Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham would have had much to say about the results of the recent Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election. The first MP ever to call himself a socialist, he was instrumental in the founding of both the Scottish Labour Party and the Scottish National Party.
Born in 1852, he lived a life which was by any standards extraordinary. In parliament he fought for social justice. An adventurer and skilled horseman, he travelled widely through South America, Spain and North Africa. At home in Scotland he wrote acclaimed stories and sketches about his exploits.
Now his life is being celebrated in a special event hosted by Glasgow University Union. The inaugural Cunninghame Graham Debates promise to be a lively and challenging evening, focussing on issues for which Graham campaigned in his day, yet which remain as relevant now as ever: freedom of speech, conservation versus progress, and Scottish independence.
An iconic figure in his day, Graham has been overlooked since his death. The event organisers hope that these debates will help revive his memory by introducing him to a new generation of students.
Elected as Liberal MP for North-West Lanarkshire in 1886, Graham soon fell out with the Liberals. In 1888 he co-founded the Scottish Labour Party with his friend Keir Hardie, the flamboyant laird and former coal miner in an unlikely alliance.
The previous year, he had been beaten by the police during a riot in Trafalgar Square. The protests, for Irish Home Rule and freedom of speech, came to be known as Bloody Sunday. As a sitting MP, Graham was sentenced to six weeks in Pentonville prison.
But his political awareness had been roused long before. As a young man, he had travelled to South America where he spent six years in the saddle, riding with gauchos who dubbed him Don Roberto, and trying to restore the family fortunes, squandered by his father who had been declared insane.
His attempts at business met with failure, but his witnessing of the treatment of indigenous people by European colonisers ignited a lifelong passion for social justice. Returning to Scotland, and ready for politics, he found echoes of these abuses in the plight of Irish tenant farmers and Highland crofters.
As an MP for six short years, he campaigned furiously on issues including an eight-hour day, universal suffrage, abolition of the House of Lords, nationalisation of land and the rights of animals. In 1892 he stood as Labour candidate for Glasgow Camlachie and was defeated.
Turning to writing, he became friends with Wilde, Wells, Galsworthy, Masefield and GB Shaw, who drew on his many exploits for characters such as Sergius Saranoff, hero of Arms and the Man. Graham’s greatest friend, Joseph Conrad, wrote to him:
“When I think of you I feel as if I have lived all my life in a dark hole, without seeing or knowing anything.”
The instinct for adventure never left him. In middle age he searched for Roman gold in northern Spain and attempted to reach the forbidden Moroccan city of Taroudant. He was captured in the High Atlas and held to ransom for three weeks by a local warlord. His account of that journey, Mogreb el Acksa, was hailed by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid as the travel book of the century.
Feeling that Labour had abandoned Scotland, Graham turned to nationalism in the 1920s as the means to ameliorate Scotland’s dire social ills. In 1934 he was elected honorary president of the newly fledged Scottish National Party. A campaigner to the end, he died in Buenos Aires in 1936, and is buried on the island of Inchmahome in the Lake of Menteith.
Ten years previously he had been narrowly defeated by the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, in the Glasgow University rectorial election. Nearly a century later, the Cunninghame Graham Debates will hear his name raised at the Glasgow University Union once more.
James Jauncey is RB Cunninghame Graham’s great-great-nephew and the author of Don Roberto: the Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham. The Cunninghame Graham Debates will be held on November 7 at 6.30pm. For more information, see eventbrite.co.uk
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