The Star on Cunninghame Graham’s ‘Copy’, People’s Press, 3 September 1890

Mr. Cunninghame Graham, says our contemporary the Star, has unwittingly gone within an ace of bringing about a strike and causing a revolution in his office. He sent us a letter the other day from Liverpool. That letter was 24 pages long, and was headed ‘Dancing and Barricades.’ It has made everyone dance who touched it, and still remains an insurmountable barricade. It cannot be read. Mr. Graham’s handwriting is sometimes crotchety, but this specimen of his calligraphy was about as legible as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The letter has been touring about the office for several days – from the editor to the printer, from the printer to the reader, from the reader to the sub-editor, and back to the printer again in a cycle – a cycle which threatened to end in revolution. Everyone has wrestled with it, but no one has been able to dig a continuous story out of it. The head printer put on his glasses and tore his hair over it, until he now wears an aged look and a wig. And expert comp was called in, but the only evidence he gave was that in Clowes’ office the men refused to set Mr. Graham’s copy. A strike was ordered at once unless the copy was withdrawn. It was withdrawn and handed to the reader, who found his occupation gone, and gave notice. The sub-editor has had a tussle with it, took it home to sleep over, but has not slept or worked since. The application of a microscope only diminished the legibility, and a magnifying glass only increased our difficulties. The copy remained undecipherable.

(We tearfully sympathise with the men of the Star. Two of our own most valued men, after a prolonged struggle with one of Graham’s articles, retired to the peaceful seclusion of a padded room at Colney Hatch. Ed. The People’s Press.)

Graham attributed his disability to an accident with a horse. In a letter to Henry Arthur Jones in 1919, he wrote: