Graham, Robert Bontine Cunninghame, Unspecified, author

Epithet: MP

Epithet: of Add MS 38653

Epithet: author

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was born in London, England, on 24 May 1852, the eldest of the three sons of William Cunninghame Bontine, of Gartmore, Perth & Kinross, Scotland and Ardoch, West, Dumbartonshire, Scotland. He was educated at Harrow School, London, and spent a year at a private school in Brussels.

At the general election of 1886 he was elected as a liberal for North-West Lanarkshire, Scotland. His political sense was both erratic and acute and went to the underdog wherever he found him. He quickly developed into an ardent socialist devoted to William Morris, and a friend of John Burns. He contested unsuccessfully the Camlachie division of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1892, and in 1918, again unsuccessfully, Western Stirling & Clackmannan. When the national party of Scotland was founded in 1928 he was elected its first president. In the same year at the election for the lord rectorship of Glasgow University he polled only 66 votes fewer than Stanley Baldwin.

In height, appearance, and bearing, Cunninghame Graham looked a Spanish Don for his maternal grandmother, Catalina Paulina Alessandro, was Spanish and as a boy taught him Spanish and brought him up in the Spanish way.

At the age of seventeen he paid the first of several visits to Spanish America and rode with gauchos over the South American plains and, later, with Indians in Mexico, where he formed a close friendship with 'Buffalo Bill'. W H Hudson, dedicating El Ombu to him in 1902, called him 'Singularisimo escritor ingles' because he 'alone of European writers has rendered something of the vanishing colour of that remote life.' He was in Paraguay when that land had lost most of its male population in the four years' war waged by Francisco Solano Lopez upon Brazil, Argentine, and Uruguay, and he gave an account of the man in his Portrait of a Dictator (1933). In the war of 1914-1918 he was there again, buying remounts for the British government and in 1935 he went there once more, at the age of eighty-three, and at Buenos Aires, greatly respected by the people, he died 20 March 1936. In honour of him, a new city in the Argentine was named Don Roberto.

His understanding of old Spanish life and of the Conquistadors is shown in nine volumes of historical and biographical studies. He wrote a little-known classic of travel, Mogreb-el-Acksa (1898), an account of a dangerous journey, when he travelled through southern Morocco; a local cadi imprisoned him, and he was released only after a painful experience. His best work is considered to be his many volumes of stories, essays, and sketches. His style was candid, direct, and vivid; his images are homely and apt.

In 1879, Cunninghame Graham married Gabriela, daughter of Don Francisco Jose de la Balmondiere. Born in Chile of a French father and a Spanish mother, she was poet, water-colourist, botanist, and mystic. She died, childless, in 1906, and he himself dug her grave in the grounds of the ruined Augustinian priory on the isle of Inchmahome in the Lake of Menteith, Stirling, Scotland. He was buried beside her following his own death in March 1936.

H M Tomlinson, 'Graham, Robert Bontine Cunninghame', , Dictionary of National Biography ( 1949 )