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| ISBN-13: | 9781775582465 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 286 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Young Logan Campbell
By R. C. J. Stone
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2013 R. C. J. StoneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-246-5
CHAPTER 1
BEGINNINGS IN SCOTLAND
John Logan Campbell was born in Edinburgh on 3 November 1817, the son of Doctor John Campbell and his wife Catherine. More than sixty years later he wrote of the circumstances of his birth in his published reminiscences, Poenamo. He began that book with a blunt one-sentence paragraph: 'I was an only son'. Very simple and direct; yet for all that untrue. He was in fact the doctor's third son, although admittedly the only boy to reach adult years. The first-born son, James, died in 1819 at the age of ten. The second son, born in 1812, christened John Logan, survived little more than a year. So the truth of the matter is that this baby born in 1817 was given the name John Logan to commemorate a brother who had died four years before.
In what Campbell wrote of himself he did not hesitate to take liberties with facts, or as he would have expressed it 'to blend romance with reality'. And, for all his apparent disarming frankness, he could be on important matters reticent and reserved. He was in reality a complex and often ambiguous figure.
There is no doubt, however, upon one matter. He was well-born. His father was the son of a baronet and his forefathers had been Scottish lairds for almost three centuries. Logan Campbell was extremely proud of his connections with the Campbells of Aberuchill and Kilbryde.
That family originated in the region of the Perthshire gateways to the southern Highlands through which one passes in a journey between Fort William and Dunblane. It is a varied and beautiful country. In places, rugged promontories project into broad outer plains which lap the mountain wall. Elsewhere long tongues of good farmland, part-wooded, re-enter the Highlands like the arm of the sea. Logan Campbell was always conscious of his ancestral origins in these picturesque homelands.
The Campbells of Aberuchill and Kilbryde trace their descent from the Campbells of Argyll: more precisely from a cadet branch of the Breadalbane offshoot headed by Lord Glenorchy, which in late medieval times settled the lands around Loch Tay. These particular Campbells lived until early modern times at Lawers, on the north side of the loch. Following a dispute with their Glenorchy cousins, they removed themselves in the late sixteenth century to the lands of Fordie near Comrie which they are said to have renamed Lawers after their old home. In 1594 the family head, Sir John Campbell, knight, acquired the nearby estate of Aberuchill. This he made over within the year to his second son, Colin, who thus became the first laird of Aberuchill.
Colin Campbell's grandson, another Colin (1637 — 1704) and the third laird of Aberuchill, was an ardent royalist who became a powerful politico-legal figure in Scotland. He was, on occasion, an advocate, representative to the Scottish Parliament, provost of Inverary, and Privy Councillor. He was also an assiduous land-buyer. In 1669 he bought those lands near Dunblane constituting the barony of Kilbryde that had been, until recently, a long-standing possession of the Earls of Menteith. The estate had a fifteenth-century castle standing in a position of natural strength, a spur of rock enclosed on three sides by the rugged glen through which Ardoch Water flowed some 30 metres below. The castle was not, according to the standards of the day, lacking in convenience and comfort. Kilbryde was no grim fortified pile. Authorities on such matters write of this castle as typical of many in the district; an old Scottish baronial semi-castle of the transition period between the square keep and the more modern manor-house. It had convenience enough for Sir Colin because he made Kilbryde his chief residence for that part of the year he was not engaged in his diverse duties in Edinburgh and elsewhere. The seat, with its rolling moorlands behind, was scenically striking. The closely-settled and well-wooded farmlands below the castle made it unquestionably profitable as well. Here was a purchase that agreed well with the more elevated status of the family. For in the late 1660s Sir Colin became the first baronet of Aberuchill and Kilbryde.
What began well did not so continue. Mismanagement and extravagance by his spendthrift successor, Sir James Campbell, dissipated resources in the early eighteenth century. And so the third baronet, another Sir James (1723 — 1812), succeeded to an estate heavily encumbered. He was a loving and dutiful father, determined to provide financially for each of his family. This in any man is an admirable sentiment. But if he is thrice married and a father of fourteen, as was Sir James, such an obligation is likely to threaten an already uncertain economic position. Impoverishment and debt arising out of these family responsibilities, and — what was much less welcome — costly law-suits over land, forced him to sell, in 1772, the old family property in Aberuchill for a small price to the Drummond Morays of Abercairney. Unfortunately there was little left over from the proceeds of the sale when old debts had been settled. In 1800, Sir James, now old and impoverished, executed an instrument of entail over the barony and estate of Kilbryde. One surmises that this was a despairing attempt by the baronet to keep intact the remnant of the landed estate so that it could remain a functioning centre of family influence.
So reduced were the family circumstances by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, that the fifth baronet, yet another Sir James, could not afford, except for the first six years after inheriting the title and while he was still a minor, to live on the estate he loved. In an attempt to repair his squandered patrimony, he was obliged to reside elsewhere for the remaining seventy-three years of his life, much of the time as a salaried civil servant in England, leasing the castle and its nearby moorlands to men of means who used it for grouse-shooting and other leisured occupations.
It is against such a family background that the lives of Doctor John Campbell, son of the third baronet, and of John Logan Campbell (Doctor Campbell's son) must be seen. The satisfaction that pride in distinguished forbears gave, was always lessened by the sense of financial necessity and of lowering expectations.
Born in 1784 as the ninth and last son of the needy third baronet, John Campbell grew up with few prospects, and with little help available, so it was said, 'in the shape of hard cash'. But one advantage he had — intelligence. This he demonstrated in his fine academic performance at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, during an era which a history of the school speaks of as 'a most brilliant period, so far as the record of its scholars goes'. But though John Campbell left the school as Dux, there was no immediate opening into a profession or commerce. He returned to Kilbryde, presumably to work on the estate, and there he stayed until he was twenty-two. Not until September 1806 did he leave to begin to make his way in the world.
Though John was destined never to live at Kilbryde again, he retained to his death some sixty years later strong emotional ties with his ancestral home. The year before he died he spoke of his life-long delight in the woods, the glen beside Ardoch Water, indeed the whole ambience of his boyhood home which for him continued to be surrounded by 'a romantic halo'. It is not to be wondered at that this same pride in Kilbryde he helped to pass on to his son.
John Campbell knew nothing, it seems, of Malthusian prudence because within a year of leaving home he wed a woman of twenty, as poor as himself. John's marriage in Saint Anthony's chapel, Edinburgh, on 3 July 1807, to Catherine Logan of Knockshinnoch, Ayrshire, was a love match bringing life-long happiness, but little ease. 'Fatal to his worldly prospects' it has been described.
But at least it forced him to settle on a career. He entered the army which, swollen in numbers by the Napoleonic Wars, had a soaring demand for medical services. The baronet's son became an assistant-surgeon on seven shillings and sixpence a day, acquiring medical knowledge and skills by the system of apprenticeship practised in those times, as he treated invalids in the camps and soldiers in the field under the surveillance of a surgeon. Little, very little, of this period of John's life is recorded. A search of the Army Lists gives no precise indication even of the regiment in which he served. There is but one firm fact for the historian to plant his feet on in a sea of conjecture. We know for certain where John Campbell was in September 1813. There is the melancholy record that in this particular month his infant son, the first John Logan, died and was buried from the military chapel in Portsmouth.
Poenamo states that assistant-surgeon Campbell did not leave the army until the exile of Napoleon to St Helena in 1815 caused his regiment to be disbanded. In fact it is highly probable that John took his discharge a year or more earlier than this. Like many another services doctor, he decided to seek further formal medical qualification. Accompanied by his wife and three small children he returned to Edinburgh to enrol at the University Medical School, at that time probably the world's best, certainly pre-eminent in the study of anatomy and the theory and practice of surgery. Following a growing practice of students of the school he supplemented university instruction by attaching himself to an extramural professional group, in this case the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, where his mentor was the extraordinarily talented surgeon George Bell. In August 1815, university study was at an end when the degree of M.D. was conferred on 'John Campbell, surgeon', on the basis of his sixty-one-page thesis — written in Latin as the regulations required — 'De Angina Pectoris'.
Upon graduation Dr Campbell decided to stay on and build up a practice in Edinburgh. As a great medical centre the city was overstocked with doctors, and competition for patients, particularly under conditions of post-war depression, threatened to be unusually severe. Here a thirty-one-year-old surgeon with a young family to support, and the ink on his degree parchment scarcely dry, was showing confidence in his ability and prospects which surely bordered on foolhardiness. But his efforts, happily for him, were concentrated in fashionable New Town, that resort of well-to-do social groups lifted by the rising tide of economic progress which had begun flowing so strongly in Scotland in the late eighteenth century. The extraordinary population growth in the area around York Place, Albany Street, and Queen Street where Dr Campbell successively hung up his plate, without doubt contributed greatly to such financial success as came in the first years of his practice. An appointment as surgeon to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary built up both reputation and income.
Yet, even if one looks ahead to his most favourable years, one finds that Dr Campbell was obliged to take in medical students as boarders to supplement his income. Obviously he never won high financial rewards as a doctor. In compensation he stood well in the regard of his colleagues. In 1823 he was elected to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Nine years later he became President of the College, the last such who, ex officio, was a member of the Town Council.
This was the family into which John Logan Campbell was born; a family conscious of its genteel connections, but equally conscious of financial insecurity. The background left its imprint. During his long life, he was never to lose sight of the importance of social standing and wealth as essential ingredients of personal happiness as he conceived of it.
Generally, the son in a nineteenth-century middle-or upper-class household was indulged by parents and sisters as a form of superior being. This was undoubtedly the lot of the second John Campbell when, at the age of two, he became the sole surviving boy of Dr Campbell's household. Johnny (as the family called him as a child) later confessed that he was so lionized and petted that he became transformed into a 'nursery tyrant':
My earliest reminiscences of nursery life are worthy an 'only brother'. I remember enacting the small tyrant in a manner worthy the 'only son' of a duke, let alone that of a metropolitan physician, which my father was when I appeared upon the scene. ... My early years were fast ripening me into a most intolerable nuisance, as I lorded it over all the womenkind in a manner that ought to have brought down condign punishment on my young understanding.
Logan — the forename friends used of him in adult years — claimed in later life that only the arrival of a fourth sister when he was six years of age saved him growing up into 'an unmitigated pest in the house, and perhaps afterwards in the world'. But there is evidence that Logan always remained the family favourite and a source of great pride to his parents, though he himself did not speak of these things.
Campbell made few references in his reminiscences to the events of his early childhood. One vivid impression he recorded: his delight whenever his nurse took him from York Place home to nearby Calton Hill. This was not a unique treat. Logan was just one of many children who enjoyed the park. Youngson in his book on The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750 — 1840 tells how the practice had grown up in the later eighteenth century for maidservants from the New Town 'to take the smaller children up Calton Hill to sit with them or play about while the "claes" bleached in the sunshine'. Young Logan was allowed to wander on the green slopes on the northern side of the park. 'How gleefully I gathered daisies and buttercups', he later wrote.
Another deep and enduring impression of childhood arose out of Logan's first journey away from his Edinburgh home. In 1824 Sir Alexander Campbell, the fourth baronet of Aberuchill and Kilbryde, died, and his eldest son James — the impoverished son already referred to — succeeded to the title at the age of six. Two years later the dowager Lady Margaret invited Dr Campbell to bring his family on an extended visit to the ancestral home of Kilbryde so that the doctor's children could meet their cousins, the boy baronet (a few months younger than Logan) and James's three small brothers. This was a visit Logan Campbell was never to forget. As an imaginative child of eight, he was enthralled by the immediate and pervasive sense of the past conveyed by the estate: the grim old castle (its ground floor all vaulted chambers embedded in the rock with external walls a metre and a half thick at the base) set in picturesque and richly wooded grounds, merging in the north with moors of the Braes of Doune, and in the south with tenant farms and crofts not yet stricken by the nineteenth-century emigrations. Logan's pride of family thereafter became yoked to this romantic old castle.
When the Campbells had acquired the castle in 1669 they had also taken over an oral history, which dated back over 200 years, and which had become encrusted with legend often having little basis in fact. The most spectacular tradition was that of the ghost of Kilbryde. From time to time, people had claimed to have seen a wraith 'arrayed in the white robes of death, sullied with blood' reputed to be the spirit of one Lady Ann Chisholm of the Cromlix family seduced, then murdered and buried in the glen, by Sir Malise Graham, the 'black knight of Kilbryde'.
Belief in such legends of this and other 'ghaists' of the castle Logan was to outgrow. In later life he mocked them gently. But in some of the Kilbryde traditions he believed implicitly as long as he lived. They became an inseparable part of his pride in Campbell forbears. He always accepted, for instance, the family belief that Mary Queen of Scots had spent some of her early days at Kilbryde, living in a chamber of the square tower facing the south-east and overlooking the glen. Needlework, still in the castle, he did not doubt came from her hands. He was convinced, too, that Mary and her handmaidens had watched bowls played on the very green beside the castle where he, centuries later, learned to play that game with the boy baronet.
Logan and James, mere acquaintances at Kilbryde, were to become full friends when, shortly after, the widowed Lady Campbell leased the castle to tenants and shifted to Edinburgh so that the young baronet and his brothers could be educated there. Like Logan, James became a pupil of the Royal High School. Being much the same age the two boys passed through school as form-fellows. By their mid-teens they had become sufficiently firm friends to go on a long summer walking-tour. Logan Campbell tells how the two lads, using 'capacious fishermen's baskets' as rucksacks, 'did the Trossachs and Loch Katrine'; then turned south and crossed the Clyde to visit Logan's cousins and aunts (on his mother's side) in various parts of Ayrshire and north Dumfriesshire. For their return journey to Edinburgh they did not take a direct route but made a detour which involved walking down the valley of the Nith as far as Dumfries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Young Logan Campbell by R. C. J. Stone. Copyright © 2013 R. C. J. Stone. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,List of Illustrations,
Introduction,
ONE Beginnings in Scotland,
TWO Voyage to New Zealand,
THREE The Excursion to Te Tamaki,
FOUR On the Hauraki Shore,
FIVE Pioneer Pakehas on Motukorea,
SIX Brown & Campbell in Early Auckland, 1841 — 2,
SEVEN Survival of the Fittest, 1842 — 4,
EIGHT 'Doing a Large and Lucrative Business', 1845 — 8,
NINE 'Innocent Abroad',
TEN Present Adjustments and Future Plans, 1849 — 51,
ELEVEN 'Doing an Excellent Business',
TWELVE 'An Independence Secured....',
THIRTEEN 'The Thrice-disgusting Pollution of Auckland Politics',
FOURTEEN A Beginning and an End, 1856 — 8,
APPENDIX,
A Deed of Sale for Motukorea,
B Political Parody by Logan Campbell,
C Campbell's Editing of his Earlier Correspondence,
D A Farmer's Possessions, 1853,
References,
Bibliography,
Index,