John Lorne Campbell

Dr John Lorne Campbell FRSE LLD OBE (Iain Latharna Caimbeul) (1 October 1906 – 25 April 1996) was a Scottish historian, farmer, environmentalist and folklorist, and recognized scholar of both Celtic studies and Scottish Gaelic literature. According to his biographer, Ray Perman, the family of John Lorne Campbell claimed descent from the Clan Campbell tacksmen of Craignish (Mac Dúbhghaill Creaginnis, Clan Tearlach), through a son of disinherited 16th-century heir Tearlach Mòr. According to Penman, however, there is no documentary proof that the son of Tearlach Mòr ever existed. The family is known, however, to have risen from modest beginnings due to the successful career "in trade" and in the British Army of General Sir Archibald Campbell, by whom the family estate at Inverneill was originally purchased, during both the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence. 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. Sir Archibald's silver teapot was similarly kept permanently displayed on the mantlepiece of Canna House, next to the teapot of the General's wartime enemy, Vermont Patriot Colonel Ethan Allen, which Campbell's wife, American ethnomusicologist Margaret Fay Shaw, had inherited from her own family. Campbell was born in an Edinburgh nursing home on 1 October 1906, but taken almost immediately to Inverneill House on the west shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Scotland. His father was Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Campbell, 8th of Inverneill (1880-1954) (called "Young Inverneill", to differentiate him from his father, who shared the same first name and military rank). His mother was Ethel Harriet Waterbury, a wealthy and cultured American heiress, from Morristown, New Jersey, whom Lt.-Col. Campbell had married in 1905 to bolster the estate's "flagging finances.