser with one foot in the past, the lover of horses who corralled them for certain slaughter – Don Roberto ill fits a modern world beset by over-simplified, binary distinctions, by careerism and narrow specialisms.
Yet his legacy is plain to see – militant trade unionism; a party of Labour; the vote for women; free education; the eight-hour working day; decent living standards for working people; Irish independence; a parliament restored to Edinburgh; the formation of the Scottish National Party and a vigorous independence movement for Scotland; the establishment of national parks; rights for animals – all bear his fingerprints.
Robert's greatest friend was the novelist Joseph Conrad, whom he championed when still an unknown contributor to literary magazines, and whom he encouraged to keep writing when, to the introspective Pole, the world appeared too bleak.
They corresponded, met frequently, and shared their innermost thoughts until Conrad's death in 1924. In 1898, following publication of Mogreb-el-Acksa, Conrad wrote to Robert: 'When I think of you I feel as tho' I had lived all my life in a dark hole without ever seeing or knowing anything.'
From a man whose own life had scarcely lacked adventure, this was a rare compliment. 'I valued Cunninghame Graham like rubies,' echoed Hugh MacDiarmid on Robert's death. 'We will never see his like again.'
(Image: PA) This may, sadly, be true. It is hard to imagine Robert being comfortable with the machinery of modern politics or the world of celebrity publishing and he would quickly fall foul of the media. But it is what he stood for that rings on loudly and clearly today. In conversation earlier this year at Winter Words, the Pitlochry book festival, John Swinney (above) pressed me on Robert's values. I replied that I believe the physical courage and moral indignation that he had, perforce, developed in South America, translated into the moral courage and desire for social justice that he would display throughout the rest of his life.
He was immensely principled, often to his own detriment. He was a champion of the oppressed wherever he found them, a believer in tolerance and inclusion. He was outward-looking, an internationalist who loathed the kailyard sentiment of 19th-century Scotland.
He believed in the sovereignty of small nations and detested the idea of empire and dominion. Above all, he believed in the right of all human beings, and animals, to a fair and decent existence.
Without wishing to portray him as a paragon – he had as many faults as the next man – he was nevertheless a rare and true humanitarian, whose beliefs chime perfectly with those of our modern Scottish independence movement. Born in a different era, he was and remains emblematic of everything to which our country aspires today.
The large memorial to Robert in his home village of Gartmore contains stones from Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. The latter bears a likeness of his favourite horse, Pampa, an Argentine stallion which he rescued from the traces of a Glasgow tram and rode for 20 years. The inscription on the memorial reads simply: 'He was a master of life, a king among men.'