The Life and Work of Robert Campbell

IN addressing the students at the opening of the 1902 session at the Belfast Royal Hospital, then in its final year at Frederick Street, Robert Campbell, who had been appointed Honorary Assistant Surgeon two years earlier, suggested that it might have been more appropriate for one of the senior members of the staff to have undertaken this duty and remarked, "If that address had taken a retrospective form and dealt with the origin and progress of this institution, and the lives of the many well-known men whose workshop it has been, a record of great interest and some permailent value might have been produced. And it is to be hoped that the present crisis in the history of this hospital will not be allowed to pass without some such record being made, for in the case of institutions or of individuals there is nothing better worth preserving than the memory of an honourable past." It is in an attempt to aid the preservation of the memory of one individual's "honourable past" that this outline of the life of Robert Campbell and the foundation of the Robert Campbell Memorial Fund has been compiled. Robert Campbell was a true Ulster Scot, or in his own words, an "unscotched Scotsman," born on 1st August, 1866, in the Old Manse, Carnanee, near Templepatrick, of a family whose history in Co. Antrim dates from plantation times in the seventeenth century, when one Hew Campbell, "a gentleman of the house of Ducket Hall" in Ayrshire, Scotland, settled at Oldstone, near Antrim. Robert Campbell was the second son of Reverend Robert Campbell, Minister of the Old Presbyterian Congregation of Templepatrick, Co. Antrim, and his wife, Elizabeth Simpson. Baptized on 8th November, 1866, by Reverend J. Porter of Ballee, he had a long and honourable manse tradition behind him. His ancestor, Hew Campbell*, was certainly an intimate friend and probably a relation by