Young Logan Campbell by R.C.J. Stone

Author:R.C.J. Stone [Stone, R. C. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 1982-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

PRESENT ADJUSTMENTS AND FUTURE PLANS, 1849-51

CAMPBELL RETURNED to Scotland in a state of euphoria. Months of constant travel had stimulated him, introducing fresh places and people, enabling him to move in a new world whose pleasures he had never suspected. Having reached the age of thirty-one without encountering at first hand any works of art more substantial than prints and watercolours, he had suddenly become aware of refined standards of taste in art and architecture that he, with further leisure, travel, and application, could also acquire.

Three days back in the family circle, however, and he was deflated. Though, as a considerate son, he dared not admit as much to his parents, Edinburgh displeased him. Compared with other cities its pace was rustic: it ‘does savour of grass-grown streets.’1 Furthermore, the new family home at 2 Queen Street, if in keeping with the shrunken practice of the old doctor, was more cramped than the spacious Albany Street residence of his youth. Nor was it the family home that he remembered: Regina was no longer there. Logan’s gloom was deepened by the need to show pleasure he did not feel and by pangs of conscience about this self-same deception.

The dark mood was not dispelled when his parents, as they had long planned, took the reunited family as a treat upon a leisurely three-week holiday through part of the Trossachs by Loch Lomond.2 With the splendours of Alpine Switzerland still fresh in his mind, Campbell was bored by the modest lochs and hills (as he considered them) of the southern Highlands. His parents noted with reproachful surprise that instead of gazing upon and praising Ben Lomond their son buried his head in a novel. It was with relief that after less than a month in Scotland Campbell was able to flee Edinburgh to attend to urgent affairs of Brown & Campbell in London.3

Seven weeks in London using the offices of H. H. Willis & Coy as his base did little, however, to restore Campbell’s spirits. There was much agency and consignment work to attend to, involving correspondence with manufacturers, merchants, and above all Mr Gibson of St Andrews. Moreover, Campbell’s main task proved worrying and protracted.4 This was to dispose of a cargo of kauri spars sent by Brown & Campbell on the ship, the Indian, which they had chartered the year before at a high figure.5 This enterprise, which had been under discussion before Campbell left New Zealand, he had considered even then ‘a speculation of a very precarious nature’.6 By the time the Indian sailed from the colony in October 1848 circumstances had begun to work strongly against the success of the venture. The threat of European war had receded and with it the likelihood of any increase in the Royal Navy’s demand for timber. Indeed a retrenching government was forcing the Admiralty to cut down on its purchases of spars. Campbell came up to London to find the Indian’s cargo in storage, still unsold and with little prospect of sale.

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