John Lorne Campbell

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.

[2] Campbell was born in an Edinburgh nursing home on 1 October 1906,[3] but taken almost immediately to Inverneill House on the west shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Scotland.

His mother was Ethel Harriet Waterbury, a wealthy and cultured American heiress,[4][5] from Morristown, New Jersey, whom Lt.-Col. Campbell had married in 1905 to bolster the estate's "flagging finances".

[8] 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.

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."

[9] 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.

[12] 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.

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.

[14] In the introduction, Campbell expressed very harsh criticism of what were then widely held stereotypes, such as that speakers of Celtic languages are overwhelmingly melancholy, ignorant, but noble savages, or that the Scottish Gàidhealtachd was completely isolated from the literature and culture of the outside world.

Even the contemporary poetry of Duncan Ban MacIntyre, who was illiterate in his own language, is similarly filled with allusions to the Fenian Cycle of Celtic mythology, stories from which James Macpherson would later adapt into Ossian and use to capture the whole world's imagination.

On Barra, which Ray Penman has since described as, "a classless society",[16] Campbell's childhood trauma over the lack of a caring father figure was eased by his close friendship with local seanchaidh John The Coddy MacPherson.

They also organised a successful tax strike by all Barra motor car owners as a protest against the Government's failure to properly maintain the island's roads.

[18] 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.

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.

John Campbell also persuaded Jonathon G. MacKinnon [gd] (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.

[25] 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.

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.

"[27] 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.

[28] Campbell also continued to be involved in researching and publicizing the life and work of war poet Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, who fought as a Captain in the Clanranald regiment of the Jacobite Army while also serving as a Gaelic tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and who is widely considered the greatest poet in Scottish Gaelic literature, with only Sorley MacLean as a recent exception.

Campbell admired Captain Alasdair MacDonald's command of the Gaelic language and it's prosody very deeply, but was a very harsh critic of how systematically The Clanranald Bard's poetry had been bowdlerized for more than 200 years by puritanical editors.

[29] Campbell also went on the record as a similarly harsh critic of what he considered the unreliability of Captain MacDonald's statements to Bishop Robert Forbes, not about the events of the 1745 rising, but about the story of his own life.

[33] 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.

[34] 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.

"[35] For much of the 1970s, Campbell fought a bitter but ultimately successful battle to maintain ferry service to Canna, which both he and the local population saw as a desperately needed lifeline to the outside world.

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.