The Search for Volume 3 of the Campbell Canntaireachd by Peter McCallister

I’m just going to talk for five minutes on the Campbell Canntaireachd prior to introducing Patrick Molard who is going to play several tunes from that manuscript.

I’m going to talk about the search for the third Volume. Most people in this room will already know of this but the Campbell family came from the West of Scotland and they spent a lot of time on Seil Island.  This is a photograph of Seil Island from a plane.

The three generations of Campbells we know of are Donald Campbell, Colin his son, who was the writer of the manuscript, and John, Colin’s son who we know was a very successful competitive piper who went to live and work on Islay.

The Campbell Canntaireachd is in the National Library of Scotland. Anybody can go and see it.  It is the most beautifully produced piece of work you can imagine.  If you have not seen it you really should take a morning and go and have a look at it.

We are trying to trace the relatives of John Campbell.

•Donald Campbell, Piper to MacDonald of Glenallandale, and after the 1745 rebellion to Campbell of Carwhin : lived 1726 – 1781?

•Colin Campbell : Piper in Western (Argyll) Fencible Regiment : died 1824?

•John Campbell : Piper to Campbell of Shawlands and Islay : lived 1795 – 1831

John’s niece Ann Campbell had the two volumes in her house.  She didn’t know what they were and she just handed them over to a member of the Piobaireachd Society one day when he went to buy a set of pipes there.

This is a picture of Islay on Bowmore fair day.

There is a piper in the middle of this and it is widely thought that this is John Campbell, so if anybody recognises a likeness, let me know.

He was seen on Islay practising from an old manuscript.

This may or may not have been the Canntaireachd but he certainly had a copy of it.  His name is written on the inside cover and so are the names of his brothers.

John Campbell took a copy of the Canntaireachd to a competition for music writing in 1815, or 1816, correct me if I’m wrong.  He showed to the judges, but the judges rejected it saying it is not written in notation.  However John MacGregor Murray bought that copy, then lost it.  So that is one lost volume, but not the volume we are looking for.  Volumes one and two were discovered in Oban in 1909.  I am looking for Volume 3.

There is what volume 1 it looks like on the outside.  It is pretty rough looking.  We are not looking for anything very fancy.

Inside it is written like this.

So is there a third volume at all?  Roderick Cannon has done an enormous amount of work on this.  He has come up with vast amounts of evidence which I can’t really explain.  The three main ones are

Numerical evidence. There are about 300 piobaireachd. The Campbell Canntaireachd contains about 168 tunes, so there are a lot of tunes missing. Of course Colin Campbell can’t be expected to have known every tune in existance, but he also knew tunes which are not in the other collections and Roderick has assumed that there may be about 50 outstanding tunes in another volume. And some of the tunes are very significant. MacIntoshes’ Lament is not in the two volumes we have. Roderick would say that it would be inconceivable that a piper of that generation would not know MacIntoshes’ Lament. War or Peace is not in volumes one or two. Keith Sanger will tell you that Colin Campbell’s regiment, The Fencibles, had that as one of their tunes. He knew War or Peace.

Ordering of the tunes. Roderick has done a lot of work on the ordering of the tunes in the two volumes we have. They are ordered according to the vocables at the start of the tune. for example, the first 44 tunes all start with hiharin. That means that we know roughly what the missing tunes are going to start with, and we can work out what these tunes are likely to be. At the end of the first 44 tunes he writes one of the few things in the Canntaireachd that is not the music. He writes “ There is 44, coming out on the little finger.” And then moves on to the next lot.

Historical evidence. When John Campbell took that volume down to the Highland Society Competition he said to John MacGregor Murray “There are two more volumes belonging to my father besides this one.” And in 1841 Angus MacKay was interviewed and he said “There is a manuscript collection in three volumes, in Language, not notation.” Now we know that Angus MacKay had seen the Campbell Canntaireachd.

So, a lot of work has been done in the background over the years and most of it has been done by archivists and real experts in looking at detailed archives.  I am not one of those guys.  I am more an internet person and I joined Genes Reunited, which is the sort of dumb end of geneology.  I get emails sometimes once a day or at least every week from somebody called Campbell, saying are you looking for the same Campbell.  Mostly the answer is no.  Campbell is a very common name.  I wish he had been called Winterbottom or something.

There is a more serious group of amateur geneologists who behave in a professional way. I am writing in their magazine in a couple of months an article on Campbell and the Campbell Canntaireachd looking for relatives of Colin Campbell.  We have been to Inverary Castle and had a look into the archive.  It’s not there.  I’ve spoken to historians and written in a historical magazine to see if other historians could spot this type of writing because it is very unique.  It is not English, it is not Gaelic, it is Canntaireachd.

Where can the Campbells have gone?  This is a map showing them leaving Seil Island.

Ann Campbell went to Oban, John Campbell went to Islay and we know that a lot of the family went off to Glasgow.  I have been in contact with historians in Seil Island, in particular historians to do with the slate mines, because a lot of the family ended up working in those mines, and they have given some clues about how I can trace Campells of that generation.

Anybody know this bridge?

And of course John Campbell went to Islay.  I’ve been there and had a look around.  There is some Canntaireachd in the museum, but guess what, it is Gesto’s Canntaireachd, collected by John Francis Campbell.  They could have gone anywhere, couldn’t they? Boston?

John MacGregor Murray is interesting because we know he had a copy of it. The family continues.  Keith has been to the MacGregor archives many times.  There is some Canntaireachd in the archive in Stirling, but it is not the Campbell Canntaireachd.

Doug MacGregor is a professional photographer.  He has written me some letters saying he hasn’t got anything.  There is a fellow called Bruce Campbell whom you might have heard of.  There might be something kicking around in his conservatory.  Apparently in his conservatory there is a trunk full of manuscripts and other bits and pieces which he hasn’t opened yet.  I’m working on that.

I have been to the National Library of Scotland where I made a video which you can see on You Tube just explaining what the Canntaireachd is.

What can we do next? There is a Facebook page already “Search for the Campbell Canntaireachd”.  There is somebody called Gert Mathe, a Belgian.  He has made a website called “The Campbell Search”.  He has also written a manual on how to read the Canntaireachd.

I would like to finish by asking that if anyone has any further ideas, please contact me, via the Piobaireachd Society website. There is a “contact” button on the top of every page of our site, and Jack Taylor would pass any messages on to me. Thank you.