Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

This post focuses on the marriage and death of Roderick Campbell and Sarah MacKinnon throughout the years.

The Marriage of Roderick and Sarah (Marion)

Roderick Campbell and Sarah (Marion) McKinnon were married on June 24th 1876 in the Small Isles. The various certificates sometimes contradict each other, especially concerning names. This can be explained, in some cases, because of the English and Gaelic spelling variants. As mentioned above, there are also considerable variations in the ages given in official records.

According to the 1876 marriage certificate, Roderick was 30 years old and his wife 21 years old; in other words, a 9-year difference. But the census of 1891 gives the ages as 50 and 35 (a 15-year difference). The censuses of 1881, 1891, and 1901 all agree on his age; so it seems the age on the marriage certificate is wrong. This would suggest that he was 35-36 years old when he married, while she was 21 years old. He was roughly 55 years old when his wife gave birth to their last child, John. She died roughly 2 months later. 

Roderick Campbell, farm servant, resident Galmisdale, was married to Marion MacKinnon, domestic servant, illegitimate, resident Galmisdale; after Banns according to the forms of the Church of Scotland at the Manse of Eigg; signed by the minister of the Small Isles, John Sinclair. Bride’s parents: Mary MacKay and Ewan MacKinnon (deceased); groom’s parents: Donald Campbell (crofter) and Margaret (maiden name MacClean).  The Church of Scotland is Calvinist Presbyterian; in other words, the same religion as followed by my mother Rhoda Campbell Harkness. The Manse on Eigg was where the Small Isles Minister lived with his family; so he perhaps also held weddings there. 

Living at Galmisdale – the ancestral home

The Campbells lived at Galmisdale for 30 years or more, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Roderick married the girl who ‘lived next door’, Morag (Marion) McKinnon.  

An ancestral home is the place of origin of one’s extended family, particularly the home owned and preserved by the same family for several generations. In this context, regarding families, this often concerns royalty and the aristocracy, such as the family of Princess Diana, the Althorps, whose ancestral home Althorp House is the historic home of the Spencer family, and where Diana, Princess of Wales, grew up and is buried. Althorp House has been the Spencer family stately home since 1508. 

Do ‘peasants’ have ancestral homes?

Of course, the lower classes of society, the rural, working and middle classes are not assumed to have ‘ancestral homes’, and thus no claim to the heritage of land and property. In other words, I use the term ‘ancestral home’ with tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless, if our family are to have any kind of ‘ancestral home’, then this must be on the Isle of Eigg.

The Campbells lived in the Galmisdale cottage for thirty years, and the Cuagach cottage for fifty years (when it was destroyed by an avalanche). In addition, my mother’s Auntie Flora also lived in one of the ‘Thomson’ Cuagach cottages to 1970 (which is now derelict). In other words, the Campbells and MacKinnons lived around a century at Galmisdale and Cuagach on Eigg. So surely this must qualify as an ancestral home! However, the crofters had few ‘ancestral’ rights, and before the Community Buyout on 12th June 1997, the inhabitants seemed to have no ‘rights’ at all.

The only ‘right’, according to Scottish Law, was the right of the legal property owner; the legal property owner being the one who was willing to pay the most for the purchase of the island. The fundamental laws of capitalism are the rights of ‘money’ and property. Ironically, those capitalists who purchased Eigg in order to make a profit were also called ‘lords’ (Scottish English: ‘lairds’). This seemed to imply that they had feudal rights regarding their ‘serfs’ (the people of the island).

In other words, Schellenberg and Maruma had the right of ‘droit du seigneur’ (‘right of the lord’), also known as jus primae noctis (‘right of the first night’). It may also be called prima nocta, which was a legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to f**k any female subject on her wedding night. As far as I know, Schellenberg and Maruma did not exercise this right, as both seemed quite impotent and repulsive. But they nevertheless exercised the ‘right’ to ‘fuck the people’. 

I am not suggesting here that I have an ‘ancestral right’ to land and property on Eigg. After all, it is not written in any religious, historical or ideological text, as far as I know.

Thus, Eigg, the land of the MacDonalds, Campbells, McKinnons, McKays, McCleans, and other ‘clans’, have not been religiously connected with the clans from their beginnings down to modern days. In the Bible, God has not promised Eiggachs that their children would inherit this land. 

As far as I know, the Scottish government claimed that lowland Scotland and the islands and highlands of Scotland are “one people”. But of course, the fact that the rights of the Highlands and Islands, and the Gaelic peoples, have been undermined by the central Scottish government over the centuries, has resulted in the people of Scotland becoming ‘one people’. It was not by mutual consent, but by the force of the dominant partner, and the irreversible processes of history.

It might be said, that this was not an explicit policy, but something that came about anyway. Explicit ‘evil’ policies, such as the eradication of a people by an oppressive government; the attempted eradication of a smaller country by a larger neighbour; or the attempted eradication of ‘stateless’ people within a falsely constructed state; are perhaps doomed to fail due to the ‘explicitness’ of evil intentions. 

I have perhaps implied here that so-called ‘ancestral rights’ are only claimed by dominant classes, nations and rulers. This is of course false. In fact, the major nations of today’s world have been forged on the anvil of equality, although something often ‘got lost along the way’. Thus, the Soviet Union (and its offspring Russia), the US and China, were created on the basis of the ‘rights of the people’, and the struggle against oppressive rulers, lords and kings. In this context, I can refer to the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx (1867), and the American Declaration of Independence, which included the statement that “all men are created equal” (1776).

Of course, one can go further back in history to find events about how oppressed people fought for their freedom against despotic rulers. For example the story of Spartacus, (103–71 BC), the Thracian gladiator who led a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Or the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381 which wanted to put an end to serfdom.

However, it wasn’t until 600 years later that the ‘serfs’ of Eigg finally managed to oust the oppressors, the lairds, specifically, Schellenberg and Maruma, and establish the “Republic of Eigg,” as it was called after the ‘community buy-out’. 

Current events and bunkum

Of course, everyone knows that ‘power’ politicians are experts at ‘bunkum’, which George Orwell describes as ‘propaganda’ or double talk.

Such ‘double talk’ is used in an attempt to legitimize breaking the international ‘rule of law’, in order to go on land-grabbing exploits, and to legitimize the murder of thousands of innocents.

Such exploits are attempted to be legitimized by saying that a country doesn’t have the right to exist, or that a country has the right to exist and persecute other peoples, because it is written in the Bible – in other words, pure ‘bunkum’. 

In this context, the major powers just stand by and watch (complicit bystanders). In this circumstance, I would like to refer to the poet, William Burroughs.

When thousands of innocent women and children are being slaughtered, the reporter, Mildred Pierce, asks Joe Biden: “Aren’t you going to do something?” 

President Biden answered, “You have to take a broad general view of troops murdering helpless civilians. It’s the old US game from here to eternity.”

Biden was inspired by William Burroughs, when he designed American foreign policy:

Mildred Pierce reporting:
I was there. I saw it. And I saw women thrown down on Fifth Avenue and raped in their mink coats by blacks and whites and yellows, while street urchins stripped the rings from their fingers. A young officer stood nearby. “Aren’t you going to do something?” I demanded.

He looked at me and yawned.

I found Colonel Bradshaw bivouacking at the Ritz. I told him bluntly what was going on. His eyes glinted shamelessly as he said, “Well, you have to take a broad general view of things.”

And that’s what I have been doing. Taking a broad general view of American troops raping and murdering helpless civilians while American officers stand around and yawn.

“Been at it a long time, lady. It’s the old army game from here to eternity. It pays to pay the boys off. Tacitus describes a typical scene… If a woman or a good looking boy fell into their hands they were torn to pieces in the struggle for possession and the survivors were left to cut each other’s throats. Well, there’s no need to be that messy. Why waste a good-looking boy? Mother loving American Army run by old women, many of them religious, my God; hanging American soldiers for raping and murdering civilians…”

Old Sarge bellows from here to eternity.

“WHAT THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL ARE CIVILIANS FOR? SOLDIERS’ PAY.”