Campbell-K returned to India in 1911 puzzling over the conflicting information with which his head had been stuffed, too inflated to believe that a person of his majesty could ever made a fool of by his underlings, as he doubtless considered Sandy Cameron and MacDougall Gillies.
World War I was bubbling up, of which Campbell-K was well aware, for the Allies, including Britain, were desperately recruiting from the sub-continent of India which generously responded with men and materials in profusion. On the surface, that is.
Underneath, a powerful Nationalist movement, which originated among Indian immigrants in Oregan, USA, and Canada, was organising, urging them to return to their homeland and demand independence. It became known as the Ghadar Movement which was centred on Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, where Campbell-K worked as an assistant commissioner.
In early 1915 a Nationalist leader, Sant Randhir Singh held a conference of about 100 revolutionaries there, under the nose of the authorities. By mid-February, another leader announced a general uprising approached and that army units were ready for rebellion.
The date of the uprising was set for 21 February, 1915, but informers leaked the intelligence to the government and the date of the uprising was swiftly advanced to 19 February, but the authorities struck back, broke up the planned revolt and began a ruthless campaign of violence, spreading terror throughout the Punjab.
To legalise what it was about to do, the government then rushed through the Defence of India Act, setting up a “Special Tribunal” with three members, only one an Indian. One measure was there was to be no appeal against sentence.
The Lahore court where Campbell-K was made registrar in 1912.
And on 15 March the first Lahore conspiracy trial hurriedly opened in a barrack block at the Central Jail, Lahore. It is not known if Campbell-K served on the Tribunal. He had been promoted to registrar of the Punjab Chief Court there on 3 April, 1912, after his marriage to the governor of Bengal’s daughter, Violet.
The leader of the Ghadar Group was only nineteen. His name was Sardar Kartar Singh Saraba, and he defied the Tribunal with a “dauntless spirit of defiance to the British Government” which he proclaimed “meant poverty and degradation at home and humiliation abroad.” Boldly he asserted: “I have committed no crime. It is the right of the slave to revolt.” The “trial” lasted almost six months.
On 13 September 1915 the accused marched out of barrack block No. 16 for the last time. Twenty-four men had been sentenced to death by hanging. As stated, no judicial appeal was allowed – only an appeal for mercy – which young Kartar contemptuously rejected. He and six of his comrades mounted the gallows on the morning of 19 November, 1915, singing and smiling.
The night before he was executed Kartar was again asked to appeal for mercy because the authorities rightly feared he would become a martyr. He retorted: “If I had to live more lives than one, I would sacrifice each of them for my country’s sake.”
The intended uprising was described as “the most powerful revolt planned since the Indian Mutiny of 1857”, and the British authorities trembled, as they considered the effects the Ghadar Group uprising could have had on the war in France, where many Indian formations were fighting, and called for first-hand intelligence accounts from India as a matter of urgency.
By coincidence, Campbell-K, Violet and their young family arrived by sea in the UK in November 1916, where he was allegedly to work in the War Ministry, although Campbell-K had never been in the Armed Services. It is known that serious threats to life were made after the Ghadar Tribunal and they may have been considered so serious it was necessary to remove the families of those involved to a place of safety.
Apparently the voyage home was perilous but the ship survived attack from submarine packs, for the German U-boat war was at its height, indicating how vital the voyage actually had been, if it seriously endangered the lives of the children, although the trip home was hushed up for many a year, when a specious excuse was devised to account for the dangerous voyage.
Campbell-K was met in London by his eldest brother, Jock, who had just emerged from an alcoholic clinic in Harrogate, and ducked going home to Kilberry Castle and his wife, although his baby daughter was ill.
Now Jock had shown signs of his addiction long before his marriage on August 27, 1913, to Marion Durand. Jock had drunk so heavily at the Territorial Army camp the previous month, he had to get medical treatment for his liver and kidneys. His problem was so florid that he was forced to write to Marion before the wedding confessing that the question of drink had to be mentioned, claiming it was his “curse”, like that of every other Highland man.
The First World War broke out in August 1914 and he was in France with his regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, in 1915. But his drinking had become so unsupportable it could no longer be tolerated on active service, and his commanding officer pointed out he was so often “sick” he could not be fit during an emergency and he was sent home, the public story being that his lumbago had been acting up. To be fair, he was 42 in 1914 and should not have been on active service over the age of 40.
As the eldest son, Jock had inherited the estate of Kilberry and the territorial title of the same name. The estate was badly run down, partly from extravagance and the continual bills for Jock’s treatment for alcoholism. The estate itself was under “entail” which meant the heir was fixed by law, and was believed to be male.
Both of Jock’s children had died in infancy, and his younger brother, Angus, had died in 1908, leaving Archibald Campbell-K the heir of both the dilapidated castle and the run-down estate unless Jock, then in his mid-forties, could father another son before he died.
But neither the castle nor the farms concerned Archie, as Campbell-K was known in the family, who instead obsessively coveted the title. After all, his wife, Violet, was a daughter of the governor of Bengal, while Campbell, then a lowly assistant commissioner, was so far down the pecking order in the snobbish Indian Government Service, that even the sparrows would have turned up their beaks at him.
In the event Jock did not father a son, but a daughter, Marion, who was born on 16 December, 1919, and was heir to the title. Jock, her father, died on 7 February 1928, and by then he so distrusted his younger brother, Archie, he had refused to allow him at his deathbed, for unknown to Archie, Jock had already secretly broken the entail, meaning the title of Kilberry passed to his daughter, Marion, only eight years old.
Uncle Archie, as one of the trustees, then effectively locked Jock’s widow out of Kilberry Castle which she was forced to leave with wee Marion on February 21, 1928, less than a fortnight after her father’s funeral. They only discovered their home was on the market when they read it in a newspaper.
It took five years before a good fairy turned up when a cousin, Ivy Arbuthnott, bought the castle and the estate, and asked Jock’s widow, Marion, to become her companion, and mother and daughter returned home to Kilberry Castle on 15 May, 1933. But cousin Ivy’s health was not good and she began to fail. She died on Thursday, 15 December, 1938, at quarter to five in the morning.
Uncle Archie, who had retired from India in 1927, somehow arrived at Kilberry the same day and so obsessed was he with finding out to whom the title had been bequeathed that Ivy’s will was read while her body still lay on her death bed.
So deep had been Uncle Archie’s compulsion to acquire the title he had already illegally used it for years, deceiving everyone that he actually owned it. But he had lost out. The title was in Ivy’s gift and she left it to Jock’s surviving daughter who became Marion Campbell of Kilberry. But in his self-delusion Campbell-K went on using the fake title till his death.
And this was the family that set itself up to steal and distort the people’s music to aggrandise their real reputation. It has been concealed for many years. These were the people who when they played the bagpipes in public played like androids, while blackening the reputations of the others who had in fact already saved the music, which they could play like angels.