In the penultimate programme from his archive series on Don Roberto from 1999, Billy explores fascinating strands in Don Roberto's life. One is his relationship with his wife whom he introduced to society as a Chilean poet called Gabriela de la Belmondière but who in real life was an English actress from Yorkshire called Caroline Horsfall! They travelled extensively together and are buried together at Inchmahome Priory in the Lake of Menteith in the author's ancestral lands.

His life as a cattle drover him all over South America and up into Texas. Everywhere he went, he had sympathy for traditional ways of life under threat, and used his writing to highlight the plight of marginalised cultures. This aspect of his legacy was in the news in the late 1990's when the body of an Ogala Sioux Indian chief was re-patriated from London to the Dakotas. The English woman who organised the event, had read of Long Wolf through the account of his life and death in the writing of Cunninghame Graham.

Back in Scotland, he became involved with the turbulent politics of the late 19th and early 20th century, and despite his background, always identified with the masses: "the damned aristo who embraced the cause of the people" as Hugh McDiarmid described him. He was Liberal MP for North Lanarkshire from 1886 till 1892, radically espousing the miners demands for shorter working hours and going to Pentonville Jail for six weeks following his participation in a banned demonstration against unemployment which resulted in a riot popularly know at the time as Bloody Sunday. A close friend of James Keir Hardie, he became the first president of the Scottish Labour party when it was formed in 1888. Show less