If the cap fits ...


The Man Who Gave Away His Island: a life of John Lorne Campbell of


Canna Ray Perman BIRLINN, 251PP, £20 ■Tablet Bookshop price £18


of the Small Isles, south of Skye and a close neighbour of Rum, Eigg and Muck. No one quite knows what the name means – candidates include “porpoise island”, “wolf cub” and “knee-shaped” – but visitors regularly, if naively, describe it as Eden. It is peculiarly favoured in that its northern shore is dominated by cliffs that shrug up like a coat collar, protecting the island from Arctic winds, creating rich habitats for birds and butterflies and making farming just about viable. Such was the attraction that John Lorne Campbell [of Inverneill – though he never used the title] planned to buy it with the novelist Compton Mackenzie. In April 1938, Mackenzie wrote to his


A


wife: “Inverneill has put in an offer for the island of Canna … It is a charming island four miles long by one … It is in the middle of the upheaval a million years ago which begins at the Faroes and ends at the Giant’s Causeway. South slope and marvellous soil. Small population is Catholic … The price is £9,000 … ” As a young man, Campbell turned away from the “county” values of Argyll and from the military culture, Episcopalian worship and Conservative/Unionist politics of his father, Duncan. His early life was dominated by a search for surrogate fathers. He found one in “the Coddy”, the uncrowned king of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, where Campbell discovered a


01420 592974


nd what an island it is! Canna, or Eilean Chanaidh, is the most westerly


to his grandfather “Old Inverneill” who had lain a blanket of secrecy over the family and its house: Inverneill was not a smiling place. John was 47 before he learned what had driven his father and American mother apart and that Duncan’s sorrow was inherited and not a flaw of nature. It was a profoundly moving moment. By then, though, Campbell was not just committed to making Canna work, he was already succeeding; a pattern of alienation that had set in after Culloden and completed by the


This complex and outwardly curmudgeonly man, born with one layer of skin too


few, was further sensitised by a mournful family history


classless way of life and self-determination that contrasted sharply with his upbringing. His adopted nationalism, conversion to Catholicism and embrace of Gaelic as a living language estranged him from his flinty Aunt Olive, but his father seems to have been gently tolerant. Campbell would only later learn why. When Mackenzie was unable to pay his share of the price for Canna – the new proprietors of the Sunday Pictorial declined to publish his commissioned biography of the


former Edward VIII – Campbell and his wife, Margaret, went ahead anyway. She was an American whom he had met in the outer islands where she was studying folk song and with whom he experienced the vital communitarian spirit of Nova Scotia, his model for a new Hebridean culture. Campbell lived with heavy debt for the next two decades, unable to count on money from Inverneill. It was only when Duncan died in 1953 that John discovered the truth, that the debt went back another generation,


Clearances was reversed. Had the model been followed more widely, a once-bustling culture might have revived. His first book, begun when he was an


agricultural student in Oxford, was Highland Songs of the Forty-Five. Modelling himself on Fr Allan MacDonald of Eriskay, he set out to preserve an oral, “vertical” culture that sat ill with the future-obsessed amnesia of industrial society. Though he became an able farmer and naturalist, Campbell’s great achievement was the three-volume Hebridean Folksongs, a collaboration with Francis Collinson that began publication in 1969 and ended in 1981. That was the year Campbell handed over Canna to the National Trust for Scotland, which maintains it still. Ray Perman was granted unique access to the archive there and has created a full and convincing picture of Campbell, a complex and outwardly curmudgeonly man, born with one layer of skin too few, further sensitised by a mournful family history. Campbell survived a major nervous breakdown, saw his political ambitions thwarted and came to learn that even a south slope and wonderful soil didn’t guarantee success. I met him the year volume two of


Hebridean Folksongs was published, in the summer of 1977, when a ragged crew of Edinburgh students, some of us pupils of Campbell’s friend Angus MacIntosh of the School of Scottish Studies, nursed a crippled motor fishing vessel into the most welcoming natural harbour on the West Coast. The human welcome wasn’t so warm, though Margaret Campbell provided comfort. John Campbell was terse and monosyllabic, but it was clear that his irascibility stemmed from shyness. I remember his hats, which he seemed to change for every occasion: a sola topi; something a paddy-worker might wear; a rakish slouch. Four years later, he gave away his island, but he had already given back the islands to the world, and to themselves. Brian Morton


24 | THE TABLET | 19 February 2011


Conservationist John Lorne Campbell: he had a tendency to be snappy


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40