The ordinary Scots soldier who made it to highest rank of the army and society

Early warfare in Scotland usually took place among the clans. By the 17th century it had been generalised into dynastic conflict. After 1707 it became one of the strongest supports of the Union through opening up the rewards of military activity paid for by a richer country next door. By the time of the Napoleonic wars a century later, tartan-clad regiments were already a familiar part of the military establishment, at home and abroad. During the 19th century, they became integral to a prospering Unionist Scotland.

There were figures now more or less forgotten who played a vital part in those old days. Among the Scottish soldiers who won the most prominence as public figures was Colin Campbell, born the son of a carpenter in Glasgow in 1792.

His Jacobite forebears had come to the city after 1745. His real surname was Macliver – a word so bizarre to English officers that they never got it right, so he accepted something simpler for their sake. On receiving a peerage at the end of his career, he called himself Lord Clyde.

Colin Campbell was ennobled as Lord Clyde in 1858

After his death, a statue to him was put up in George Square and stands there still. Though not a warrior – he was a bit too steady and cautious – he became the leading general in the imperialist army of the late 19th century. Yet he had started off in the lowest ranks, and his rise to high command was slow. Campbell joined up in an English regiment in 1808, in time to serve in the Peninsular War at the Battles of Vimeiro (1808), Corunna (1809) and Vitoria (1813). He was wounded during the storming of San Sebastian (1813). He also served in the Low Countries.

When peace came in 1815, it was not to the taste of keen young Campbell. He went to Canada, and then became aide-de-camp to the governor of British Guiana. He came back to deal with Chartist disturbances in the north of England before being sent to China. He was a lieutenant-colonel commanding a regiment during the First China War in 1842 and spent several years in Hong Kong, with spells of maintaining order in other trading centres.

Campbell set off to return home in 1847, and had reached Calcutta by the time his always varied fate added another exotic experience to his course in life. In due course he became commander-in-chief in India, gained distinction in the Second Sikh War (1848-49) and was wounded at the Battle of Chillianwala (1849). He led the main relief of the besieged British garrisons during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. He was then knighted and specially named in the statement of thanks voted for by Parliament.

Promoted to major-general in 1854, Campbell’s service in the Crimean War (1854-56) brought him to wide public attention and finally made his name to the man in the street. He commanded the Highland Brigade at the Battle of the Alma (1854). At Balaklava (1854), his “Thin Red Line” of Highlanders repulsed the assault by the Russian cavalry.

In the old days, Scottish soldiers usually had only some European conflict to join, of little obvious benefit to their native country.

Once their loyalty to the UK was no longer in any kind of real question, there were few parts of the world where Scots were not to be found.

Campbell also did his best to improve the comfort of his men during the bitter Crimean winter. He had little comfort for them otherwise. He had told them: “There is no retreat from here, men. You must die where you stand.”

On the news of the Indian Mutiny (1857-59), the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, offered Campbell the position of commander-in-chief in the sub-continent. He left London the following day, arriving in Calcutta in August.

Having organised his troops and cleared Lower Bengal of mutineers, Campbell advanced on November 9 with 4500 men to relieve the besieged white garrison at Lucknow.

On November 14, his men stormed the Dilkusha Palace, and two days later the relief force broke through the rebel lines. The white men, women and children besieged at the residency were evacuated to Cawnpore on November 22.

After defeating Tatya Tope at Cawnpore in December 1857, Campbell returned to Lucknow the following March for the final capture of the city. He attacked in set-piece fashion, moving forward from position to position, after his engineers had constructed bridges across the Gumti River.

La Martiniere palace was captured on March 9 and two days later the Secundra Bagh and the Shah Najaf mosque fell.

The complex of the Begum Kothi palace was a tougher nut to crack. Pitiless hand-to-hand fighting led to more than 700 rebel deaths. During the next three days, Campbell’s gunners blasted their way through the buildings between the Begum Kothi and the rebel posts in the Kaiserbagh – the Nawab of Oudh’s palace --which was captured on March 14.

These famous sites of battles, more or less forgotten today, would have been familiar to the generations of Victorian Scots and recalled with reverence as examples of the martial qualities of the mother country.

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Perhaps Campbell’s main achievement during the rising was the way he organised the various campaigns that systematically cleared the rebels from each region, and probably kept down the numbers who had to die. Yet during these operations his men committed many indiscriminate reprisals against natives in response to the mutineers’ earlier massacres of Europeans and Indian Christians.

For his services in the conflict Campbell was ennobled as Lord Clyde in 1858. After returning home in 1859, he received the thanks of both Houses of Parliament and a pension of £2000 a year. In 1862, he was promoted to field marshal.

Campbell did not lack critics. Contemporaries nicknamed him Sir Crawling Camel, disliking his approach of safety-first to battles. On the other hand, an official dispatch praised his “steady coolness and military precision”.

While he may have been wanting in the dash and spontaneity of some other commanders, Campbell’s concern for his men and his prudent desire to keep casualties to a minimum meant he was much loved by his soldiers. Throughout his career he always stressed the importance of their physical conditions and mental wellbeing.

There are other races that boast about their martial qualities but perhaps none such as the Scots who regard the military life and the national life as being so close to each other. This link has two locational aspects that became especially typical of Scotland. One was the association of the regiment with its own county or town, so that in Perth or Stirling or Inverness the military and civic identities have reinforced each other. In addition, likely lads from local families might pride themselves on serving in the same regiment for generation after generation.

At the time it was still rare for a relatively common soldier such as young Campbell to advance all that far or fast up the ranks, yet he succeeded. The British Empire was becoming a global power and not only as a military force. Operations such as the suppression of the slave trade and the maintenance of free commerce could not have been carried out without an efficient and usually disinterested force controlled from London and adequately manned by the sons of the Scots who shared the sentiments of liberty espoused by the structure as a whole.