John Lorne Campbell

I lived and worked in Argyll for about 15 years off and on and I remember hearing the name John Lorne Campbell from time to time in various contexts. Now finally I've got round to reading his biography by Ray Perman (2010) and it's an inspiration.

Campbell (1906-1996) came from the Argyll landed gentry but he wasn't one of them. He didn't do the huntin/fishin/shootin stuff. He didn't serve as an officer in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. He didn't marry 'one of his own.' At Oxford, he studied, not classics as his family wanted him to but agriculture. He bought the island of Canna, encouraged people to come and live and farm there, in an attempt to reverse the Clearances, and in his old age he gave it to the National Trust for Scotland.

The list of Campbell's publications in Wikipedia is long and their range amazing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lorne_Campbell

He was very interested in politics. And the issues he raised in the 1930s are the very matters now preoccupying us in Scotland: Who owns the land? How do we protect our environment? What should our democracy be like if it's to support the people?

He and his wife Margaret Fay Shaw - she was an American of Scottish ancestry - learned Gaelic and collected and recorded Gaelic folklore and songs. They were very clear that the Gaelic language was dying in their time, not of neglect but of the open hostility of the British state, and did everything they could to preserve and promote the language and culture.

On page 20 of the biography, Ray Perman writes:

"(Gaelic) had once been spoken by all social classes in the Highlands and Islands, but after the failed Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 it became associated with political dissent and the Catholic religion...There was an official campaign to discourage and even suppress the language, backed by repressive legislation which...discriminated against Gaelic...There was also a campaign to supplant Gaelic in education...although...among themselves and at home (children) continued to speak Gaelic. Catholic priests still preached in the old language and, despite the prevailing orthodoxy, many ministers in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland continued to preach in both languages."

In 1765, 100% of the population of Argyll spoke Gaelic. By 1879 less than one in ten was a monoglot Gaelic speaker. By 1921 there were just 20,000 Gaelic speakers in Argyll - less than a third of the number forty years before - and only 500 of them spoke Gaelic alone.

So the next time somebody tells me 'But Gaelic is dying, isn't it?' I plan to ask if they know who killed it. But I want to point out the debt we owe to John Lorne and Margaret Fay Campbell. Without them, we would have little record of Argyll Gaelic and the community would be a poorer place.