John Dewar’s lost photographs

The gentleman in the photograph is George Douglas Campbell (1823-1900) eighth Duke of Argyll who was a Scottish peer and Liberal politician.

In his day he was Postmaster General for the UK and largely responsible for the 1872 Education Act of Scotland making primary school education mandatory for children between the age of five and 13. He was also Secretary of State for India and helped to establish the Royal Indian Engineering College based near Egham, Surrey, to train civil engineers for service in the Indian Public Works Department.

In 1871, his son and heir, Lord Lorne, married Princess Louise, one of Queen Victoria’s daughters. He made a significant geological discovery in the 1850s when one of his tenants told him he had seen some leaves embedded in basalt lava on the Isle of Mull. Duke George helped to popularise ornithology and was one of the first after Leonardo da Vinci to give a detailed account of the principles of bird flight in the hope that man might take to the air. He published many erudite papers on science and religion.

Although no doubt trachled by the responsibilities of state and high office and perforce absent from Inveraray for much of the year, the Duke never turned his back on his home county and did a particularly wonderful thing for Argyll and Scotland. In 1862, on the suggestion of his cousin, John Francis Campbell of Islay, he commissioned one of his employees, John Dewar (1802–72), a wood-cutter and Gaelic-speaking native of Arrochar in Dunbartonshire, to go round Argyllshire, Arran, West Dunbartonshire, West Perthshire and Lochaber gathering and writing down the traditional tales, historical stories, poems, songs, and the genealogies of those districts. When he died 10 years later Dewar, who was a storyteller himself, had collected a colossal 5,000 pages of information ranging from the time of Robert the Bruce to the Jacobite Rising of 1745 which might otherwise have been lost or forgotten.

What the Duke did was unique on two counts. Firstly, because very few big landowners in the Highlands during the Victorian era took much interest in local history or the Gaelic language, and, secondly, through Dewar, he established the first oral history project ever conducted in Scotland – 89 years before the School of Scottish Studies was founded at the University of Edinburgh. Dewar’s monumental work still exists and is contained in 10 large manuscript volumes. Seven are at Inveraray Castle and three in the National Library of Scotland. Also at Inveraray are 20 volumes of English translations of Dewar’s handwritten notes made for the Duke and Lord Lorne by Hector Maclean an Islay schoolmaster at Ballygrant in 1879–81, which are bound together in six thick tomes.

Very little of what John Dewar collected has been published and what has appeared in print is not considered satisfactory. All this is changing. Torquhil Ian Campbell, the 13th and present Duke of Argyll, has magnanimously opened to the public his voluminous and nationally important private archives through the recently formed Friends of Argyll Papers. The archivist is Alison Diamond, who for eight years created, managed and delivered the National Records of Scotland education service to learners of all ages.

The Dewar Project has been established. This

George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll from a portrait by Baron Heinrich von Angeli, 1876. Photograph: with permission of His Grace the Duke and Inveraray of Argyll; Castle. is a collaborative undertaking using voluntary help worldwide aimed at transcribing, translating, editing and publishing his work.

All the manuscripts have been digitised, allowing images of pages to be sent to volunteers anywhere for transcription. The project is directed by Ronald Black, who is acknowledged as one of the greatest living Scottish Gaelic scholars, and Dr Christopher Dracup, who graduated from Sabhal Mor Ostaig College on Skye with a First Class Honours degree in Gaelic Language and Culture and was the recipient of the prestigious Highland Society of London Award for the best Highlands and Islands themed dissertation in the Humanities and Gaelic subject network, (The Oban Times, October 20, 2010). With such a doughty leading team, historians are in for a treat.

The proposal is to divide the material into 10 volumes as follows: 1. Appin and Lorn; 2. Arran; 3. Cowal; 4. Glencoe, Lochaber and the North; 5. Inveraray, Mid Argyll and Knapdale;