Background
James Graham was born on May 2, 1907, in Stirlingshire, Scotland, United Kingdom
James Graham was born on May 2, 1907, in Stirlingshire, Scotland, United Kingdom
Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a BA in Agriculture in June 1928 and a Blue for heavyweight boxing.
After a spell with Imperial Chemical Industries in England he was transferred to Rhodesia in February 1931 to their subsidiary, South African Explosives and Chemical Industries. For three years he sold fertilisers to farmers and then decided to be a farmer himself. He began in 1934 in the Banket district. In 1938 he moved to his 3,000-acre Derry Farm, 20 miles from Salisbury. The following year he was in Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve uniform, serving until 1945 in the Red Sea, the Mediter-ranean, and eventually at the D-day landings in France, commanding the destroyer HMS Ludlow.
His first stirrings towards politics came when he nearly stood as an Independent Liberal at Ross and Cromarty in the 1945 British election. His first campaign was in Rhodesia’s federal elections of 1953. His first success was in 1958 as the right-wing Dominion Party candidate for Hartley- Gatooma the first British peer elected to a parliament.
As MP for Gwebi he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Winston Field government formed on December 17, 1962. Premier Ian Smith confirmed him in the post on April 13, 1964. At UDI he was in his element, making patriotic speeches. He ridiculed Britain’s economic sanctions, saying Rhodesians would eat sadza (African maize-meal) rather than surrender. For a time he won over the farmers with a secret plan “to sustain the tobacco industry during sanctions” but they became more and more difficult to appease. Smith promoted him to Foreign Affairs and Defence in 1966.
His resignation on September 11, 1968, was the result of the cabinet crisis in the summer. He and William Harper proposed immediate white supremacy with separate parliaments instead of constitutional proposals for an interim multi-racial parliament. Harper quit in July. He waited for the Rhodesian Front Congress—and their right-wing plan was only narrowly defeated. He told Smith he was resigning because “on a number of matters our thinking is not the same”. He had just been elected a vice-president of the party so, unlike Harper, who left the party, Montrose stayed on as a respected figure, rallying the more right-wing men around him as an alternative government to Smith.
Rhodesia’s noblest white patriot, symbol of the transplanted landed gentry, and standard-bearer for the right-wing in politics. Every inch of his 6ft 6in frame, a Scot (Gaelic speaking) with 10,000 acres around Loch Lomond. His views on racial issues were epitomised in his famous memorandum to the Monckton Commission in 1960 entitled “Factors Affecting African Psychology that should be Considered when Contemplating Widening Spheres of African Advancement”. The basic argument was that the African child was bright until puberty then failed to develop intellectually because of “his almost total obsession henceforth with matters of sex”.