ROMANTIC FIGURE

Evening Star, Issue 22382, 4 July 1936, Page 13

ROMANTIC FIGURE

A MODERN QUIXOTE Few people in the world possessed so glamorous a personality as Hebert Bontine Cunninghnmo Graham. That his death should have occurred in his beloved South America, seems curiously appropriate, says the ‘ Daily Telegraph.’ Ho was a man who, all through his adventurous life, stood out vividly against his surroundings. With his strikingly handsome face that many artists had painted, his beard trimmed neatly to a point, big flowing moustache, loose necktie, and soft hat, he carried himself _ with so romantic an air that irresistibly he became a yelasquez to the life, a dashing cavalier, a Don Quixote. ' His intimate friends never addressed him by an other name than “ Don Roberto.” Dominating his life wag the chivalry of another age. His father was a Scottish laird, who had been in the Scots Greys, his mother a sister of the fourteenth Lord Elphinstone. Through his maternal grandmother he inherited Spanish blood. Early in life he was so fascinated by tales of Spanish America that he went there after leaving Harrow. He was not 17, and for the next 16 years lived in the Argentine and Mexico. Loving the pampas like a Gaucho, and just as skilled on a horse as with a lassoo, he delighted in a carefree life that allowed him to travel for long distances selling mules or cattle. Then, having married Gabriele, the Chilean daughter of Don Francisco Jose de la Balmondiere, he returned to Scotland. His father had dic'd, and Cunninghame Graham found the family estate loaded with debt. He and his wife struggled pluckily for years at farming and made it pay, but eventually they gave up the estate. She died in 1906.

Soon after arriving home, however, Cunninghame Graham entered politics. He became a Socialist, was elected to Parliament, helped Keir Hardie to found the Scottish Labour Party, and, as years went on, became the friend or George Bernard Shaw, Whistler, William Morris, Joseph Conrad, and W. H. Hudson.

In 1887 came the Trafalgar Square riot. With John Burns he was arrested in the fierce struggle that occurred. Cunninghame Graham was taken to Bow street, where, 24 hours later, his mother found him injured and hungry, waiting to be brought before the court. When he took the food she had brought he remarked solemnly: “ The condemned man ate heartily.” Shortly afterwards he was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. Five years later Cunninghame Graham’s parliamentary career terminated. He failed to secure re-election for North Lanarkshire. Politics, however, represented merely one episode in Cunninghame Graham’s life. In a hundred ways, but most of all by his writings, he gained fame. Tremendously independent and sincere, and with great powers of irony, he wrote many books which showed his wonderful gift of portraying all that ho had observed in life, particularly in Spanish America. He had an extraordinary affection for a good horse, and for long he was a familiar sight in the Row on his longtailed mustang. When he was over 80 ho delighted to ride bucking horses. Some years ago the death of a horse he had ridden for 26 j'ears made him mourn as if for a relative.

And once, writing to the late President Theodore Roosevelt, who had a great admiration for him, he exclaimed: r ‘ God forbid that I should go ‘to any Heaven in which there are no horses.” One of his early books was * Mogreb-El-Acksa ’ C The Far West ’), without which, Mr 6. B. Shaw has said, ‘ Captain Brassbound’s Conversion ’ would never have been/Written. This book, about a visit to a city --of Morocco in which no Christian had set foot, necessitated elaborate disguise by the author. He travelled as a Turkish doctor, “ Sheikh Mohammed el Fasi,” and carried with him a stock of quinine, eyewash, and seidlitz powders.. But this was one only of two dozen books he wrote, all marked by the strong individuality that was his characteristic in ordinary life. Mr G. B. Shaw, in a tribute to his astonishing personality, has described Cunninghame Graham as “so incredible a personage” that “there are moments when I do not myself believe in his existence.” One of the stories told by Cunninghame Graham was of a Texan who went off to get married, but arrived at the ranch without his bride. “ The weddin’ was fine,” he explained, “ but startin’ hack my wife was thrown off her mule because it stumbled into a hole. She broke her leg, and I had : to shoot her.” It was Cunninghame Graham who was mostly responsible for Mr Jacob Epstein being asked to be sculptor for the Hudson memorial of Rima in Hyde Park.