DUMBARTON NOTEBOOK BY BILL HEANEY

Notebook by Bill Heaney

For many of us Dumbartonians, Argentina’s connections with our town are far more interesting than a football match taking place later this evening.

My message to Notebook readers is not to cry for England when Argentina thump them – Harry Kane et al – in the World Cup semi-final in the USA.

Most of Dumbarton’s connections are through Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham.

He was a politician, writer, journalist and adventurer, and was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament (MP); the first ever member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to declare himself a socialist.

In 1888, Don Roberto, as he became known, was elected first President of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA); a founder and first president of the Scottish Labour Party; elected first President of the National Party of Scotland; and, in 1934, was elected Honorary Vice-President of the Scottish National Party.

He was a peripatetic politician who switched parties almost as often as the UK today changes prime ministers.

He spent most of his childhood on the family estate of Finlaystone in Renfrewshire, across the river from Brucehill,  and Gartmore in Stirlingshire, with his younger brothers Charles and Malise.

After being educated at Harrow public school, Robert finished his education in Brussels, where he learnt Spanish, before moving to Argentina to try to make his fortune cattle ranching at just 17 years of age.  He became known as a great adventurer and gaucho there, and was affectionately known as Don Roberto.

He also travelled in Morocco disguised as a Turkish sheikh to find the “forbidden” city of Taroudant but was captured by a Caid (Si Taieb ben Si Ahmed El Hassan El Kintafi),  prospected for gold in Spain, befriended Buffalo Bill in Texas, and taught fencing in Mexico City, having travelled there by wagon train from San Antonio de Bexar with his bride sic Gabrielle Marie de la Balmondiere, who is said to have been a half-French, half-Chilean poet.

Dumbarton’s connection with Argentina – Don Roberto aka Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham. Montage by Bill Heaney

After the death of his father in 1883, he reverted to the Cunninghame Graham surname and returned to the UK, where he became interested in politics.

Cunninghame Graham, who claimed to be a Liberal “both by descent and from conviction”, was adopted as the Liberal Party candidate for North West Lanarkshire for both the 1885 general election and the 1886 general election.

His manifesto was typically Radical Liberal, being against an aggressive foreign policy and game laws; for more local government, a graduated income tax, the abolition of primogeniture and entail, free education and local option on the sale of liquor.

However, he more radically also called for:

• the abolition of the House of Lords
• universal suffrage
• religious equality and the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland
• Irish, Scottish and English Home Rule

In 1886, supported by Liberals and the Irish, Graham defeated the Unionist candidate by 322 votes. He had stood against the same candidate at the 1885 general election, in which he was defeated by over 1100 votes.^[13]

Although professing to respect the office of the Speaker, Robert Cunninghame Graham refused to accept the conventions of the British House of Commons and was frequently “named”. On 12 September 1887 he was suspended from parliament for making what was called a “disrespectful reference” to the House of Lords.

He was suspended for unparliamentary language in 1888 and, in 1892, in response to being named and the question of suspension raised, responded, “Suspend away!” and “…I do not care a damn.”, which is alleged to be the first time swearing was used in the Chamber.^[14]

Graham’s main concerns in the House of Commons were the plight of the unemployed and the preservation of civil liberties. He complained about attempts in 1886 and 1887 by the police to prevent public meetings and free speech.

He attended the protest demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887 that was broken up by the police and became known as Bloody Sunday.

Graham was badly beaten during his arrest and taken to Bow Street Police Station, where his uncle, Col William Hope VC, attempted to post bail. Both Cunninghame Graham, who was defended by H. H. Asquith, and John Burns were found guilty for their involvement in the demonstration and sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment.

When Graham was released from Pentonville prison, he continued his campaign to improve the rights of working people and to curb their economic exploitation. He was suspended from the House of Commons in December 1888 for protesting about the working conditions of the chain makers of Cradley Heath. His response to the Speaker of the House, “I never withdraw”, was later used by George Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man.

During his time in Parliament, he became more socialist and more radical, advocating:

• the establishment of an eight-hour working day
• the nationalisation of land, mines and other industries
• free school meals
• disestablishment of the Church of England

Graham was also a vociferous anti-imperialist at the height of British jingoism as well as a high-profile supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and Home Rule for Ireland and India.

While in Parliament, Graham started attending socialist meetings where he heard and met William Morris; the Fabians George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Webb; trades unionists like John Burns and Annie Besant; and Marxists like H. M. Hyndman and Friedrich Engels. Despite his wealthy origins, Graham was converted to socialism, and he and his wife began to speak at public meetings. He was an impressive orator and was especially good at dealing with hecklers.

Graham was to become a strong supporter of Scottish independence. In 1886, he joined the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), and while in the House of Commons, he made several attempts to persuade fellow MPs of the desirability of a Scottish parliament. Graham joked that he wanted a “national parliament with the pleasure of knowing that the taxes were wasted in Edinburgh instead of London.”

In 1888, Graham attended the SHRA Conference at the Anderton’s Hotel in Fleet Street and passed a motion “That in the opinion of this Conference the interests of Scotland demand the establishment of a Scotch national Parliament and an Executive Government having control over exclusively Scotch affairs, with a due regard to the integrity of the Empire”.

The motion was supported by Mr Cuninghame Graham (as name spelt in article), who said he “wanted a Scotch Parliament to do justice to their crofters and keep them at home, to pass an Eight Hours’ Bill for their miners, to settle the liquor laws, and to nationalise the land.” Peter Esslemont MP attended. Dr G.B Clark, MP for Caithness-shire, chaired the conference.

He supported workers in their industrial disputes and was involved with Annie Besant and the Matchgirls Strike and the 1889 Dockers’ Strike. In July 1889, he attended the Marxist Congress of the Second International in Paris with James Keir Hardie, William Morris, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling. The following year he made a speech in Calais that was considered by the authorities to be so revolutionary that he was arrested and expelled from France.

Graham was a supporter of the eight-hour day and made several attempts to introduce a Bill on the subject. He made some progress with this in the summer of 1892, but he was unable to persuade the Conservative government, headed by Lord Salisbury, to allocate time for the Bill to be fully debated.

While in the House of Commons, Graham became increasingly more radical and went on to found the Scottish Labour Party with Keir Hardie in 1888, though he did not leave the Liberal Party until 1892.

At the 1892 general election Graham stood as the Independent Labour Party candidate for Glasgow Camlachie. He was heavily defeated, coming third with just 906 votes, bringing his parliamentary career to an end.

He remained active in political circles, though, helping his colleague Keir Hardie establish the Independent Labour Party and enter parliament as the MP for West Ham. However, he became disillusioned by the pettiness and dissent of those he called “piss-pot socialists” and increasingly turned to a nascent Scottish nationalism as a means of achieving social justice and cultural revival.

In 1928, Graham was elected (in absentia) President of the National Party of Scotland (NPS), and was elected the Honorary Vice-President of the new Scottish National Party in 1934, for which, despite reservations, he led the country-wide campaign to promote it along with Compton Mackenzie, who wrote Whisky Galore, a novel based on the shipwreck off Eriskay of Dumbarton-distilled whisky carrying SS Politician.

 He was several times the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association candidate for the Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow, which he lost by only sixty-six votes in 1928 to Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister at the time. This event was pivotal in boosting the newly formed National Party of Scotland.

Because of his Scottish nationalism and criticism of what he saw as the Labour Party’s timidity and lack of socialist zeal, Graham has been effectively written out of Labour Party history, and the belief has been circulated that after his electoral defeat in 1892, he retired from politics until the late 1920s.

This is entirely incorrect; in fact, between 1905 and 1914, Graham, while retaining the position of elder statesman, social commentator, and renowned world-traveller, became more militant, involving himself in many left-wing causes and protests. Moreover, in 1918, he was persuaded to stand as the Liberal candidate in the new constituency of West Stirlingshire, coming last behind the Unionist and Labour candidates.

There is evidence to suggest that Graham joined the hard-left British Socialist Party, and he was an associate of anarchists (like Peter Kropotkin) and the political assassin Sergei Stepniak but left over the BSP’s opposition to the First World War.

Despite having been a vociferous pacifist, at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Graham (aged 62) unsuccessfully tried to enlist as a rough rider but, following talks with the War Office, he was sent to Argentina to lead a team buying horses for the Western Front. Returning to England in May 1915, the ship he was on was torpedoed. However, the Captain managed to beach it, and no lives (human or equine) were lost.^[26]

In 1917, Graham was despatched to Colombia by the Board of Trade to secure beef supplies, which necessitated his travelling the country, often on horseback and sleeping rough, to effectively survey cattle resources. His report to the Government, dated 31 March, was meticulously detailed.

Between 1888 and 1892, Graham was a prolific contributor to small-circulation socialist journals, but his literary career took off when he was recruited by Frank Harris to write for the Saturday Review in 1895, and he continued writing for the Saturday until 1926, as well as other journals. His main form was the ‘sketch’, or sketch-tale’, mostly descriptive, atmospheric works on South America and Scotland, which gave his work a unique aesthetic, which carried a subtext of anti-colonialism, nostalgia, and loss.

T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) described his Scottish sketches as “the rain-in-the-air-and-on-the-roof mournfulness of Scotch music in his time-past style [. . .] snap-shots – the best verbal snapshots ever taken I believe.” His many works were collected into anthologies. Subject matter included history, biography, poetry, essays, politics, travel and seventeen collections of short stories or literary sketches. Titles include Father Archangel of Scotland (1896 in conjunction with his wife Gabriela), Thirteen Stories (1900), Success (1902), Hope (1910), Scottish Stories (1914), Brought Forward (1916) and Mirages (1936).

Biographies included: Hernando de Soto (1903), Doughty Deeds (1925), a biography of his great-great-grandfather, Robert Graham of Gartmore, and Portrait of a Dictator (1933). His great-niece and biographer, Jean, Lady Polwarth, published a collection of his short stories (or sketches) entitled Beattock for Moffatt and the Best of Cunninghame Graham (1979), and Alexander Maitland added his selection under the title Tales of Horsemen (1981).

Professor John Walker, a university professor who was born in Dumbarton, lived with his parents in Brucehill, went to St Patrick’s High School and Glasgow University and played football at Junior level for Vale of Leven when they won the Scottish Junior Cup in 1951, published collections of Cunninghame Graham’s South American Sketches (1978), Scottish Sketches (1982) and North American Sketches (1986), and Kennedy & Boyd republished the stories and sketches in five volumes (2011 – 2012). In 1988, The Century Travellers reprinted his Mogreb-el-Acksa (1898) and A Vanished Arcadia (1901). The former was the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. The latter may have helped inspire the award-winning film The Mission. More recently, The Long Riders Guild Press has reprinted his equestrian travel works in their Cunninghame Graham Collection.

He helped his close friend Joseph Conrad, whom he had introduced to his publisher Edward Garnett at Duckworth, with research for his novel Nostromo. Other literary friends included Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, George Bernard Shaw (who openly admits his debt to Graham for “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion” as well as a key line in Arms and the Man) and G. K. Chesterton, who proclaimed him “The Prince of Preface Writers” and famously declared in his autobiography that while Cunninghame Graham would never be allowed to be Prime Minister, he instead “achieved the adventure of being Cunninghame Graham”, which Shaw described as “an achievement so fantastic that it would never be believed in a romance.”

There is a seat dedicated to Cunninghame Graham in the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh with the inscription: “R B ‘Don Roberto’ Cunninghame Graham of Gartmore and Ardoch, 1852–1936, A great storyteller”.

Graham remained sprightly and rode daily even in his eighties. He continued to write, and held the office of President of the Scottish Branch of the P.E.N. Club and involved himself in politics. He died from pneumonia on 20 March 1936 at the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, following a visit to the birthplace of his friend William Hudson. He lay in state in the Casa del Teatro and received a countrywide tribute led by the President of the Republic before his body was shipped home to be buried beside his wife on 18 April 1936, in the ruined Augustinian Priory on the island of Inchmahome, Lake of Menteith.

The following year (June 1937), a monument, the Cunninghame Graham Memorial, was unveiled at Castlehill, Dumbarton, near the family home at Ardoch. Despite the monument being removed to Gartmore in 1986, closer to the principal Graham estate, which he had been forced to sell in 1901 to the shipping magnate and founder of the Clan Line, Sir Charles Cayzer, Bt, the Cunninghame Graham Memorial Park (which is managed by the National Trust for Scotland) is still affectionately locally known as “the Mony”  before it was shamefully vandalised and and had to be taken away to safety to Gartmore.

His estates at Ardoch and the feudal baronies of Gartmore and Ardoch passed to his nephew, Captain (later Admiral Sir) Angus Cunninghame Graham, the only son of his brother Cdr. Charles Elphinstone-Fleeming Cunninghame Graham, MVO

Cunninghame Graham was a staunch supporter of the artists of his day and a popular subject. He sat for artists such as Sir William Rothenstein, who painted Don Roberto as The Fencer; Sir John Lavery, whose famous Don Roberto: Commander for the King of Aragon in the Two Sicilies was on the cover of the Penguin Books edition of Conrad’s Nostromo for many years and who painted the equestrian portrait of Don Roberto on his favourite horse, Pampa; and G. P. Jacomb-Hood, who painted his official portrait on entering parliament, with whom, along with Whistler, he was personal friends. George Washington Lambert painted him in oil with his horse Pinto, and James McBey and Ignacio Zuloaga portrayed him in old age. There are also busts by Weiss and Jacob Epstein. The Dumbarton-born artist, William Strang, used Cunninghame Graham as the model for his series of etchings of Don Quixote. Unsurprisingly, he was at the mercy of cartoonists such as Tom Merry, who portrayed him in prison garb, and caricaturists such as Max and Spy.

Cedric Watts claims that Cunninghame Graham appears as ‘Mr. X’ in Conrad’s The Informer, as Mr. Courtier in Galsworthy’s The Patrician, and as ‘Mr. Graham’ in Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes.^[41] Anne Taylor and James Jauncey have argued that his travels in Morocco were one of the inspirations for the character Sandy Arbuthnot, hero of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle (1916).

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I’m just back from shopping at the supermarket(s) at St James’s Park and Castle Street. It was with some dismay that I looked out from the Lidl supermarket, which has been given the finest site in Dumbarton by our sagacious planners at West Dunbartonshire Council.

And now ALDI’s very own new supermarket is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old distillery offices, bottling halls and mill building of Hiram Walker or Allied Distillers, according to whichever era of the Scotch Whisky industry you lived through.

I have said here before that it was an astonishingly poor decision for the WDC planning committee to give the precious land in Castle Street over to these supermarkets.

Sitting in the sunshine yesterday in the beautifully refurbished Colquhoun Square in Helensburgh, I thought about just how badly Dumbarton had been let down — again.

Castle Street, as its name suggests, looks out to Dumbarton Castle and Levengrove Park over the swiftly flowing confluence of the River Clyde and River Clyde.

Given that site to make something of for local government planners and councillors, such as the chairman of the planning committee, Lawrence O’Neill, we should have expected an outcome such as Helensburgh received from Argyll and Bute Council.

But what we got was Lidl and Aldi, which I noted yesterday was rising to a height that would not, as Lidl has,  block out the views of the Clyde and Renfrewshire Hills, obscure the views of Dumbuck and the Old Kilpatrick Hills, which, like Dumbarton Castle and Elspeth Crocket and Kevin  McKenna commented about earlier this month, are steeped in history.

Not local history but national history and ecclesiastical history.

I have said before that we are poorly served by our elected representatives and council officers at West Dunbartonshire Council, where in the not too distant past the convener of the Culture Committee, now there’s a misnomer of ever there was one,  expressed the view to Rose Harvie that he didn’t think Scottish Heritage should put a blue plaque on St Augustine’s Scottish Episcopal Church in the High Street.

Not even after it was pointed out to him that the world-famous architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret were married there. 

Cllr Agnew did not consider that Mackintosh, the designer of the Art School in Glasgow and Hill House in Helensburgh, to name but two of his great achievements, was important enough for that.