A DESCENDENT of SNP founding president Robert Cunningham Graham hopes a film exploring his adventurous life and political impact could be made.
James Jauncey, who recently wrote a biography about his great-great-uncle, spoke to The National ahead of an event hosted by SNP leader and First Minister John Swinney.
The pair are to feature in a sold-out show as part of the Pitlochry Winter Words Festival later this month to talk about the book, which also features moments of Jauncey's own life.
"There's been quite a lot of touch points in my life and, and in his," Jauncey explains. The great-great nephew followed in his uncle's footsteps to South America 100 years after the latter, and is also a keen supporter of Scottish independence, coming to the cause later in life.
Jauncey claims the "multi-faceted character" would be the perfect topic of a biopic, and is necessary since the man who shaped the modern day politics of the UK is "better known in Argentina than he is in Scotland".
"His story would make a wonderful film," Jauncey said, adding: "He is slightly difficult for storytellers because there's so many aspects to his life."
Best known in the UK as the co-founder of the Labour Party and key in the formation of the SNP, Cunninghame Graham was born in 1852 and led an extraordinary life not many are aware of today.
But Cunninghame Graham (below, right) is best known in South America as Don Roberto, a nickname given to him by the cowboys in Argentina he rode with from the age of 18-years-old in 1870.
He made the journey to remake his families fortune after his father, who had mental health problems, gambled the majority away.
Jauncey (above, left) shared: "Robert had to be taken out of school, and when accountants really got to grips with the with the financial state of the family affairs, they discovered that Robert's father had run up absolutely enormous amounts of debt in in today's terms, millions of pounds' worth.
"So he had to leave the house and his father was taken away because he was considered to be a danger to his family."
The young man went to South America because cattle ranching had just started in South America. When he arrived in Argentina in 1870, there was a severe drought and brutal civil war going on.
Moments he witnessed stayed with him for the rest of life and would inform his political motivations in his later years.
"It ignited his sense of social justice," said Jauncey.
He added: "It was the thing that then went on to drive him when he went into politics, this very strong sense of the fact that everybody should have a a decent life and a very strong sense of social justice.
"There was there were those who had nothing and those who had lots, and he felt that that imbalance needed to be redressed."
The farm he was going to work on was in ruins, so he left and spent six of the next eight years in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and became an incredibly good horseman.
The slightly eccentric SNP uncle?
After several commercial failures including trying to grow mate tea, he returned to Scotland.
He started to see the scenes he saw in South America around him in Scotland. People were desperately poor, doing terrible jobs working in coal mines and steel factories in areas like North West Lanarkshire, where he eventually became an MP.
"It was sort of the tail end of the clearances. There were a lot of Highlanders coming down to work in the industrial inferno in the west of Scotland, and there was a lot of unrest in Ireland at that time too.
"He was someone who very early in recognising that the working man and woman had a really raw deal, and he was determined to do something about it.
"Which is how he then came to team up with Keir Hardie and found the Labour Party."
Jauncey said Labour have "definitely written him" out of their history because, although he was a socialist, he was also an aristocrat who went on to become a nationalist.
"I don't really know with the SNP. I think some people are aware of him, but I think he's sort of seen as a slightly eccentric uncle," Jauncey laughed.
The year before he died, there was a General Election, the SNP took under 1% of the vote. Jauncey said Cunninghame Graham would be delighted by the way the movement has grown.
He added: "He would also be as frustrated as all the rest of us are, I'm sure, at how blocked we are and how we don't seem to be able to really get past the sort of 50% mark, although I know things are shifting at the moment."
His later life
CUNNINGHAME Graham spent six years in Parliament, which Jauncey puts down to be being "burnt out".
Jauncey said: "I think he probably had a kind of breakdown at the end of it because he'd been going so hard and so fast for a short period of time. He has been trying to get the eight-hour working day, better working conditions for working people and championing underdogs all over the place. I think he was just exhausted."
From the age of about of 50 until he died in his 80s, he wrote almost a book a year.
He wrote 35 books in the second half of his life, and is now being taught to first years in the University of Glasgow's literature course.
When asked which is a good one for readers to start with, Jauncey said Mogreb-el-Acksa, the story of his time in Morocco disguised as a Turkish sheikh to find the "forbidden" city of Taroudant but then held to ransom by a warlord in the Atlas mountains.
The Winter Words Festival will be held at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from February 21 to 23
