Alistair Heather talked to Billy Kay about his forthcoming radio series on the extraordinary life of RB Cunninghame Graham

FEW families in Scotland can claim an aristocratic pedigree as long or as storied as the Grahams. Look back to the Wars of Scottish Independence and a Graham is found right at the shoulder of the Wallace. Another of the Grahams was a great friend and patron to Rabbie Burns. Burns even wrote his First Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry Esq to him. Grahams, in short, crop up every century or so either doing something intensely significant or else hanging close by the elbow of the movers and shakers of the day.

A Graham that carried forward both of these attributes, with both a high circle of friends and a catalogue of tremendous personal achievements, was politician Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, also known as Don Roberto, who was to the fore at the turn of the 20th century.

READ MORE: The Gaucho Laird - Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham

This adventurer, socialist, activist and jailbird, whose aristocratic family lands once stretched over vast swathes of the country, is now getting a much-deserved radio show to remind Scotland of his great achievements and thrilling adventures.

This week I sat down with the show’s producer and presenter Billy Kay to hear more about the man and the stories. The interview was conducted largely in Kay’s mither tongue, Scots.

Graham is a figure Kay has studied over many years, and his passion and knowledge come out both in the radio shows and in conversation. He began by recounting how Graham “grew up in Gartmore, in a faimly that was pairt o the Scottish establishment”.

Kay continues: “Wan o them marriet a Spaniard, so he grew up wi a knowledge o Spanish culture, an spikkin Spanish. He grew up kennin how tae ride a horse, how tae use a sword. When he came of age, his mither sent him aff tae Argentina. There was an early Scottish colony in Argentina, it was called the Monte Grande colony, so there was a history of Scottish agricultural settlement in that country.

“The Grahams were freens o the Ogilvies, wan o the big east-coast faimlies. Yin o the Ogilvies had a big estate in Argentina. Whit dae ye dae tae gie the boy some mair life experience? Send him tae Argentina tae stay wi the Ogilvies. But when he arrives there, he gets swept up in a revolution, an joins a revolutionary airmy.”

Indeed, the Argentine sept of the Ogilvies proved themselves to be inefficient, perhaps rendered so by a fondness for drink. Graham soon found that he had little to learn from them. Instead, the bold teenager became a gaucho – a South American cowboy.

Kay explains: “Political turmoil swept him away. He became pairt of the revolution. He survives all that, which a lot of people didnae, but stayed on as he’d fell in love with the liftsyle o the gaucho. There’s a photae o Graham dressed as a gaucho, an ye talk aboot gallus, this is the personification of gallus.”

The gauchos were agricultural workers, farmhands, itinerant workers, and are very much as mythologised as their North American counterparts the cowboys. For all that Graham loved the simplicity of this life and the long journeys on the great open plains of the Pampas, his mind was constantly working.

Kay points out: “He was aware o revolution politics, of the landowner haudin doon the tenant, an haudin doon the native people. He cared aboot warkin men, an cam tae unnerstaun them. This added tae his unnerstaunin o the warld, a perspective he brought back tae Scotland. When he got hame, he stood for the miners, an the warkin people o Scotland.”

For most, a career as a gaucho and being an active part in a revolutionary South American war would be enough excitement for a lifetime. But moving back home in his twenties, it became clear that Don Roberto, as he had been affectionately termed by his fellow gauchos, was only just getting started.

Kay says: “Him an Keir Hardie set up the Scottish Labour Pairty thegither. Graham got sterted doon in Westminster as an MP, but quickly became disillusioned wi it. He cried Westminster ‘an asylum fir incapables’. He became that famous that George Bernard Shaw based a character in a play on him, an Joseph Conrad said that Graham’s colourful life made Conrad himself feel as though ‘I had lived all my life in a dark hole’.”

Unlike many Scottish MPs that journey to Westminster, however, Graham never lost sight of Scotland’s interests.

“He aye supportit an independent Scotland. He realised the limitations of Westminster, an that his desire fir representation of Scotland wad aye be wattered doon. He saw an independent Scotland as a place whaur his ideals wad be mair easily realised than through Westminster.”

Graham stood on a bold platform as an MP. He argued for dissolution of the House of Lords, nationalisation of land, nationalisation of coal mines, Home Rule for the nations of the UK as a staging post to independence and many other radical policies.

“He was pairt o the movement fir Irish Home Rule. In fact he was arrested efter the first Bluidy Sunday, a great demonstration he wis involved wi. It wis fir higher wages, an employment, but it hud an Irish Home Rule element. Graham got his heid bashed by the polis, when they moved in wi truncheons an attacked. He wis in Pentonville fir six weeks. He wis an Irish Home Rule supporter before he was a Scottish Home Rule supporter. He wis fir indigenous peoples nae maitter whaur they were.”

The radio series has a powerful quote that confirms this. It is taken from a letter of Graham’s to a London newspaper that addresses the North American government’s extermination policy of the indigenous peoples, and refers to the Sioux Indians’ ‘Ghost dances’. The letter reads: “I wonder if the British public realises that it is the Sioux themselves that are the ghosts dancing. Ghosts of a primeval race, ghosts of ghosts for 300 years, through no crimes committed by themselves, except that of being born, if it be not a crime to love better the rustle of the grass than the shrieking of the engine.”

Graham went on to become the honorary president of the Scottish National Party in 1934 shortly before his death, and within SNP circles his name may still resonate. But his fame should be far wider than that. His international outlook, his solidarity with workers regardless of race or ethnicity, his tireless championing of that which is just, and his staunch opposition to tyranny in whichever form he found it make him a man that people of every stripe can admire.

Billy Kay's five-part series Don Roberto begins on February 20 at 1.30pm on BBC Radio Scotland, with each episode available for 30 days after broadcast on the BBC Radio iPlayer