Bad Willie’s Crime

Every family has its black sheep and in our family, it is William Cunningham Cunninghame Graham of Gartmore and Finlaystone (1775 – 1845), who is known by a number of soubriquets: “Bad Willie”, “The Runaway Laird” and “The Swindler”.

Born into a wealthy family and given every advantage, William was described as “a person of considerable accomplishments” who “although he possessed a love for the fine arts, it was in the more imitative and mechanical ones that he excelled”, being “without rival at turning the lathe”. And, indeed, he left some very fine ivory pieces, including a chess set with which my grandfather and I used to play our coffee-house games.

In his youth, William fell in with the Prince Regent’s set becoming an inveterate gambler.  He squandered the family art collection and the estates he had inherited (hence, “Bad Willie”) and by 1828 he had been forced to flee to the continent to escape his creditors (earning him the epithet of “Runaway Laird”).  But it is how he came to be known as “The Swindler” that is the most interesting part of his story.

Having lived briefly in Brussels and Tours, Bad Willie moved to Florence in 1832 with his second wife, Janet, their son Alexander and their daughters Susan and Margaret.  He was joined a couple of years later by his stepson, Allan George Bogle, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, who had been on half-pay for about two years.

Bad Willie made his living in Florence by mechanically reproducing the rare engravings of artists such as Rafael Morghen, Domenichino and Guido Reni with great genius by use of a machine of his own design.  It was there that he fatefully made the acquaintance of the Marquis de Bourbel, a schemer, who had married an English heiress, and was now plotting to swindle the bankers Glyn & Co out of £1,000,000 by means of forged letters of credit.

Bad Willie was clearly at the heart of the plot, as was his stepson, whom he helped to enter into a partnership with two respected gentlemen of commerce to form a new bank “Bogle, Kerritch & Co, whose business rapidly grew to be highly profitable thanks to Mr Kerritch’s business contacts.  In 1839, Bad Willie introduced the Marquis de Bourbel to Bogle, Kerritch & Co as an investor.  But that was not his main contribution to the plot.  It was Bad Willie’s particular skill and his tracing machine that De Bourbel wanted so as to mechanically forge to perfection the signatures of Glyn, Hallifax, Mills and Co for the faked letters of credit.

The plot moved on apace when De Bourbel went to London where he encountered an old friend, another gambler of good family, the Baron d’ Arjuzon, who gladly joined the scheme.  Together they managed to procure the same paper Glyn & Co used for their letters of credit and then in January 1840 obtained a genuine letter of credit from them from the strong box of Bogle Kerritch & Co. of which Bogle was the custodian.

Another of the band, calling himself Comte de Paindry, tested his forged letter of credit by presenting it at Bogle, Kerritch & Co and received £200.  However, he returned the money the following day claiming that a shopkeeper had cast doubt on the authenticity of the letter.  He stated that rather than have his honourable name brought into question he would rather cancel the transaction, which the bank did, noting on the letter that it had been done at “the request of the bearer.”  This had the benefit of allaying suspicion and reassuring other lenders.

Once they had their forged letters, 6 of the conspirators travelled in pairs to different countries under assumed names to start presenting their letters on the same day, 19^th April.  At first, all went well and they were able to draw large sums, but as is often the case, they got greedy.  D’Arjuzon successfully withdrew £750 in Brussels, but his companion, Perry (alias Ireland), was refused a further £750 in Antwerp the following day as the banker was suspicious that another advance was needed so soon and contacted the police.  Perry was arrested on the Ostend Ferry fleeing the country, which news caused the rest of the gang to decamp in great haste.

Nonetheless, they had managed to defraud various banks in Italy, Belgium, France and the Rhineland of the vast sum of £10,700 6s (about £1.22 million in today’s money) in just 6 days.  Surprisingly, none of the principal conspirators suffered any serious consequence.  Bad Willie’s family were not so fortunate.

The Times had published a letter on 26^th May from one of their correspondents, Joseph Lawson, in which the fraudsters had been named, including Bad Willie, his son Alexander and his stepson, Allan Bogle.

Bogle sued Lawson for defamation of character.  However, the evidence of his involvement was such that the jury awarded him the paltry damages of just one farthing, and, as the judge refused to certify, he had to bear all of his legal costs.  His reputation and finances ruined, he died 10^th April, 1843 in Westminster.

According to The Times, Alexander, who was described as a “debauched and dissolute young man”, was living under an assumed name in France “in great want and misery”, when he died of an infectious disease in a nursing home near Paris, less than a year after the scandal.  He was just 23 years of age.

Bad Willie was arrested in Florence – probably having returned to try and destroy his machine –  and then expelled from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany with a ban from ever returning.  He eventually made his way back to London, where he died some five years later without ever facing any punishment.

A Tale of Two Thomases

In the south aisle of the parish church of Harrow-on-the-Hill, there is a monument which bears the arms of Graham of Gartmore on its base. It is the tomb of Thomas Graham, Apothecary-General to the Army and Apothecary to Kings George I & II, who was born ca 1666 and who died in Pall Mall on 14th May 1733. He had a son Daniel (to whom we shall return later), who was also an apothecary to kings (George II & III) at the Chelsea Hospital.

Memorial to Thomas Graham (1666-1733), St Mary’s, Harrow-on-the-Hill  (Photo by Edwardx, Wikipedia Commons )

In about 1699, hundreds of miles away in Scotland, another Thomas Graham was born. He was the third son of Robert Graham MD of Gallingad (later of Gartmore) and his wife Isabel, daughter of Nicol Bontine of Ardoch.

Like his father and older brother Walter, this Thomas too became an apothecary. While Robert had practised medicine in Edinburgh up until he inherited the Gartmore estates from his cousin Mary Hodge, his two sons were destined for greater things. Walter was to become Apothecary-General to the Army in America (but died unmarried in Kingston, Jamaica in May 1742) while Thomas was an Apothecary to George II, making him a contemporary of Daniel Graham at the Chelsea Hospital. In 1756, the wealthy Thomas bought the lands of Buchlyvie-Graham from James Graham of Buchlyvie, but he did not enjoy them for long as he died unmarried in March 1764.

While the ancestry of Thomas Graham of Buchlyvie is certain, that of the other Thomas Graham is far from clear. All that is known is that he was the son of Alexander Graham, who may or may not have been the son of one Robert Graham, an apothecary, who is believed to have come to London at about the same time as the Stuart king (James VI & I). However, there are no Roberts or Alexanders (neither being common names at that period) among the Gartmore Grahams. As there is no evidence that either Thomas ever matriculated arms, the Gartmore Arms (first matriculated by Nicol Graham of Gartmore in 1772) are therefore used illegally as noted by Lord Lyon Thomas Innes of Learney (and had the memorial been in Scotland, the family would have been legally obliged to remove the arms), who none-the-less confounded the two Thomases in a case in 1957, in which a supposed descendant of the Harrow Thomas tried to block a descendant of Nicol Graham of Gartmore (d 1775) from matriculating the Graham of Gartmore arms in his own name.

But there is a twist in this tale.

In the Farrington Diary, the artist relates that he and his fellow artist Sir George Beaumont visited the house of William Cunninghame Graham (a great-nephew of Thomas Graham of Buchlyvie, known to his family by the epithet, Bad Willie) in May 1805. There they admired a portrait of four children which was painted by Hogarth in 1742. Farrington was led to believe that it portrayed his host and sisters when Bad Willie was about 8 or 9 years old.

Full title: The Graham Children
Artist: William Hogarth
Date made: 1742
Source: http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/
Contact: picture.library@nationalgallery.co.uk
Copyright © The National Gallery, London

As Don Roberto rightly points out in his biography of Bad Willie’s father (Robert Graham of Gartmore, known in the family as Doughty Deeds), this could not be Bad Willie as he wasn’t born until 1775 (11 years after Hogarth’s death). Don Roberto then makes one of his false assumptions. He assumes that as it was in his great-grandfather’s possession it must be of the Gartmore family and that Farrington must have misunderstood (I think it more likely, given Bad Willie’s proclivity for embellishment, that Farrington understood perfectly, but I am less generous than Don Roberto) and it was in fact a portrait of Bad Willie’s father. But had Don Roberto paused to think, he would have realised that this claim is equally dubious.

Doughty Deeds was only 7 in 1742 and was the second of three sons, so where is his elder brother, William? Furthermore, his two sisters (Elizabeth and Isabella) were the youngest of the five children, so who is the eldest girl in the portrait?

Remember I promised to return to Daniel Graham the apothecary, son of the Harrow Thomas Graham. The portrait, it turns out, is of his four children (left to right), Thomas (1740-42), Henrietta (b 1733), Anna Maria (b 1738) and Richard (b 1735). How the portrait came to be in Bad Willie’s possession (in Don Roberto’s day it was in the possession of Lord Normanton and is currently in the National Gallery in London) or why he tried to pass it off as being of him and his sisters to his artist friends we shall probably never know.

FOOTNOTE

Having mentioned Lord Lyon Innes of Learney and his confounding of the two utterly unrelated Thomases, which automatically invalidated Mrs Walz’s claim (for which she improperly offered “no evidence or pedigree or such like”), I would like to make some points arising from his judgement and, in particular, his obiter dictum concerning the name and arms of Bontine of Ardoch.

His Lordship criticises the passing of Ardoch to the eldest son, who none-the-less used the name and arms of Bontine until he succeeded his father, when he became Graham of Gartmore, as improper and “contrary to the entailer’s intention that his family should be perpetuated”, ruling the entire line to be “conventionally dead” and thus, having no entitlement to either the name or arms of Bontine of Ardoch.  In this, he was, no doubt, absolutely correct.

However, his Lordship apparently made the assumption that the intention of the entail was breached right from the outset, implying that Nicol (d 1775) should have devolved Ardoch on his younger brother Thomas.  However, as both Thomas (d 1764) and his older brother, Walter (d 1741 – of whom the Lyon was seemingly unaware), predeceased their last Bontine cousin, William (d 1770), it was legally impossible for Nicol to devolve Ardoch on either of them. 

In fact, Nicol followed the entail to the letter, devolving the Ardoch on to his second son, Robert (1735-97), who duly adopted the Bontine name and arms as required and managed the estate, where he built a new house.  The difficulty occurred when the elder son, William (d 1774), predeceased his father and Robert unexpectedly became heir to Gartmore.  As his younger brothers had also apparently predeceased their father, he had no choice but to temporarily devolve Ardoch on his infant son, William (b 1775), before transferring it to his second son, Nicol (b 1778). 

All would have been well had the said Nicol retained the estate, but on inheriting the more profitable estates of Jarbuck & Monihive, he disponed Ardoch onto his eldest nephew, Robert (1799 – 1863), who was heir to Gartmore, rather than to the younger surviving nephew, Douglas (1805 – 56).  And it is only at this juncture (in 1845, 75 years after the death of the last Bontine of Ardoch) that the tradition of passing Ardoch to the eldest son on succeeding to Gartmore commenced.

Robert, incorrectly, disponed Ardoch on his eldest son William (1825-83), who incidentally retained the Bontine name even after succeeding to Gartmore in 1863.  He, in turn, disponed Ardoch on his eldest son Robert (1852-1936), during whose lifetime, Gartmore was sold.  Robert, being childless, left Ardoch to his only nephew, Angus (1893-1981), the petitioner, who adopted the Bontine name into his own on succeeding, as had his uncle on succeeding to Gartmore over half a century earlier.

The last Cunninghame Graham of Gartmore & Ardoch was Angus’s only son, Robert Elphinstone (b 1925) who, being aware of the ruling, did not adopt the Bontine name (despite being pressured by Lord Lyon Monteith Grant to resume the custom of the heir to Gartmore being called Bontine during his father’s lifetime) and the estate was broken up and sold to its tenants during the 1970s; the house, along with the ancient barony, were sold in 1987 to Professor Tommy Mackay.

I am the last of the Cunninghame Graham’s to bear the Bontine name which, being unaware of the Lyon’s ruling, I assumed as a middle name on the death of my father in 1996, but which I lost on acquiring Spanish nationality (Spanish Law limits the number of forenames to two), thus, bringing to an end almost 250 years of honouring our Bontine ancestors.

Reference: Scots Law Times (1960), pp 6 – 9.