William Joll

Labour of love

I visited the Hebridean island of Canna in May 2008 — Canna being John Lorne Campbell’s island, donated by him to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981 — and was immediately struck by three things, all of which presented a considerable contrast to the island of Colonsay, some little way to the south, where I live.

I visited the Hebridean island of Canna in May 2008 — Canna being John Lorne Campbell’s island, donated by him to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981 — and was immediately struck by three things, all of which presented a considerable contrast to the island of Colonsay, some little way to the south, where I live.

I visited the Hebridean island of Canna in May 2008 — Canna being John Lorne Campbell’s island, donated by him to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981 — and was immediately struck by three things, all of which presented a considerable contrast to the island of Colonsay, some little way to the south, where I live. There is an excellent natural anchorage; the arable land smacks of fertility, and the massive cliffs, 600 feet high, offer protection from the north.

After a week on Canna, I had come to understand a certain amount about John Lorne Campbell and his legacy, but he was evidently such a private and reserved figure that it required a book of this kind, full of information not previously available, to set the man in perspective.

Nothing in Campbell’s early life (he was born in 1906) was designed to help him get on with people: his parents were neither close nor supportive (they did not attend his coming of age party). His natural shyness, coupled with the formality of the Argyllshire gentry, made him a loner, and his life at Oxford centred round the study of agriculture rather than the kind of parties frequented by Agatha Runcible, with whose world Perman rather surprisingly compares Campbell’s.

He found his direction in a five-year sojourn on Barra, from 1933-38, his time there rendered particularly genial by his friendship with Compton Mackenzie, who inducted him into island democracy, and with a charismatic islander, the Coddy, who taught him Gaelic.

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