Putting the Tea in Britain by Les Wilson

Author:Les Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn Limited

Archibald Campbell was born on the Inner Hebridean island of Islay in 1805, the sixth of eleven children raised by parents Archibald and Helen. Archibald senior was the tacksman of Ardmore in the parish of Kildalton, on the ragged easterly coast. A tacksman was a ‘sub-laird’, a gentleman who leased a large area of a landowner’s estate and sublet parcels of it to lesser tenants, and Campbell was significant enough to serve on, and in 1814 preside over, Islay’s Stent Committee, a local ‘parliament’ of gentlemen who imposed taxes (or ‘stents’) on the islanders for various public works.

Close to what was the Campbell home at Ardmore stands Islay’s famous Kildalton Cross, an eighth-century carved Celtic masterpiece, and the ruins of the medieval parish church, beside which the graves of Campbells of Ardmore can still be seen, although the kirk where Archibald Campbell of Darjeeling was baptised was in nearby Lagavulin. The register of births for the parish suggests that Archibald and Helen Campbell waited until 1821 to have their eleven children baptised, all on the same day. Back then parish ministers were occasionally sloppy in their record-keeping and sometimes had to play ‘catch-up’, but, more commonly, a mass christening would take place after a minister convinced the erring parents of a family of unbaptised children to remedy the situation.1

Lagavulin was an important community, boasting merchants and a distillery (legal since 1816) that produces a distinctive, complex and smoky whisky to this day. Gentlemen farmers there spent ‘almost the whole of their time rearing good black cattle’. Cattle, horses and linen yarn were shipped out of the parish, and meal, salt, sugar and tea were among the goods probably landed at Lagavulin.2

Campbell of Ardmore had an heir (John, born in 1801) and a spare (William, born in 1803), so young Archibald would have to make his own way in the world. In this era Islay was haemorrhaging people, especially young men. Many went to the Lowlands for work, while others left for America and other foreign climes, but when young Archibald left Islay it was to study at Glasgow and then Edinburgh universities. The Old Statistical Account shows that there were two schools in Kildalton Parish at the beginning of the nineteenth century and it was one of these that gave Archibald the grounding that he needed to flourish. Although Campbell was of ‘the better sort’ of islander, he would have been a fluent Gaelic speaker and may well have dreamed of a cupa tì air a deagh-tharraing (a well-brewed cup of tea) on his arduous Indian journeys. Edinburgh University’s records show that he graduated in medicine in 1827; his thesis (written in Latin) had been on De Cynanche Tracheali – spasmodic laryngitis, or croup, a condition seen mainly in children. Later that year Campbell joined the East India Company as an assistant surgeon. Archibald’s father – no doubt pleased to see his third son gainfully employed – may well have echoed the words of Sir Walter Scott, who wrote around

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