Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Canna by John Lorne Campbell Magda Sagarzazu obituary. My friend Magda Sagarzazu, who has died aged 70 of cancer, was a woman from the Basque region of Spain who moved to the Hebridean island of Canna and made it her mission to preserve and popularise the work of the married Gaelic scholars John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw. John, who bought Canna in 1939 and farmed it for 40 years before gifting it to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981, had known Magda’s father, Saturnino, since before the war. After Saturnino’s wife, Vicenta, died in 1958, John invited his friend and his two daughters to spend the summer on Canna – it was the beginning of an annual trip that lasted until Saturnino’s death in 1974. Saturnino did odd jobs, farm work or fishing with John and the girls played with the Canna children. Born in Hondarribia, Gipuzkoa, to Vicenta (nee Bueno), a pianist and teacher, and Saturnino Sagarzazu, a fisherman, Magda attended the local convent school. After they began to visit Canna, Magda and her sister, Maria Carmen, were given permission by the nuns to take extended holidays so that the family could stay on the island for three to four months at a time. There, Margaret taught them English, by reading them Beatrix Potter stories. After leaving school, Magda initially worked in administration and commerce in Spain, but decided to retrain as a teacher so that she would have long summer holidays and be able to pick up her visits to the island. John and Margaret were pioneers in recording Gaelic songs and folklore, and built up an extensive collection of Celtic books, journals, manuscripts and original sound recordings. During her visits Magda began to help John catalogue and organise the archive. After John died in 1996, Magda decided to move to Canna full-time to continue his work and be a companion to Margaret, who was then 93. Magda lived in Canna House until Margaret’s death in 2004. That year, the National Trust for Scotland created the post of archivist for Magda, and she continued to catalogue the Campbells’ extensive archive. She also documented the 1,500 sound recordings made by John in the first half of the 20 th century and Margaret’s collections of 9,000 early photographs and films, which are a unique historical record of a Hebridean lifestyle that has now largely disappeared. Magda’s work was recognised by the National Trust for Scotland in 2015 when she was presented with the George Waterston Memorial award. The following year she was honoured by the Saltire Society as one of Scotland’s Outstanding Women of the Year. At Doirlinn, her cottage on Canna, Magda cooked Spanish meals from Hebridean ingredients and welcomed visitors with a glass of wine. She taught French to the children in the island school and Flamenco dancing to anyone who was brave enough to try. After her retirement in 2015 Magda continued to live on the island until treatment for cancer took her back to San Sebastian. Even then she returned each summer to Canna. She is survived by her husband, Joaquin Gironza, a teacher, whom she married in 2016. Canna Local History Group. In his history of Canna, John Lorne Campbell provides little by way of explanation as to why he had been tempted to buy a remote Hebridean island at a time when Europe was on the verge of war. His thoughts are revealed more clearly in his correspondence with the Trust, when the case for acquisition was being made to the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Ray Perman has made the case for John Lorne Campbell having believed that Compton McKenzie would have shared the cost of acquisition, having collaborated with him while on Barra over a number of ventures, waging a joint war against the authorities for improvements to be made to island life. Whatever agreement John Lorne Campbell thought had been reached did not materialise, and financing the sale imposed a considerable personal burden; the combined costs of the sale of the island, and for the stock that was valued, amounted to around £15,500. Although this represented a considerable fall in the value of the investment made by Robert Thom, and reflects the economic problems faced by many landowners defeated by heavy taxation during the 1930s, it was well above the level that John Lorne Campbell could finance comfortably. For many of the improvements that were carried out in the coming years there were few grants available, and the costs had to be met largely by the proprietor. Ultimately, the high levels of investment and maintenance required to keep the island going would drain not just his coffers but his energy, and force the sale of the island to the Trust. John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw shared a number of common interests, not least a passionate interest in the Gaelic heritage of folk songs and traditions, of which they created an inventory of sound recordings. Margaret was also a distinguished photographer, and her record of a dying way of life in the Hebrides and on the west coast of Ireland in the 1930s provided an invaluable archive. She was also a gifted pianist. John could envisage Canna House as a depository of a growing archive of cultural research, and for his growing natural history collections. Using his education at Oxford, where he studied at the School of Rural Economy, he could run Canna as a model farm to provide a baseline income, while establishing a wildlife sanctuary run on nature conservancy principles. Margaret, in From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides tells us ‘his ambition was to find a farm he could bring back – to make it bloom, so to speak’. At one level, the acquisition could be regarded as a self-sustaining social and economic experiment, and in this John Lorne Campbell can be regarded as a pioneer, many years ahead of his time. On taking possession of Canna House, the mouldy Victorian possessions of the Thoms were jettisoned unceremoniously. The fruits of the ‘shoot on sight’ policy towards the birdlife of the islands - in the form of glass cases containing stuffed and mounted specimens - were destroyed, leaving only a few remaining. The Campbells also attacked the ivy which had been allowed to grow on the house walls which Margaret considered gave the house a melancholy appearance. Their own furniture was introduced, a distinctive mix of Pennsylvanian pieces and antiques from the Inverneill ancestors, giving the property a unique flavour. Over time the house became a repository for learned books, research papers, sound and photograph archives, and the natural history collections; it also became a repository and a haven for the many distinguished guests from the couple’s international connections in academia. Increasingly the house would be cluttered with some highly personalised trivia, which would be displayed and interspersed among the more important possessions. Hugh Cheape said once of the house, with great perception, that John and Margaret had recreated the typical Highland tacksman’s house of the eighteenth century, a model which had long disappeared elsewhere. Study of the regular correspondence between Margaret and various seedsmen in rural England reveals that she had a considerable interest in the garden of the mansion house, and bought plants and fruit trees for it regularly. The extent to which the reliance on the gardener to look after the garden as it had been in the past is shown in a photograph taken during the hardship of the Second World War. John extended the planting schemes begun by the Thoms to the east of the house, and he planted stands of trees at regular intervals from the late 1940s onwards, with the intention that the larch plantations would make a financial contribution to the islands’ needs. Rental records from when Canna was sold in 1938, and shortly thereafter, provide an interesting insight into the roles and occupations of the greatly diminished island population. Some were listed as tenants without landholdings. Crofters would often have other ‘official’ occupations, such as wreck receiver, relief lighthouse keeper (a lighthouse was erected on Heiskir in 1904), postmaster and piermaster. Other listed occupations might include schoolmistress (although this appointment was outwith the control of the proprietor, and would not appear on the rent records) and the gardener at Canna House; other occupations were associated with farming and fishing, such as farm grieve, horseman, cattleman, and a lobster fisherman for which other crofters would crew the boat. A croft on Canna, let with the house at Doirlinn, was improved with a grant and operated as a guest house. Without similar levels of personal wealth as Robert Thom, John Lorne Campbell could never have invested in the houses on the islands in anything like the same way: if improvements were needed, or a new replacement house was required, grants would normally be available and were applied for under the relevant Agricultural and Crofting Acts. While improvements were carried out, and new houses had been built by the former proprietor on Sanday, it is apparent that the state of the older properties on the island had deteriorated considerably from when Robert Thom had invested in the improved cottages at the time when the island was passed to the Trust. Some of the shells of the old crofthouses were reduced to being roofless, derelict, and in some cases the external walls were in a collapsed state. In part this reflected a further reduction in the population of the island when numbers had dwindled to levels that were dangerously low for Canna to be sustainable.