Bobby Campbell, journalist and musician; born July 27, 1942, died September 29, 1997 BOBBY Campbell, who has died suddenly at 55, was a big man of great breadth and much warmth.

In 1958 he left Hyndland School in Glasgow and was apprenticed as a marine fitter in John Brown’s Shipyard, in Clydebank. The raucous, ribald culture of the yards also hastened his progress from surreptitious violinist to fine folk fiddler – a process encouraged by his admiring mentors, Norman and Janey Buchan. For many fellow apprentices in that first rock and roll generation of the late fifties, Bobby’s playing and singing with Ray and Archie Fisher, and later with Enoch Kent and Gordon McCulloch in The Exiles, was a revelation which inspired a lasting love of traditional music. The awesome voice and magic fiddle enlivened many demonstrations and crowded potential recruits into political concerts and pub sessions. And at anti-Polaris demonstrations on the Clyde he was aye to the fore. As part of the Scottish diaspora in London he busked as a maintenance fitter by day but by night featured frequently at the Singers Club, run by the legendary Ewan McColl, along with other wild talents like Luke Kelly, later of The Dubliners. Bobby’s passion for justice, argument, and storytelling, allied with a willingness to work for the cause for next to nothing, made him a natural recruit to the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper. He fell in love with his second career and felt himself privileged in 1976 to join the Sunday Times and its team of outstanding journalists led by Harry Evans. Under Evans’s brilliant and benign regime, Bobby’s flair for writing, designing, sub-editing, and commissioning flourished, as did his circle of London friends. His love of the crack kept him singing in clubs where anthems and instrumentals from early albums were frequently requested. In the early eighties he played backing for another former shipyard mate, Billy Connolly, whose comic genius was then exploding on the London stage. He was married three times – first to Helen Heron, a fellow political activist from Glasgow, then to Bea Campbell, the broadcaster and journalist. His third marriage to Honorah Perry, another beautiful and witty journalist, produced his first children, the triplets Roderick, Diarmid, and Fergus, in 1984. Concern that they be reared in Scotland brought Bobby to Edinburgh in 1986 as chief sub-editor at the Scotsman – a return celebrated by many old friends. These friends were later to provide vital support after Hon’s tragically early death from cancer in 1990 when the boys were only five years old. Subsequently the responsibility for rearing the boys was taken on squarely by Bobby – washing, cooking, and caring – no mean feat coming as he did from a generation of men who could build a ship but couldn’t boil an egg. Magnus Linklater, as editor of the Scotsman, was hugely supportive of its by then features editor in his bereavement. In 1993 Bobby was made associate editor in recognition of a remarkable breadth of intellectual enthusiasms which ranged across culture, society, and politics. He was also asked to guide the paper into the information age. As with every assignment, he was diligent and enthusiastic. Additionally he saw a mastery of new technologies as a job protection device, a necessary security for the boys should any new editorial regime begin to thin-out the over-fifties. He needn’t have feared. Affection for him and the boys guaranteed support from an old friend who assumed the editorial chair, Jim Seaton. This security was underpinned by his new editor-in-chief Andrew Neil, who retained fond memories of the gruff but life-enhancing sub-editor of Sunday Times days. Last year Bobby made a remarkable recovery after a brain haemorrhage was diagnosed and treated just in time. His Irish surgeon fell to talking about traditional music and said he had treated Luke Kelly for a similar aneurysm. ”A great friend of mine,” said Bobby. ”And sure, Luke died,” came the black Irish reply that was much appreciated. A few months later Bobby proudly produced brain scans showing some filigree replumbing before we climbed to Edinburgh Castle, en route checking the boys into a cybercafe where Bobby was developing the Scotsman’s website as a global resource for wandering Jocks. Later, after a night at the pictures, we agreed that Esmerelda’s song in support of the wretched of the earth in The Hunchback of Notre Dame put Walt Disney somewhere to the left of New Labour and, over a dram, trips to Ibrox were planned for the boys, who retain their dad’s Glasgow Rangers allegiance despite their Edinburgh Catholic upbringing. Bobby Campbell had a gift for friendship. Occasionally glowering in defence of principle, he would soon explode with affection and humour. His verve can be heard in his great recording of The Hanged Man’s Reel. His creed and his Scottishness is expressed in the The Exiles’ For A’ That and A’ That. Bobby was realistic about the odds on the occurrence of another haemorrhage but took comfort in the marvellous support on call from family and friends. His death so soon after that of his beloved wife is desolating. However, the finest memorial to Hon Perry and Bobby Campbell are the three wonderful boys who celebrated their thirteenth birthdays so enjoyably with their proud father just last Sunday.

Robert Arthur Thornbury Campbell, journalist: born Glasgow 27 August 1942; thrice married (three sons); died Edinburgh 29 September 1997.Bobby Campbell became a journalist because of his political convictions; a route to journalism that speaks of a different and perhaps more serious age. He began his career in newspapers in 1966, when, as a young Communist, he joined the staff of the Communist Party’s paper, the Daily Worker (latterly the Morning Star). When he died in the early hours of yesterday at the age of 55, he was an associate editor of the Scotsman in charge, among other things, of the paper’s website. It was, he would often say, an unlikely destination. But then so many things in his life were unlikely. He lived, more than most of us, under dramatic, unpredictable switches of light and shade. Bobby (sometimes Bob) Campbell was born in Glasgow in 1942. To those who did not know him well, he seemed to epitomise the kind of Glaswegian popularised by Billy Connolly (whom he knew, and with whom in the 1980s he shared the stage as a supporting musician). He was a big man, sometimes bearded, who was gruff, sardonic and enjoyed a drink. When I first saw him, in the composing room of the Sunday Times in the 1970s, he looked as though he had just stepped off the terraces of a Glasgow football stadium. He wore a denim suit pricked with enamel badges and a tartan scarf tightly knotted at his neck. The clothes and the manner disguised the most gentle, thoughtful and compassonate of men, a standing reprimand to stereotypes of class and nationality.

He grew up in what is known as the respectable working class on Glasgow’s west side (the term “West End” would be misleading here), where he was educated at Hyndland School and learned to play the violin. In 1958, he went to John Brown’s shipyard in Clydebank as an apprentice engineering fitter and worked there for the next six years, helping to build the liners and tankers that comprised the Indian summer of Clyde shipbuilding. The violin gave him access to folk music; his apprentice colleagues to left-wing politics. Like many people of his generation in Glasgow at that time, he embraced both. Folk music, with its memorialisation of the achievements and disasters of working-class life, was seen as a radical expression of grievance and solidarity, and it became for a time a radical movement.
Campbell came under the influence of Norman Buchan, the Labour MP, whose house in west Glasgow was the headquarters of a small but influential group known as “the Broomhill Bums”. He joined two well-known folk musicians, Ray and Archie Fisher, in a band called the Wayfarers and became one of the first fiddle-players to make a mark on urban (as opposed to rural or traditional) Scottish folk music. He wrote a tune to “The Fairfield Apprentice”, with words by Archie Fisher, which was commissioned by Charles Parker for the BBC’s famous series The Radio Ballads.In 1964, he left the shipyard and came to London as a maintenance fitter (the Savoy Hotel was one of the less likely places he helped maintain). Once again, his evenings were taken up with fiddle-playing and political argument. With Enoch Kent (Norman Buchan’s brother-in-law) and Gordon McCullough, he formed the Exiles and recorded a collection of songs. The Daily Worker published some pieces about folk music by him and then offered him a job as sub-editor on its sports pages.Later he was promoted to the post of features editor, but by then he had begun to be unhappy with the paper’s political direction, which allowed no deviation from the Moscow line. He began to work Saturday shifts for the sports department of the Sunday Times, and in 1976 joined the staff of that newspaper. He became its chief sub-editor, in charge of presenting its home and foreign news pages, in 1981.
His life until the late 1970s could be said with fairness to be peripatetic. He had been married twice, the second time to a Party comrade, the journalist Bea Campbell; his politics meant that he earned far less than mainstream journalists; he had no children, owned no property. An evening chez Campbell often meant the carriage of clinking paper bags to a rented flat in Tower Hamlets, Islington or Hackney, where sooner or later someone was bound to remember the words to “Carrickfergus” or “The Bleacher Lassie o’ Kelvinhaugh”. But with his third marriage, to Honoria Perry, his life began to change. She wanted children. He wanted them also, but had been told that he could never have them.
Consultants were seen. “Apparently the remedy is loose underpants and no more Benson and Hedges,” Campbell told me one day, with a distinct scepticism. More consultants were seen. Eventually, one proposed a simple operation to remove a blockage. In 1984, his wife gave birth to triplets, three boys. The family moved to Edinburgh two years later, where he joined the Scotsman and bought a handsome stone house. He was wry about this sudden change of fortune – so much of his life had been spent avoiding home-ownership and car driving – but he was fulfilled in ways that, only a few years earlier, would have seemed unimaginable to him.
His happiness at this extreme was short-lived. His wife died of cancer in 1990. In less than 10 years he had moved from no prospect of children, to the sudden acquisition of three of them, to single fatherhood. All the qualities that had made so many friends now came to the fore. To say that he coped seems inadequate. He loved and enjoyed his children. Earlier this year, Campbell had his first brain aneurysm. His life hung in the balance, but he made a good recovery. He had even begun playing the fiddle again, often at the farewell parties which are the new commonplace of newspaper culture. Last month, when I had lunch with him, his old spirit shone through. He was steadfast not in the narrowest political sense, but to the values which underpinned his old beliefs. He said to me once, “Being a socialist means you have to be an optimist”, and, despite everything, he was
always that.