OBITUARY: ‘A REBEL ARISTOCRAT’, by Henry W. NEVINSON (ABRIDGED), OUTLOOK & THE MODERN SCOT, MAY 1936

The sudden news in the middle of March that Cunninghame Graham had died startled me. Ever since I came to know him fifty years ago he had always seemed to me an immortal type rather than an actual man subject to change and death like the rest of us. In the Trafalgar Square Riots of 1887, there he was, with John Burns, Hyndman and William Morris protesting against the violent suppression of a great meeting called on behalf of persecuted Ireland. Tall, very slim, with sharply pointed beard and masses of brown hair, speaking with restrained gestures in a fearlessly penetrating voice, dressed quietly, but to perfection, he stood conspicuous among all the crowds, the very model of a fine and knightly figure. He seemed a return – a ‘throw-back’ – to the age of romance and unselfish devotion. Bonnie Prince Charlie in the best years of his youth may have looked like that, and have exerted the same kind of personal attraction upon all who came under his charm.

Except for whitening his hair and deepening the wrinkles on his thin and active face, age did not change his appearance much, and never changed his spirit at all. In the preface to Captain Brassbound, Bernard Shaw thus described him in 1901:

Mrs. Shaw was quite right. Cunninghame Graham, though a Socialist, always remained a gentleman. Our history has supplied us with many of those aristocrat and wealthy people – Byron, Shelley, William Morris – who were always on the side of the common people, and Cunninghame Graham was another conspicuous example.