CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM’S CAREER IN the public eye demonstrated a remarkable longevity, spanning over fifty years: from an aristocratic ‘cowboy-dandy’ and radical enfant terrible of the British political establishment, he moved to a state of near veneration amongst every class in society. In 1927, the gossip columnist of the popular Sunday Post reported, ‘There are few men nowadays so well known as Mr R. B. Cunninghame Graham’, and on his death in 1936 his early biographer Tschiffely believed that ‘his name will surely grow’. However, he quickly faded from both the academic and the public consciousness, and a mere sixteen years later, on his centenary, the cultural revivalist Hamish Henderson asked the question, ‘Who Remembers Cunninghame Graham?’

There have been brief episodes of reawakened interest in Graham. These were stimulated by occasional biographies and new anthologies of his writings, references by writers and academics who portrayed him as a visionary or a quaint anomaly, and more recently by exaggerated or simplistic claims, often sponsored by those who wished to promote or justify their own political agendas. There have also been periodic attempts to reignite interest by those whom Wendell Harris dubbed ‘eager champions’, but Graham’s name and reputation have stubbornly refused rehabilitation, and his many literary works, which were never commercially popular in his lifetime, remain little read. Consequently, his champions have focused on the romantic aspects of his life. Foremost among these were his part-Spanish ancestry, his early adventures among the gauchos and natives of South America, and his travels in Morocco; his radicalism and erratic behaviour as a Liberal Member of Parliament and the first declared ‘socialist’ there, and the formation of an early Labour party; his large literary output, and his role as an inspirational Scottish patriot. These have, however, obscured rather than illuminated Graham’s life, and aggregated, they have left us with a unique simulacrum of a romantic idealist, aesthete, and dilettante – portrayals and perceptions that this study will challenge.

The reasons for Graham’s eclipse were complex, but part of the explanation is that his career appeared both disparate and contradictory, bifurcated between the radical political campaigner and ardent polemicist, and a nostalgic essayist; a nationalist and an internationalist; a Justice of the Peace and a disturber of the peace.