Sir Colin Campbell, 1st Baron Clyde(1792–1863)

Colin Campbell was born at the lodging-rooms at Glasgow on 20 October 1792, son of John Macliver, a Glasgow carpenter of Inverary descent, and Agnes Campbell of the cadet line of the Campbells of Islay. He was raised at his uncle's house at the small farm at Kirkmichael, Glasgow, after his father's small carpentry business failed and his mother died when he was nine. The maternal uncle, Colonel John Campbell of the East India Company army, took the boy in, paid for his schooling at the Glasgow Royal High School, and bought him an ensigncy in the 9th (East Norfolk) Regiment of Foot at fifteen on 26 May 1808. The young ensign was registered on the regimental rolls under the surname Campbell, not Macliver, on the standard pragmatic basis that a Campbell would advance in the British army of the period faster than a Macliver. He used the Campbell name for the next fifty-five years of his service career.

The Peninsular War apprenticeship ran from 1808 to 1814. He fought at Roliça and Vimeiro under Wellesley in August 1808, marched with Sir John Moore through the Galician mountains in the retreat to Corunna across December and January 1808-09, was at the Corunna stand on 16 January 1809 in which Moore was killed, and went back to Spain with the British army through the 1809 to 1813 campaigning seasons. He fought at Walcheren in the 1809 Dutch campaign and got the fever there that recurred for the rest of his life. He was at the storming of Badajoz in April 1812 and was severely wounded leading a forlorn-hope assault on the breach; he was sent home to recover, returned in time for the Pyrenees campaign of 1813, was wounded again at San Sebastián in August 1813. The wounds and the Walcheren fever set the medical pattern of his career: the wounds slowed promotion and the recurring fever kept him in cooler postings whenever the medical opinion allowed.

Forty years of mostly garrison service followed Waterloo. He served in the West Indies (twice), at Gibraltar, in the Demerara slave revolt of 1823, in the Burmese War of 1824-26, in the Chinese War of 1842 (where he commanded the 98th Regiment at the storming of Chinkiang), and in the Second Sikh War of 1848-49 (where he commanded a brigade at the Battle of Chillianwala and was promoted major-general). The Russian war broke out in March 1854 and he was given the Highland Brigade of the British Army of the East, comprising the 42nd, 79th and 93rd Highland regiments, on the strength of his Sikh War record. The Highland Brigade landed at the Crimea in September 1854 and fought at the Alma on 20 September under the immediate command of General Sir Colin Campbell on the right flank of the British line.

The 25 October 1854 action at Balaclava was the event that put his name into the public memory. The Russian cavalry, having broken through the Turkish-held redoubts on the south side of the Vorontsov road in the morning, came down on the British supply base at Balaclava in three squadrons of about four hundred horsemen apiece. Campbell, by what his subsequent dispatch to Lord Raglan called the necessary working improvisation of a brigade commander faced with a cavalry charge and no time to form square, took his Highland Brigade's flank battalion the 93rd Highlanders and lined them up two-deep in a single thin red line on the ridge between the Russian advance and the harbour. The two-deep line was, by the field-manual orthodoxy of the period, militarily indefensible against cavalry; the textbook formation was the four-deep square. Campbell held the line. The Russian cavalry charged at six hundred yards' distance, took two long-range volleys from the 93rd at three hundred and at fifty yards, broke off the charge inside fifty yards of the line, and fell back. The *Times* correspondent William Howard Russell, watching from the heights above the action, wrote in the dispatch printed in London on 14 November that the 93rd had stood as a *thin red streak topped with a line of steel*; the phrase compressed in subsequent retellings to *the Thin Red Line* and entered the British military-public lexicon as the foundational nineteenth-century image of small-numbers-Highland-infantry-against-overwhelming-cavalry discipline.

The Indian Mutiny broke out across the spring and summer of 1857. He was sixty-four years old. He was at his married sister's house in Hertfordshire when the Lord Palmerston cabinet sent for him on 11 July 1857 and offered him the Commander-in-Chief India post. He took the appointment, sailed for Calcutta on the *Hindostan*, reached Calcutta on 13 August 1857 with the rebellion at its high point and Lucknow under siege. He marched up the Ganges valley through October and November with a small force of about four thousand five hundred British and loyalist Indian troops, broke the rebel ring at Lucknow on 17 November in seven days of street-fighting in which the British units lost more than five hundred killed and wounded, evacuated the besieged garrison and the women and children of the Lucknow Residency, and held the position through the rest of 1857 and into 1858. The final taking of Lucknow on 21 March 1858 closed the rebellion in the central Ganges; the residual mopping-up across central and northern India ran through to mid-1859. He was created Baron Clyde of Clydesdale in the August 1858 honours and was promoted Field Marshal in November 1862. He died at Government House, Chatham on 14 August 1863, seventy years old, of the long-term effects of the Walcheren fever that had returned through his Indian campaign. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. The Campbell name in the Scottish catalogue is the largest Highland clan surname (the *cam-beul*, twisted mouth, byname of the medieval Campbell forebears); he carried it from a Glasgow carpenter's adopted-mother's name into the foundational generation of the Victorian British Army's senior officer establishment.