‘Alone in his attic study John Lorne Campbell made an astonishing discovery. Painstakingly going through old papers, he uncovered the family secret which had caused an unbridgeable emotional gap with his father and burdened his early years with heavy debt.’ Read more
Tag: John Lorne Campbell (page 1 of 2)
When I was researching John’s story I came across unopened bottles of long-forgotten brands of whisky in his desk, relics of the SS Politician which foundered on Eriskay in 1941. Now, revising The Man Who Gave Away his Island for a new paperback edition, I am intrigued to find how often whisky works its way into the book. Perhaps that’s not surprising. As Addicted to Pleasure, Brian Cox’s diligently researched documentary records, Scottish history is saturated with uisge beatha, which no doubt accounts for the potent blend of fact and fantasy in so many stories. Read more
A view of Florence from Fiesole
The No 7 bus takes only 15 minutes to climb the hairpin bends from Florence to the hilltop town of Fiesole, but when you arrive you are in a different world. The heat and bustle of the city are left behind and although the market square is busy, the Via Vecchia Fiesolana, a narrow lane between high walls a few yards away, is quiet and cool.
In the bleak midsummer
On another bleak midsummer John’s remains returned to Canna. By poetic coincidence his coffin made the journey on the Loch Nevis in the company of a wedding party. And now long friends of Canna, Gordon and Julie Galloway return to the island every June to celebrate their anniversary.
What would John Lorne Campbell make of his story being told at a music festival? T in the Park would not be his style but he might feel quite at home in The Big Tent, a green festival celebrating sustainable land management with music and good local food.
There was an inevitability about the meeting of John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw; their paths and their interests had been intertwining for years. Several times they had been in the same place at the same time, but had not met until a wet night in 1934, when he took the Lochearn to South Uist to address a meeting of the Sea League. Read more
Interesting to see that this year’s theme for Faclan: The Hebridean Book Festival, is An Dà Shealladh, or Second Sight, although how Alistair Darling snuck in there I don’t know. The former Chancellor has a holiday home in Lewis, as well as a new book to promote, but doesn’t seem to have inherited any of his ancestors’ gift of foretelling the future. If he had, perhaps he might have avoided the banking crisis.
Canna in 1938 by Margaret Fay Shaw
In the 1930s it wasn’t that unusual for wealthy men to buy up whole islands, but John Lorne Campbell was an unusual young man.
A nice surprise in the post, a review in Farming Scotland Magazine which, not surprisingly, concentrates on John’s modernisation of the farm on Canna. Interestingly, it also highlights his essential belief that efficiency must go hand in hand with wildlife conservation and sustainability.
Questions from the floor at Glasgow’s Aye Write! book festival have become highly topical. Looking forward to an equally stirring discussion with Andy Wightman at Edinburgh Book Festival next month.
Today’s story in the Guardian moves me to write a letter to the editor. Severin Carrell’s report on the sudden depopulation of Canna draws attention to the difficulties of living in a small, remote community and the problems facing the National Trust for Scotland. The problem as always centres on land ownership.