John Lorne Campbell – ‘a Scottish patriot of unique stamp’

The eldest son of Col Duncan Campbell of Inverneill on Loch Fyne and his American wife, Ethel Waterbury, of New Jersey, he was educated at Cargilfield School, Edinburgh, and Rugby.

He went on to St John’s College, Oxford, to read Rural Economy under Professor Sir James Scott Watson and Celtic under Professor John Fraser of Jesus College, graduating in 1929 and receiving his MA in 1933.

An interest in Gaelic from boyhood was fostered by Fraser, the gamekeeper’s son from Glenurquhart who became Campbell’s mentor. Campbell began work while at Oxford on a Gaelic anthology which became his first publication, Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, in 1933.

After Oxford, Campbell’s career took a fresh and momentous turn. Invited to Barra to study crofting conditions and colloquial Gaelic, his arrival in the Outer Hebrides on 4 August 1933 marked the beginning of a long and extraordinary life’s work of recovery and transmission of the Gaelic song, literary and linguistic record.

Sharing in the coterie which Compton Mackenzie had established at Northbay in Barra, Campbell himself stayed with the exceptional John Macpherson, County Councillor and postmaster, known to all as the Coddy.

With him, and other Barra notables, such as Neil Sinclair, the Sgoilear Ruadh, and Annie and Calum Johnston, he began to explore this unusual world of the Hebrides, then still, as in his own words, ‘like the old Highlands of the early 19th century’. Here Campbell became the pioneer of the modern collection and preservation of Gaelic song and story.

Campbell was also a pioneer of technical methodology. His recording work advanced in step with contemporary developments; beginning with an Ediphone Recorder using wax cylinders, he progressed to a Presto Disc Recorder both obtained in New York as state-of-the-art equipment. He would often recall ruefully the difficulties and suspicion which he met in trying to get his equipment through the bureaucracy of customs.

The linking of Scotland and Nova Scotia was another facet of Campbell’s innovative approach to Gaelic studies. ... He visited eastern Canada and Cape Breton in particular to discover the Gaelic oral tradition among the descendants of 18th- and 19th-century emigrants very much alive even after a separation of over 100 years. He also recorded the history and traditions of the Micmac Indians, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Maritime Provinces, while he was in Nova Scotia (1937). The significance of Cape Breton for Gaelic tradition was in his own words, as ‘a Highland Community where there are no lairds’.

Wishing to play a more active part in Hebridean affairs, John Lorne Campbell adopted the persona of laird and farmer when he bought the islands of Canna and Sanday in 1938, midway in the Minch between the mountainous seaboard to the east and the Outer Hebrides of the Uists and Barra to the west.

No celebration of Campbell's life could omit his marriage of 60 years to Margaret Fay Shaw of Glen Shaw, Pennsylvania, whom he met in South Uist in 1934 where she was collecting traditional Gaelic songs.

This rare partnership brought together her musical talents with his lexical skills, creating the treasure house of their lives and work in Canna.

The Isle of Canna was presented by John Lorne Campbell to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981, together with his library, archives and sound recordings and this gift of his life's work to Scotland was a gesture of enormous magnanimity.

John Lorne Campbell, Scottish Gaelic scholar, born Argyll 1 October 1906; FRSE 1989; OBE 1990; married Margaret Fay Shaw 1935; died near Fiesole, Italy, 25 April 1996