Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 23 April 1957), was a South African poet, literary critic, literary translator, war poet and satirist. Most of his adult life was spent in Europe.
Born into a white South African family of Scottish descent in Durban, Colony of Natal, Campbell was sent to England to attend Oxford University. Instead, he failed the entrance exam and drifted into London's literary bohemia. Following his marriage to the bohemian Englishwoman Mary Garman, he wrote the well-received poem The Flaming Terrapin which brought the Campbells into the highest circles of British literature.
After experiencing both shunning and social ostracism for supporting racial equality as the editor of the South African literary magazine Voorslag, Campbell returned to England and became involved with the Bloomsbury Group. He ultimately decided that the Bloomsbury Group was snobbish, promiscuous, nihilistic and anti-Christian. He lampooned them in a mock-epic poem called The Georgiad, which damaged his reputation in literary circles. His subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism in Spain and vocal support for Francisco Franco and the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War caused him to be labelled a fascist by influential left-wing literati, for example George Orwell in 1937. This further damaged his reputation as a poet. He served in the British Army during Second World War and briefly attended meetings of The Inklings during this period, where he befriended C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
In the post-war period, Campbell continued to write and translate poetry and to lecture. He also joined other White South African writers and intellectuals, including Laurens van der Post, Alan Paton, and Uys Krige, in speaking out against apartheid. Campbell died in a car accident in Portugal on Easter Monday, 1957.
Though Campbell was considered by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First and Second World Wars,"Roy Campbell: Bombast and Fire" – Catholic Author's article the accusation that he was a fascist, which was first promulgated during the 1930s, continues to overshadow his reception, though some literary critics have attempted to rehabilitate his reputation.
Early life Family origins According to Campbell, his family history had been traced out, despite their differing views about the Spanish Civil War, by "that valiant and fine writer, my friend, the late George Orwell."Campbell (1952), page 4.
Campbell's paternal ancestors were Scottish Covenanters and members of Clan Campbell, who left the Gàidhealtachd of Scotland after their Chief, the Earl of Argyll, was defeated in battle by the Royalist Marquess of Montrose in 1645. The Campbell family then settled as part of the Plantation of Ulster at Carndonagh, in Inishowen, County Donegal.Campbell (1952), page 3. During the centuries when they lived in Donegal, the ancestors of the poet were "bog-trotting Scotch-Irish peasants who were tenants of the Kilpatricks, the squires of Carndonagh." Many of the Campbell men were said to have been talented fiddlers. The living standards of the Campbell family improved drastically around 1750, when one of the poet's ancestors eloped with "one of the Kilpatrick girls", whom he had met "while he was fiddling at a ball given by the Squire."
Campbell's grandfather, William Campbell, emigrated to the Colony of Natal with his family aboard from Glasgow in 1850. William Campbell adapted well to life in Africa and built the breakwater that still forms the foundation of the great North Pier in Durban harbour. He also built a large and very successful sugar cane plantation. Campbell's father, Samuel George Campbell, was born in Durban in 1861. In 1878 he travelled to Edinburgh to study medicine. He graduated with honours in 1882 and completed postgraduate work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris; he also studied ear, nose and throat ailments in Vienna. In 1886, Campbell's father returned to Scotland to take his M.D. and to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
While in Scotland, Dr Campbell married Margaret Wylie Dunnachie, daughter of James Dunnachie, of Glenboig, Lanarkshire, a wealthy self-made businessman, and Jean Hendry of Eaglesham.The Dictionary of National Biography In his memoirs, Campbell alleges: "My maternal grandmother was a Gascon from Bayonne and though I never met her, I inherit through her my love of bulls, and of Provençal, French, and Spanish poetry." According to Campbell, his Dunnachie ancestors were "Highland Jacobites who fled Scotland" after the Jacobite rising of 1745, but returned after the 1747 Act of Indemnity. Also according to Campbell, his maternal grandfather, James Dunnachie, was an acquaintance of poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson and corresponded with Mark Twain.
In 1889, Campbell's parents moved to Natal, where his father established a successful medical practice. Dr Campbell often travelled long distances on foot to treat patients and, in an unprejudiced approach rare in colonial South Africa, would treat both black and white patients. He also was generous to patients who could not afford to pay. "Sam Joj", as he was called, was remembered kindly by the Zulu people of Natal.
Childhood Roy Campbell was the third son of Samuel and Margaret Campbell, born in Durban, Colony of Natal, on 2 October 1901. At that time, Roy's father was on active service as a major with the Natal Volunteer Medical Corps in the Second Boer War and did not learn of the child's birth for several days. Campbell was named Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell for an uncle and christened in a Presbyterian ceremony.
According to Campbell, his first memory was of his Zulu nurse maid, Catherine Mgadi, who wheeled him further than usual on their morning outing to a site overlooking the Indian Ocean. Mgadi told him that the Indian Ocean was "Lwandhla", the word for the sea in the Zulu language, which Campbell later described as his first word.
After the birth of his younger brother, Neil Campbell, Roy was increasingly left in the care of Mgadi and he would later cite her as an early influence.Campbell (1951), p. 46. Campbell also played regularly with boys from among the Zulu people. According to biographer Joseph Pearce, Cambell was influenced by these different cultures and by colonialism.
Campbell later described the Zulu people as "highly intellectual" and highly-skilled conversationalists, claiming that conversation "is the only art they have".Campbell, Roy (1934), Broken Record, p. 59. His daughter, Teresa Campbell, said he respected the Zulu people "tremendously" and attributed Roy's skill at social mixing to this childhood influence.
Cambell was also influenced by Scottish culture via his father's Scottish coachman Dooglie, who taught the Campbell sons the Great Highland bagpipes and Highland dancing.
Teenager and voyage to England Educated at Durban High School, Campbell counted literature and the outdoor life among his first loves. He was an accomplished horseman, hunter, and fisherman. In 1916, as the First World War was raging in Europe, a 15-year-old Campbell ran away from home and enlisted in the South African Overseas Expeditionary Force. He used the assumed name of Roy McKenzie and claimed to be an 18-year-old from Southern Rhodesia. However, a suspicious officer telephoned the Campbell family's home. Roy's sister Ethel picked up the phone and confirmed that Roy was only 15. Ethel later wrote "This was the first that any of us knew of his having run away from school and joined up.
At the end of 1917 Campbell left school with a third degree matriculation pass, which was the lowest possible pass mark. He registered at Natal University College, intending to read English, physics, and botany. His heart was not in his studies, however. The war was still raging and Campbell intended to enlist as soon as he was old enough, and hoped to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Campbell left the Union of South Africa in December 1918 aboard the Inkonka, a 2,000-ton tramp steamer. Almost as soon as the ship lost sight of land, the third mate entered Roy's cabin and, objecting to the large number of books, threw all of them, as well as Roy's painting and drawing materials, out of the porthole and into the sea. "Campbell," according to Pearce, "looked on as his cherished volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Dryden, Pope, and Marlowe," disappeared over the side. In the absence of his books, Campbell spent much of the voyage on the fo'c'sle, watching "all those strange and beautiful creatures that inhabit the majestic southern extremity of our continent." Pearce also maintains that "Campbell's love affair with the sea, thus far expressed only in poetically imagined theory, was consummated by the cascading waters off the Cape."
When the Inkonka docked at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, Campbell went ashore with one of the ship's apprentices, who was a Roman Catholic. While inside Las Palmas Cathedral, Campbell was shown several holy relics, including the heart of Bishop Juan de Frías, "who sacrificed himself to the protection of the Guanches or natives of the Canaries." According to Pearce, "Campbell recalled that the heart was so magnified by the glass and the spirits in which it was kept that he laughed in a superior way and swore it was the heart of a rhino or hippo. His skepticism suggests an antagonism towards Catholicism, but was also indicative of a general disillusionment with Christianity. He had moved from a lukewarm and half-hearted acceptance of his parents' Presbyterianism towards an inarticulate agnosticism."
In February 1919, Campbell's ship steamed into the estuary of the River Thames during a particularly cold winter. Campbell later wrote, "It was certainly by far the widest river I had ever seen... Then warehouses and other phantasmal buildings loomed out of the mist on the distantly converging banks. Slowly, forests of masts and banks began to appear, and moving almost imperceptibly we berthed in the East India Docks cracking the first film of ice I had ever seen." After a brief tour of London on a donkey cart, Campbell took a train to Scotland to meet his maternal grandfather James Dunnachie, who gave his grandson £10, with which Campbell replaced the books he had lost at the beginning of the voyage.
According to his daughter Anna Campbell Lyle, Roy had grown up where "everything was beautiful, and like paradise," and then he came to "this funny little country full of fog, with no wild animals, very little sun and no mountains – he had a really mystical feeling about mountains... So he got a funny thing about England. I think he was terribly anti-Anglo-Saxon. He had a passion for Celts." Campbell later wrote in his memoir Broken Record, "My ancestors cleared out of Britain at the first whiff of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I only came back to see what made them clear off in such a hurry, which I soon found out."
From Oxford to Bohemia Oxford After a brief stay with his grandfather, Campbell travelled to Oxford University, where he hoped to pass the entrance exams to Merton College. During the spring of 1919, Oxford was filled with returning veterans of the Great War. Painfully shy, Campbell hid himself away in an attic room and read voraciously. He later wrote, "Never before, or since, have I done so much reading as I did at Oxford. Had I taken an ordinary course in English for three years, I would not have read a quarter as much."
While the Irish War of Independence was then taking place Campbell expressed support for Irish Republicanism in letters to his parents, despite his descent from Orangemen.