MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1936, Page 4

MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

A LIFE OF ADVENTURE. BUENOS AIRES, March 20. Air R. B. Cunninghame Graham, author, traveller and politician, died here yesterday evening. Air. Cunninghame Graham. w,ho was 84, was taken ill with congestion of the lungs a few days ago. He arrived here last month, intending to spend six months in South America. A week ago he was received in audience by President Justo of Argentina. Few people in the world possessed so glamorous a personality as Robert Routine Cunninghame Graham. That his death should have occurred in his beloved Somli America seems curiously appropriate (says the London “Daily Telegraph.”) He was a man who, all through his adventurous life, stood out vividly against, his surroundings. With his strikingly handsome beard trimmed neatly to a point, his flowing mous-1 tacho, loos' 1 necktie and soft hat, ho carried himself with so romantic an air that irresistibly he became al

Velasquez to the life, a dashing cavalier, a Don Quixote. His intimate friends never addressed him by any other name than “Don Roberto.” Dominating his life was the chivalry of another age. His father was a Scottish laird who hud been in the Scots Greys, his mother, a sister of the 14th 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 no! 17, and for the next IS years he lived in the Argentine and Mexico.

Loving tile pampas like a Gauclio, and just as skilled on a horse as with a lasso, he delighted in a care-free life that allowed him to travel for long distances soiling mules or cattle. Then, having married Gabriele, the Chilean daughter of Don Francisco Jose de la Balmondiere, he returned to Scotland. His father had died 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 lf)0(>.

ARRESTED IN RIOTS. 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 of George Bernard Shaw. Y\ hist lor. William Morris, Joseph Conrad, and W. 11. Hudson. In 1887 came the Trafalgar-sqnare 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 lie 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-elec-tion for North Lanarkshire. Politics, however, represented merely ono 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 he 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 he delighted to ride bucking horses. Some years ago the. death of a horse he had ridden for 2G years 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: “God forbid that 1 should go to any Heaven in which there are no horses.” One of his early books was “Mogreb-El-Acksa” (“The Far West”), without which, Mr. G. 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 Mohammend el Fasi,” and carried with him a stock of quinine, eyewash and seidlitz powders. But this was only one of the dozenn books he wrote, all marked by the strong individuality that was his charactertistic 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 Cunninghanie 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’ back my wife was thrown off her mule because it stumbled into a hole. She broke her leg and 1 had to shoot, her.”

It was Cunninghamo Graham who was mostly responsible for Mr. Jacob Epstein being’ asked to be sculptor of the Hudson memorial of Rima in Hyde Park.