Jamie Jauncey looks back on the life and work of his great-great-uncle in his latest book. David Robinson talks to him about having such a pioneering historical figure in his family.

Don Roberto: The Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham
By Jamie Jauncey
Published by Scotland Street Press

When he was 23, James (Jamie) Jauncey found himself in the presidential palace at Buenos Aires, looking up at a portrait of a handsome, bearded man astride a fine black stallion. The man in John Lavery’s portrait, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a gaucho’s cape, and seemingly at one with both his horse and the empty landscape of the Argentinian pampas, was his great-great-uncle, RB Cunninghame Graham, ‘a fantastic combination of Don Quixote and Sir Gawain, Indiana Jones and the Lone Ranger’.

Even stripped of hyperbole, Cunninghame Graham’s life had the kind of width and verve that seems impossible now, and was rarely matched in either the nineteenth century, when he co-founded the Scottish Labour Party, or the twentieth, when he was the founding co-president of the SNP. Consider the evidence. Here is a descendant of the Earls of Menteith and the first MP (a radical Liberal; the Labour Party did not then exist) to declare himself a socialist in the House of Commons. A writer of 30 books – including one which ‘broke the mould of travel writing’ and one which told the story that became the film The Mission – who also tried his hand as a Argentinian rancher, a Uruguayan horse trader, and took his wife on a dangerous 600-mile mule train to Mexico. A maverick who took up the cause of Irish republicanism and was jailed for defying the Home Secretary’s ban on a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, who supported Scotland’s striking miners and campaigned for an eight-hour working day. His friend, the novelist Joseph Conrad – who dedicated Typhoon to him – once wrote that by comparison, he felt as though he had lived his whole life in a dark hole.

When he stood in front of Lavery’s portrait half a century ago, Jauncey felt he knew everything he needed to know about the man Argentinians knew as ‘Don Roberto’. He was, after all, the family’s great hero, especially to his mother, who remembered him fondly from her own childhood and who also wrote a biography of him.

‘His name was forever on my mother’s lips so he was there in our childhood, offstage but somehow very present, and he assumed a kind of mythic status. She told us so many stories of him – about his time in Argentina, the story of Bloody Sunday (the violent 1887 Trafalgar Square demo at which he was beaten by police and arrested), and of how he was captured in the Atlas Mountains, and so on.

‘I didn’t feel any obligation to live up to him, but when I reached my sixties, I realised that I couldn’t any longer live with this two-dimensional colossus in the family landscape. I wanted to demythologise him, to find out what he was really about and what he was like as a person.

‘There are already five or six biographies, though the first two were almost written at his own behest. And it’s not really that the other got things wrong so much as that I felt I could tell the story through a slightly different lens.’

Jauncey admits that his book isn’t the result of long years poring over primary sources in the archives (which in any case were shut because of the pandemic). Instead, it is a personalised quest to come to terms with a larger-than-life ancestor, and Jauncey’s reflections on his own life as a writer (he has five novels to his name), traveller, and a family member that also adds depth to his portrait. While some biographers seem to strain every sinew to present an image of their subject as consistent, Jauncey leaves room for complexity and contradiction.

Even his parents’ attitude to Don Roberto differed wildly, he points out. ‘My father was a small-c conservative, a diligent jurist who liked to be out of the spotlight. Robert loved the spotlight, and so to my father he was both dangerous politically and had an extravagant personality. Yet to my late mother, Robert was glamorous and kind and she hero-worshipped him. Her own biography (Gaucho Laird, by Jean Cunninghame Graham, 2005) is a semi-fictionalised version of his life and yet she barely mentions Robert’s nationalism at all and I think she thought it was just a pose, an aberration. She wasn’t of a generation able to take it seriously.’

Jauncey harbours no such doubts. ‘You have only to read the speeches to sense the depth of his connection with Scotland,’ he says, pointing out that the Scottish Labour Party under Keir Hardie was committed to home rule – a policy it only dropped in 1927, when Don Roberto became active in the national movement.

‘What convinces me that he wasn’t fooling around in his politics is that, right from the start of his career, he was a humanitarian. In South America he had seen people living in desperate conditions and had been deeply touched by it. When he came back to Scotland and saw the conditions the miners were living in, he realised that a Liberal government, funded to some extent by the mine owners, was never going to take their cause on board, so he determined to do something for them – which is why he pressed for an eight-hour working day.’

Mavericks like Don Roberto fascinate because they stand outside of their own time. Reading Jauncey’s biography makes clear why he was able to do this: Robert’s father’s mental illness, the debts into which this plunged the family, and Robert’s own failure to make his fortune – all of this gave him a mindset at variance with so many late Victorian values. His marriage to the rather wonderful Gabriela (to my mind an even greater maverick) proved the point: ostensibly born in Chile to a French father, in reality she was a probably a Yorkshire teenage mother who ran away to London and then Paris to work either on the stage or possibly as a prostitute.  As James Robertson points out in the foreword, the story of Robert’s marriage ‘is so romantic that it would hardly stand scrutiny as a novel’.

But even though mavericks fascinate, we’re never quite sure of them. And that, says Jauncey, is the reason that Don Roberto isn’t as recognised today as he should be: we find him just too hard to place. As an example, he mentions his journey, disguised as a Turkish doctor, to a part of Morocco forbidden to foreigners, during which he was briefly imprisoned by a local warlord. When Mogreb el Aksa was published in 1898, Conrad hailed it as ‘the travel book of the century’, while Hugh MacDiarmid later described it as ‘one of the best books of travel ever written’.

‘There’s a genuine mystery about the whole journey,’ says Jauncey. ‘Did he go there for the hell of it – because he often did do things for no other reason. Or was he spying for the British government and reporting back to Sir Arthur Nicholson, his distant relative who was then the permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, what the tribes were up to in southern Morocco? Or was he on a commercial enterprise? All are perfectly possible.’

One of those would, I suggest, knock on the head the idea that he was an anti-imperialist (for which, I should add, there is also plenty of evidence). ‘It would’ Jauncey agrees.  ‘But this is where he is fascinating because he is just so full of contradictions.’

In his book, he lists some of them. Don Roberto was, he writes ‘the aristocratic socialist, the Scottish laird with the manners of a Spanish hidalgo, the hard-riding dandy, the romantic realist, the cosmopolitan nationalist; the progressive who deplored the effects of progress, the visionary antiquarian, the anti-imperialist, anti-racist admirer of the Spanish Conquest, the moderniser with one foot in the past, the disdainful writer of literary prefaces who could chatter easily in Scots with his tenants …’

When he looked at Sir John Lavery’s portrait of Don Roberto, Jamie Jauncey saw a singularly interesting person with hardly any of these complexities. Fifty years on, his own fine portrait of one of the most fascinating Scots of his era contains them all.

Don Roberto: The Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham by James Jauncey is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £24.99.