In this post, we discuss Donald Campbell and Janet MacKintosh’s life together and what had remained of their home years later.
Donald Campbell (born 1881)
When my mother was a young girl she would visit her two uncles on the Isle of Eigg, that is, Uncle John and Uncle Donald.
Birth of Donald Campbell, 1881
Janet MacKintosh
Janet MacKintosh wasn’t from Eigg, but Elgoll, Strathaird, which is about 15 miles to the north across the sea in Skye. Her mother’s maiden name was MacKinnon (Catherine) the same as Donald’s mother. Janet lived to the age of 100! (d. 1983) Her father was Farquhar MacIntosh (fisherman).
Death of Janet MacKintosh Campbell 1983
Marriage of Donald Campbell and Janet MacKintosh
Donald was married to Janet Macintosh in 1914 at “Strathaird, Broadford – After Banns according to the forms of the United Free Church” (see marriage certificate above). At the time, Donald was resident at Cuagach, and had been resident there since just before the turn of the nineteenth century. On the marriage certificate it states that Donald is a ‘Steamboat agent’ under the heading ‘profession’: “He was called this because he went out in his ‘launch’ to meet cargo boats which couldn’t sail into the harbour at Eigg.”
Some of Donald and Janet’s children
Dolina Campbell born 1916
Catriona (Catherine) born 1918.
Roderick (Roddy) born 1921.
Mary-Ann born 1925.
Avalanche on Eigg crushes Donald Campbell’s croft
My mother kept a scrapbook of newspaper articles about Eigg, which her sister Violet, who lives in Glasgow, had perhaps sent to her; she had perhaps cut them out of the Scottish newspaper she happened to be reading. My mother only ever read two newspapers, The Daily Express and the Scottish Sunday Post. One interesting article in her ‘Eigg Scrapbook’ is an article from “The Scottish Daily Mail”, Monday, June 23rd 1952, written by John MacLennan.
Donald Campbell lost his home in Cuagach in December 1951. His father Roderick had been moved there roughly 55 years ago by the proprietor Thomson around 1897 (John Campbell, Roderick’s son, died at Galmisdale in 1897).
“…. The first man I saw down by this northern shore was a Campbell – Donald Campbell, the ferryman. He is a remarkable looking old man, unmistakably Highland, with his finely chiselled features and air of quiet distinction. (…)
A soft tranquillity dwelt over the landscape. But storm clouds hovered over the mountains in Rhum. An angry sea boiled in the gulf. Eigg was enjoying a local lull. But Donald Campbell has no illusions about the weather. He knows how wild it can be in Eigg.
He has put to sea in many a gale. That is his job. But last winter the cruel Atlantic weather struck him in the one place where he was entitled to feel secure. It wrecked his home.
I asked him where he lived. “Well now,” he said in the west coast idiom, “that used to be my house.” And he pointed to a well-built croft house standing a few yards back from the road. “I lived there for 55 year – until last winter.” Then he told me a news story that did not get into the newspapers.
“Do you see that great gash in the cliff face above the house?” he said. “That was a landslide. It happened last December. There had been heavy rain for days. All our fields were under water right along the bay from the Roman Catholic church to Laig Point. That was bad enough.
“But one December day the whole hillside collapsed. A thousand tons of rocks and earth rolled in an avalanche down towards the shore. And our house was right in the track of it.”
“There was no warning. It crushed our back walls like an eggshell and piled up in the house and swept on down to the sea. We had some visitors staying with us in the back rooms. They were buried up to their necks in debris. It’s a miracle we weren’t all killed.
“Yes, 55 years we’ve been here and now this happens. We’ve tidied things up a bit now, but the house is quite uninhabitable. We were lucky – there was an empty house nearby, so we’ve moved in there. But I never thought I’d lose my old home like this.”
Donald’s derelict cottage in 2007
There wasn’t much left of Donald’s cottage – but its basic structure was still intact.
I visited the crushed house in summer 2007 (60 years later) with my son, Alan, 8 yrs. I had by chance met my second cousins for the first time while walking along the road – Morag and Donald McKinnon (Katie McKinnon’s son). They were busy getting ready for the vet who was scheduled to pay a visit, but they had time to point the house out to me. The house was as if frozen in time, and although overgrown it was not difficult to picture the scene a half century or more before, which was exactly as Donald Campbell described it to John McLennan of The Scottish Daily Mail.
The walls are still standing except for the hole made by the avalanche in the back wall. Ironically, the Ballachulish slates mentioned in Dressler’s book Eigg – The Story of an Island (2007: 100) were still piled together inside the house.
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