Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  The grim conditions forced political change. In Parliament the radical wing of the Liberal Party pushed for social and economic reform, while at grass-roots level the Socialist ideas of Marx had begun to reach an influential audience. The first Socialist political party, the Social Democratic Federation, was established in 1881. A second, the Socialist League, a breakaway from the SDF, followed in 1885. Though both parties were tiny, their militancy alarmed the authorities. In 1885 and 1886 both parties were forbidden by the London Metropolitan Police from holding public meetings. The Socialists refused to heed the ban and their meetings were often forcibly broken up, which attracted a good deal of public attention. In 1886, with unemployment at unprecedented levels, the SDF hijacked a demonstration against free trade in Trafalgar Square; hoisting a red flag, one of their leaders, John Burns, urged the crowd to revolution. When the police attempted to move them on a riot ensued. The rioters attacked carriages in Hyde Park, smashed windows and plundered shops. The police, caught unawares, instructed shopkeepers to put up their shutters. For several days, before order was restored, it seemed that the mob had gained the upper hand.

  The Socialists were not the only political group fomenting disorder in London in this period. During the 1880s, the question of Irish Home Rule dominated domestic politics and, from 1880, Irish terrorism returned to London with new boldness. The Fenians, the fraternity dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish republic, took their name from the Fianna, bands of ferocious warriors in Gaelic Ireland who lived apart from society and who might be called upon in times of war. For decades they had considered terror their most powerful political weapon. The Fenian dynamite campaign saw attacks on such London landmarks as the Tower of London, Westminster Hall, Mansion House and the House of Commons. In 1883, on the Metropolitan Railway near Paddington station, a bomb was dropped from a moving train, injuring seventy-two passengers.

  Unrest in the capital reached its fever pitch in 1887, the year that marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The celebrations were a riot of pageantry; immense crowds of Londoners turning out to cheer their monarch and her glittering procession. Several weeks later two Irish-Americans were arrested, complete with dynamite, in Islington, accused of plotting to assassinate the Queen as she made her way to the Jubilee service at Westminster Abbey. In nearby Trafalgar Square hundreds of London’s poorest families bedded down around the fountains, which offered water to drink and the chance for a free wash. Though the police were instructed to move them on, their numbers continued to rise. The poverty shocked some of London’s more compassionate citizens, who arranged for ‘bread vans’ to tour the square, handing out food. The local police superintendent disapproved of such largesse, claiming that it only made the problem worse. He described the no-good idlers whom he believed descended on the square in search of a free meal derogatively as ‘loafers’.

  By October the mood was sour. Under mounting pressure to deal with a situation described by the newspapers as a disgrace, the police grew more aggressive in their attempts to clear the square. There were skirmishes and arrests. On 8 November, Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, banned all meetings in Trafalgar Square. The effect on the Socialists was electric. Long riven by factional disagreement, they found themselves at last united in common cause: the right to freedom of speech and to peaceful protest.

  On 13 November, in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, smarting from their failures of the previous February, marchers converged on Trafalgar Square in outright defiance of the ban. This time the police left nothing to chance. The marchers were ambushed before they could reach the square. There was fighting in Shaftesbury Avenue, Parliament Street and the Strand. Three thousand police officers were supported by two squadrons of cavalry from the Life Guards, while, in front of the National Gallery, a company of Grenadier Guards occupied the square itself and fixed bayonets. Mercifully they proved unnecessary. The police prevailed without difficulty against the unarmed protestors. Two hundred marchers were injured in the fracas, many seriously. Two died.

  Though a second demonstration was organised for the following Sunday, the heat had gone out of the protests. Skirmishes continued till December but the efforts were fractured and disorganised. As Socialist activism directed its attentions increasingly towards the industrial struggles of the New Unionism, Bloody Sunday was to prove the high-water mark of what some Socialists had hoped would be the unstoppable tide of popular revolution.

  In stark contrast to the poor camped in Trafalgar Square, 1887 saw a very different kind of encampment establish itself in the western end of the capital. In April a company of over two hundred men, women and children pitched their tents at Earls Court. Numbered among them were one hundred cowboys and ninety-seven Indians, including the Sioux chief Red Shirt, as well as 180 horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, two deer and five wild steers. On 9 May Buffalo Bill’s Wild West opened its doors to the public. An adjunct to the American Exhibition, a trade fair for the promotion of American-manufactured products, the show re-enacted the key events of America’s pioneer history and boasted magnificent and elaborate scenery. Seventeen thousand railway-carriage-loads of rock and earth were used to simulate the Rockies and planted with mature trees brought from the Midlands.

  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a sensation, rapidly eclipsing the American Exhibition next door. It was not only the ambitiousness of the show that ensured its success. The show’s promoter, Major John Burke, was perhaps the world’s first PR supremo. Long before the show had even left New York harbour he was in London, buttering up the editors of the capital’s thirty-two newspapers and feeding them with tasty daily bulletins about the show and its exotic cast. Everything from the Indians’ fear of the sea (they believed that once they lost sight of land they would surely die) to the age of the youngest cowboy (Master Bennie Irving, aged five) was faithfully reported in the press. By the time the steamer disgorged the company in Gravesend on 13 April there was not a person in London who did not know that Buffalo Bill Cody was coming to town.

  Cody was adamant that the Wild West was an unvarnished picture of life on the American frontier but the show allowed itself some liberties. It was Cody who invented the war whoop we now associate with Indian braves, for he wanted their dramatic entrance into the arena to be as frightening as possible. Cody’s obsession with war bonnets also meant that the Indians in the Wild West were much more gloriously feathered than they could ever have afforded to be, even in pre-Custer times. Nor did he have any scruples about exploiting the alarming appearance of his Indians to promote the show. Dressed in war bonnets and with terrifyingly painted faces, his band of Indians was conducted around the sights of London as a walking advertisement.

  The Wild West made celebrities of many of its stars, including the cowboy Buck Taylor and the diminutive sharp-shooter Annie Oakley. Oakley was married, and her husband accompanied her to England, but Burke ensured that this was kept a secret. She attracted many admirers and several proposals of marriage. Cody himself was the toast of London, invited to innumerable high-society events and made an honorary member of several distinguished London clubs, including the Reform Club. The Lord Mayor even honoured him with a lunch at Mansion House. Cody too was married, although there was little evidence of it in his behaviour. In London he embarked upon a passionate affair with a young actress, Katherine Clemmons, which he made no effort to disguise, often taking her to dinner at the Savoy after the show.

  The success of the American Exhibition in general, and of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in particular, marked a fundamental shift in the relationship between Britain and America, sowing the seeds for a friendship that would shape the global politics of the twentieth century. Two and a half million people paid to see the Wild West during its six-month London run and, thanks to the efforts of Major Burke, scarcely a day went by when the newspapers did not carry a story about Buffalo Bill or his entourage. A good number were even true. Many were also exaggerated or knowingly set up for the purpose of charmi
ng the press. Though it is a beguiling story, I have my doubts as to whether one of Cody’s Indians really referred to the telegraph that connected the two coasts of the United States as the ‘singing wires’. Even Cody’s title of Colonel was not quite what it seemed – it was not a mark of military rank but rather an honorary title bestowed upon him by the Governor of Nebraska.

  Many of the Indians in Buffalo Bill’s show were prisoners of war, sold in bond to Cody by the US government. Such an idea sits uncomfortably with modern-day sensibilities. However it is plain that Cody treated his Indians a great deal better than they were treated in the government reservations, where promises were routinely broken and food was deplorably scarce. Furthermore, the Wild West highlighted the plight of the displaced Indians, ensuring that the question of their future was taken up by, and debated in, the English press.

  It was through his furious letters to the Daily Graphic on the plight of the Indians that I first encountered Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham. Each letter was a small masterpiece, bristling with anger and fierce irony. His Socialist leanings were immediately apparent – in one letter, written after the murder of Sioux chief Sitting Bull, he compared the plight of the Indians to the fate of the miserably paid tailors in the East End and declared furiously that ‘the mere accident of a little colouring matter in skin does not alter right or wrong and that the land was theirs, no matter to what uses they put it, centuries before the first white man sneaked timidly across the Atlantic’.

  It transpired that Robert Cunninghame Graham was a Scottish aristocrat, whose ancestors had long been radicals. One of his great-grandfathers had had his portrait painted with one hand pointing to a bust of Charles James Fox, a prominent eighteenth-century radical renowned for his impassioned campaigns against slavery and for parliamentary reform, and the other to the Bill of Rights. His maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was famous for having given away a valuable Allan Ramsay portrait of the Marquess of Bute because he could not stand to have a picture of a Tory grandee in the house. Cunninghame Graham’s maternal grandmother was Spanish and at her urging he travelled extensively in his youth, mostly in South America, working as a gaucho on the plains of Argentina. He attempted to establish several businesses in South America, including a ranch and a maté plantation, but he had little aptitude for business and none of his enterprises proved successful.

  Instead he returned to London, where the poverty and deprivation shocked him profoundly. Determined to push for reform he stood for Parliament as a Radical-Liberal. Once in the House he was a tireless campaigner, pushing hard for Irish Home Rule, land reform in Scotland, graduated income tax and a higher rate of tax on unearned income. He condemned Scotland’s hereditary chiefs and landowners, despite being one himself, claiming that ‘the unfortunate people starve, and the Tory government, to their cry for a meal, answers with bullets’.

  Cunninghame Graham attracted a good deal of attention, not all of it favourable. While William Morris praised the ‘brilliancy’ of his maiden speech to the Commons, plenty more dismissed him as a dilettante and poseur. Vanity Fair described his appearance as ‘something between Grosvenor Gallery aesthete and waiter in a Swiss cafe’, mockingly claiming him ‘a person of “cultchaw”’. He favoured an exotic style of dress, sporting jaunty bandannas and broad-brimmed hats, and, at Ascot, wore a gaucho knife under his dress suit. He was impetuous and chafed against the mechanisms of parliamentary procedure. In September 1887 an outburst against a series of Lords’ amendments to the Coal Mines Regulation Bill, in which he protested against the unelected nature of the Upper House, earned him a brief suspension from the Commons. Two months later, in November, he was arrested and imprisoned for his role in the Bloody Sunday riots. Bitterly disillusioned, Cunninghame Graham did not stand for re-election in 1892. Instead he joined with Keir Hardie to found the Scottish Labour Party which fielded five candidates of its own, none of them successfully. The SLP, which merged with other groups in 1893 to become the Independent Labour Party, was the foundation stone of the modern-day Labour Party.

  It will be perfectly clear by now that the character of Edward Campbell Lowe is modelled, politically at least, very closely on the real-life Robert Cunninghame Graham. This decision was deliberate – I wanted the politics that form the backdrop to the novel to be absolutely historically accurate. Beautiful Lies, however, is not at heart the story of Edward Campbell Lowe or, by association, of Robert Cunninghame Graham. The novel belongs to Maribel, and it was when I happened upon an article in a little-known literary journal that I knew I had my story.

  The article that led me to Maribel was written by Jad Adams and called ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s’. It opened with a story that featured heavily in all the books and biographies of Robert Cunninghame Graham. In 1878, at the London registry office on the Strand, he had married a Chilean woman ten years his junior. His wife, Gabriela, was the daughter of a French landowner, Don Francisco José de la Balmondière, and a Spanish mother. Both had been killed in an accident when Gabriela was twelve years old. Gabriela had then been sent to Paris where an aunt enrolled her in a convent school. The Cunninghame Grahams liked to relate how they had met by chance on the Champs-Elysées, when Gabriela was startled and almost knocked off her feet by Robert’s wayward horse. It was, as Robert’s friend, A. F. Tschiffely, cooed in his biography of 1937, ‘a case of love at first sight’.

  The story was very romantic. It was also, as Adams’s article revealed, a complete fiction, albeit one that had been successfully maintained long after its protagonists were dead and buried. Gabriela Cunninghame Graham died of dysentery in 1906, her husband thirty years later in 1936. It was not until 1985 that a previously undiscovered cache of family letters revealed the truth: Gabriela was not Chilean at all, nor was she called Gabriela. Her name was Carrie Horsfall and she had been born in 1860 in Masham, North Yorkshire. Her father was a surgeon. Carrie was his second daughter, and the second of thirteen children. In 1875, aged fifteen, she had run away from home and headed to London, determined to fulfil her dreams of becoming an actress. As for what had happened between then and her reappearance in 1878 as Robert’s wife, Adams could only speculate.

  Immediately I was smitten. I tried to find out more about Gabriela but it seemed that, beyond what had been included in the article, there was little more to discover. The fleeting references in her husband’s biographies were unrevealing. I tracked down a handful of her published articles and poems. I also found a brief entry in Study in Yellow, a history of the influential literary journal The Yellow Book, that as well as recounting (again) the story of their romantic Parisian encounter, claimed that, during Robert’s trial for illegal assembly after the Bloody Sunday riots, Gabriela had issued ‘At Home’ cards to all their friends, giving their address as Bow Street Police Court. Everything else that seemed to be known about her was contained in Adams’s short article. Gabriela Cunninghame Graham was beautiful and charming (W. B. Yeats apparently referred to her as the ‘bright little American’), smoked prodigiously, and had a weakness for Parisian dressmakers. She was also enamoured of mysticism and the esoteric, and wrote a biography of Santa Teresa of Avila, published in 1894.

  Only her mysticism prevented me from loving Gabriela Cunninghame Graham unreservedly. I could not help finding it peculiar, even improbable, that a woman who had once summoned the courage to run away from home to go on the stage would in later life succumb to what I considered to be mumbo-jumbo. I was certain from the outset that ‘my’ Gabriela was a sceptic, a woman with no time for visions and emanations and materialisations from beyond the grave. Almost immediately Maribel began to take shape in my mind.

  The irony of imagining the life of a woman who imagined it for herself is not lost on me but Beautiful Lies, though based in truth, is fundamentally a work of fiction. Unhooking myself from the real Gabriela allowed my imagination to take flight. There is no evidence that there was ever, during Gabriela’s life, a serious risk of her secr
et being discovered, but I could not help thinking how differently her story would have ended if there had been. The 1880s witnessed the emergence of a brand-new kind of journalism, one that laid the foundations for our modern tabloid press and that would, by the end of the decade, bring down Charles Parnell, the widely revered founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who, before scandal destroyed his career, had looked set to lead his country towards Home Rule (and from there perhaps, as some historians have argued, to all-Irish independence).

  The pioneer of this New Journalism was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead. Stead, who took up his editorship in 1883, was the first newspaper editor who fully understood that the great power of the press lay in its role as a conduit between an eagerly opinionated public and a political class eager to appropriate popular issues for political gain. (He was also the first editor to introduce to English newspapers the American convention of the interview.) The son of a Congregationalist minister, Stead was a chapel-going Nonconformist and though he had little education and was described by George Bernard Shaw as ‘stupendously ignorant’, had a thunderous sense of right and wrong. Stead’s father had considered the theatre to be the Devil’s Chapel, and novels the Devil’s Bible. Under Stead’s leadership the Pall Mall Gazette soon provided a lurid alternative to both, whipping itself into sensationalist frenzies under the auspices of moral outrage and setting the tone for tabloid newspapers ever after. Stead’s most infamous stunt, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, exposed the seamy underbelly of London’s sex trade and forced Parliament to raise the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. It also resulted in Stead, who had purchased a girl of twelve for £5 in order to show how easily it might be done, serving four months in prison for trafficking in child bondage.