John Lorne Campbell

Early life

According to his biographer, Ray Perman, the family of John Lorne Campbell claimed descent from the Clan Campbell tacksmen of Craignish (Scottish Gaelic: Mac Dúbhghaill Creaginnis, Clan Tearlach), through a son of disinherited 16th century heir Tearlach Mòr. According to Penman, however, there is no documentary proof that the son of Tearlach Mòr ever existed.

The family is known, however, to have risen from modest beginnings due to the successful career "in trade" and in the British Army of General Sir Archibald Campbell, by whom the family estate at Inverneill was originally purchased, during both the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence. Despite his own descent from the General's younger brother Duncan, John Lorne Campbell always referred to Sir Archibald in later years as his "honoured ancestor" and kept a portrait of him hanging inside Canna House. Sir Archibald's silver teapot was similarly kept permanently displayed on the mantlepiece of Canna House, next to the teapot of the General's wartime enemy, Vermont Patriot Colonel Ethan Allen, which Campbell's wife, American ethnomusicologist Margaret Fay Shaw, had inherited from her own family.

Campbell was born in an Edinburgh nursing home on 1 October 1906, but taken almost immediately to Inverneill House on the west shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Scotland. His father was Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Campbell, 8th of Inverneill (1880-1954) (called "Young Inverneill", to differentiate him from his father, who shared the same first name and military rank). His mother was Ethel Harriet Waterbury, a wealthy and cultured American heiress, from Morristown, New Jersey, whom Lt.-Col. Campbell had married in 1905 to bolster the estate's "flagging finances".

In contrast to his family's tenants, who were mainly Gaelic-speaking Catholics and Presbyterians who attended religious services in nearby Tayvallich, Campbell was raised in the Scottish Episcopal Church and given a staunchly Unionist upbringing within the Scottish landed gentry of Argyllshire. Campbell later recalled that his family, like the other High Tory landowners of Argyll, felt a deep sympathy for the Anglo-Irish landlords and accordingly watched with horror the events of the Land War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Irish War of Independence.

He was educated at Cargilfield School in Edinburgh and then Rugby in England.

As he was expected to inherit the family estate, Campbell's coming of age in 1927 was celebrated with a feast and formal dance inside the massive stone barn at Taynish House. Campbell's Aunt Olive was in charge of organizing the party and invited not only friends and relatives, but also the estate tenants, most of whom her nephew had never met before. The tenants had secretly taken up a collection and gave Campbell a gold pocket watch and a pair of cufflinks. In return, Campbell recited a few words of Gaelic that he had learned for the occasion, "Tha mi gle thoilichte a bhith comhla ribha nochd." ("I am very pleased to be with you tonight.") Campbell was deeply touched by the warm response these words received.

Scottish nationalist

Beginning in 1926, Campbell's interest in learning his heritage language was piqued during a visit to the Highland Games in Oban, where he overheard a conversation in Gaelic between four men from the Hebrides. Campbell later recalled, "I had never heard Gaelic spoken like that and I said to myself, 'That's something I should have!'"

Later that year, Campbell began attending St John's College, Oxford, studying Rural Economy with a minor in Celtic studies. The study of Rural Economy was intended to help Campbell learn how to profitably manage his future inheritance, but in 1928, Campbell learned to his horror and devastation that the Inverneill estate was being sold. Even though this was the only way to cover his father's considerable debts, both the Argyllshire gentry and Campbell himself would always view the sale as proof that his father lacked confidence in his ability to successfully manage the estate. Campbell would always treasure the gold watch and cuff links given by the Inverneill tenants at his coming of age party as a reminder of what might have been.

Campbell graduated in 1929 and receiving an MA in 1933. During this time, Prof John Fraser engendered a strong love of the Scottish Gaelic language and Scottish folklore. In the Oxford Gaelic Society, which Campbell also belonged to during the 1920s and early '30s, the 17th century Classical Gaelic literary language was taught by reading the Irish bardic poetry collection Foras Feasa ar Éirinn by Fr. Geoffrey Keating, while the Scottish Gaelic vernacular was taught using the prose collection Caraid nan Gàidheal by Rev. Dr. Norman MacLeod.

In 1933, Campbell published the groundbreaking book Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, consisting of 32 Gaelic song-poems that he had tracked down with Prof. Fraser's assistance in both the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. These were analyzed for political content and published with facing translations into English blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. At the time, the real cultural, political, and religious reasons for the Jacobite rising of 1745 had been obscured by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, who both depicted, "the Highlander as a romantic hero fighting for a lost cause." In response, Campbell set out to give, "a voice to the voiceless - ordinary men who had never been allowed to speak for themselves".

Personal life

On an extremely wet and rainy evening in 1934, Campbell was introduced as "Young Inverneill" to his future wife, American ethnomusicologist Margaret Fay Shaw, by the manager of the Lochboisdale Hotel on South Uist. Campbell later recalled, "As so often happens, we didn't take to each other at first, but we got to know each other and we were working in the same little world."

Their courtship was slow and awkward, but in March 1935, Margaret Fay Shaw brought Campbell to meet her family in Glenshaw, Pennsylvania. She later recalled that he spent the whole visit chasing butterflies in the nearby forest or typing up articles in his room. The whole Fay Shaw family accordingly decided that Campbell must not be seriously interested in Margaret and no one was more shocked than she was when Campbell proposed marriage on the last day of his visit.

In June 1935, John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw were married by Rev. Calum MacLeod in the manse of John Knox Presbyterian Church in Glasgow. Neither family attended and the bride was given away by family friend Fred Moir. At the groom's insistence, the entire ceremony was conducted in the Scottish Gaelic language and the bride was relieved to learn that she had only to say, "Tha" ("Yes"). The Campbells spent their brief honeymoon in the Lofoten and Vesteraalen Islands of Norway before returning to Scotland.

Folklorist, naturalist, and Laird of Canna

In addition to his other interests, in 1936 Campbell began to study the distribution and migration of insects. His Hebridean collection, started on Barra in 1936 was continued on Canna from 1938 with the use of a mercury vapour moth trap from 1951 onwards. The collection now consists of 30 cabinet drawers containing 283 species of macrolepidoptera, including the first recorded specimen of the noctuid moth Dianthoecia caesia taken in Scotland and some other surprises.

In June 1936, Campbell's work collecting and publishing Scottish Gaelic folktales tipped off the Irish Folklore Commission to the fact that the oral tradition still survived in the Gàidhealtachd. Dr. Séamus Ó Duilearga accordingly wrote to Campbell and invited him to visit the Commission's archives in Dublin. While Campbell was unable at the time to accept, their correspondence continued and was the beginning of a decades long collaboration.

In 1937, the Campbells' travelled to Nova Scotia with an Ediphone to record Canadian Gaelic folklore and traditional singers. The Campbells spent six weeks in Cape Breton, where they used the Ediphone to record upon wax cylinders ninety five Gaelic traditional songs and ballads, two games, seven local songs, and three original songs sung by their composer. John Campbell also persuaded Jonathon G. MacKinnon (1869–1944), the former editor of the literary magazine Mac-Talla, to introduce him to Gabriel Syllibuy, the Chief of Cape Breton's indigenous Mi'kmaq people. The Campbells recorded Syllibuy as he described, in the Mikmaq language, an account from the oral tradition about the arrival of the first Gaels in the Province. The Campbells also recorded other Mikmaqs singing Catholic plain song hymns in the Mik'maq language.

The Canadian Gaelic song recordings made in Nova Scotia by the Campbells were later transcribed into musical notation with the assistance of Irish traditional musician and collector Séamus Ennis and published in the volume, Songs Remembered in Exile: Traditional Gaelic Songs from Nova Scotia Recorded in Cape Breton and Antigonish County in 1937, with an Account of the Causes of the Highland Emigration, 1790–1835.

During their visit, they also called at St. Francis Xavier University, where they met and befriended Fr. Moses Coady, a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Antigonish and the founder of the Antigonish Movement. Campbell was later to praise Fr. Coady's ideas and to suggest that similar activism be introduced to Scotland.

Crossing the Tiber

In 1946, after healing from a nervous breakdown at Oxford with the assistance of a Catholic therapist, John Lorne Campbell was received into the Catholic Church inside St. Ninian's Cathedral in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. While writing a subsequent explanation for his conversion, Campbell cited his intense dislike for the role that Protestantism had played in the 17th and 18th-century ideology of the Whig political party and that party's legacy in creating the modern centralized British state. Campbell also explained that his research into Highland culture and history had led to many close and lasting friendships with Catholic priests and laity. Lastly, Campbell expressed an "aesthetic preference" for the Tridentine Mass over the High Church Anglican worship of his childhood.

In later years, Campbell would often deliberately irk visitors with anti-Catholic or Unionist views by speaking proudly of, "we Papists", expressing his admiration for the Jacobite risings, and his belief in Scottish nationalism. His wife Margaret followed him a few years later into the Catholic Church in Scotland, but always insisted that her favorite English-language Presbyterian hymns from her childhood be sung during Low Mass at St Columba's R.C. Church upon Canna, much to the incomprehension of the island's Gaelic-speaking population.

After John Lorne Campbell was received into the Catholic Church, his previous fascination with the iconic Gaelic poet Fr. Allan MacDonald ripened into an obsession. According to his biographer Ray Penman, "Over 20 years John was to devote a considerable amount of time and money to tracing the work of Fr. Allan, publishing much of it for the first time, righting wrongs he believed had been done to the priest and writing a short biography. The more he learned of him and read his work, the more he identified with him."

With the help of various friends and the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Campbell succeeded in tracking down the poetry manuscripts, diaries, and detailed folklore notebooks of Fr. Allan MacDonald, which had been missing and presumed lost since his death in 1905. As word spread, others shared surviving letters to and from Fr Allan. Further detailed research by Campbell about Fr. MacDonald's life, times, and writings, as well as his diary, was similarly collected and housed at Canna, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Campbell has been widely credited since with restoring both Fr. MacDonald's reputation and his enormous importance to Scottish Gaelic literature.

Later life

In 1946, the Irish Folklore Commission dispatched trained folklorist Calum Maclean from Inverin in the Connemara Gaeltacht to the Hebrides with orders to begin systematic folklore collecting, with Campbell's assistance, that he later continued for the School of Scottish Studies.

During the early 1950s, American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax used several of Campbell's field recordings without permission for a vinyl album of Scottish traditional music for Columbia Records, much to Campbell's chagrin.

In 1961, Campbell published Stories from South Uist, which he had begun collecting with a wire recorder from seanchaidh Angus MacLellan. Campbell explained that he had modeled his Gaelic-English translation of MacLellan's stories upon the recently published volume Tales from the Arab Tribes by Charles Grimshaw Campbell, which Campbell praised as, "a masterpiece of translation of folk-tales from another language into readable English." Angus MacLellan's similarly dictated autobiography, The Furrow Behind Me, was published in the same year.

The first collection of Fr. Allan MacDonald's Gaelic verse, Bàrdachd Mghr Ailein: The Gaelic Poems of Fr Allan McDonald of Eriskay (1859–1905), was both edited and self published by Campbell in 1965. In 1966, future Gaelic literary scholar Ronald Black received a suitcase full of Gaelic books from Campbell and brought them to Eriskay for sale aboard a ferry from Ludag, South Uist. At the time, Eriskay still had many Scottish Gaelic monoglot speakers who had known Fr. Allan MacDonald personally and Black has since recalled that the poetry book and Campbell's "little blue biography of Father Allan", both accordingly, "sold like hotcakes".

Following the Second Vatican Council, Campbell and Shaw disliked the abandonment of the Ecclesiastical Latin liturgical language and the subsequent introduction of the Mass of Paul VI in the vernacular. They accordingly joined the Scottish Branch of Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce, which still presses for the greater availability of the Tridentine Mass, immediately upon its foundation in 1965.

In a 2023 article, Traditionalist Catholic biographer Charles A. Coulombe wrote, "As with most isolated folk in those days, they were at the mercy of whatever the Diocese gave them - but the Campbells were not quiet about their preferences. For John Lorne Campbell, the Latin and Koine Greek once so well known by local priests were a bridge to the greater world for Gaeldom - as reflected in their songs and stories - without the medium of English. In addition to the religious issues the changes raised, they also threatened to submerge various Catholic subcultures around the globe through forcing worship in the ever encroaching dominant vernacular. Subsequent experience has shown him to be entirely correct."

Legacy

Campbell's partnership with Shaw was professional as well as marital. Together the couple assembled an important archive of both Scottish and Canadian Gaelic folklore, folksongs and poetry, including manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and film, in an effort inspired by that carried on by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser in the 1900s. The Campbells' three-volume collection of Hebridean folk songs, published between 1969 and 1981, is regarded as a valuable source. The Campbells' archive at Canna House, which is a similarly invaluable source for scholars of Scottish Gaelic literature, Scottish traditional musicians, and folklorists, is now in the possession of the National Trust for Scotland. As of 2013, the many Ediphone wax cylinders, upon which the Campbells' had recorded folklore and traditional music in Scottish Gaelic, Canadian Gaelic, and Mikmaq, were on long term loan to the British Library for the purposes of being digitized. The School of Scottish Studies has since made the digitized recordings available online through the Tobar an Dualchais – Kist o Riches website.

Both the recent rise of Scottish nationalism and the ongoing efforts by the Scottish Parliament to ensure a Scottish Gaelic language revival through the setting up of immersion schools are also John Lorne Campbell's legacy.

A biography of Campbell, The Man Who Gave Away His Island by Ray Perman, was published by Birlinn Limited in 2010.