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

Colin Campbell was born at Glasgow on 20 October 1792, son of a Glasgow carpenter of Inverary descent and Agnes Campbell of the Campbells of Islay. His maternal uncle, a Company army colonel, took the boy in, paid for his Glasgow High School schooling, and bought him an ensigncy in the 9th Foot at fifteen in 1808. He was registered under the Campbell name, and used it for the next fifty-five years of service.

The Peninsular War was the apprenticeship. He fought at Roliça and Vimeiro, marched with Sir John Moore in the retreat to Corunna, was severely wounded leading a forlorn-hope assault at the storming of Badajoz in 1812, and was wounded again at San Sebastián in 1813. The wounds set the pattern of a career advanced the hard way.

Forty years of mostly garrison and campaign service followed: the Burmese War, the Chinese War of 1842 where he commanded the 98th at the storming of Chinkiang, and the Second Sikh War where he commanded a brigade at Chillianwala and was promoted major-general. On the strength of that record he was given the Highland Brigade for the Russian war in 1854 and fought at the Alma.

The action at Balaclava on 25 October 1854 put his name into the public memory. With the Russian cavalry coming down on the British base, Campbell drew up the 93rd Highlanders two-deep in a single thin line on the ridge, against the field-manual orthodoxy that required a four-deep square, and held them. The 93rd's volleys broke the charge inside fifty yards. The Times correspondent William Howard Russell wrote that the 93rd had stood as a thin red streak topped with a line of steel; the phrase became the Thin Red Line and entered the British military lexicon as the foundational image of disciplined Highland infantry against overwhelming cavalry.

He was sixty-four when the Palmerston cabinet sent for him in 1857 and offered him the command in India. He sailed at once, marched up the Ganges valley through the autumn with a small force, broke the rebel ring at Lucknow on 17 November 1857 and evacuated the besieged garrison, and took the city in March 1858. He was created Baron Clyde of Clydesdale in 1858, promoted Field Marshal in 1862, and died on 14 August 1863, seventy years old. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. The Campbell name, the largest Highland clan surname, he carried from a Glasgow carpenter's family into the foundational generation of the Victorian British Army's senior officer establishment.