Stephen Martin
Thailand

Jane Campbell¹ (1790–1850) was catapulted from humble beginnings on a farm in Georgian Scotland² to a life of stresses and medical danger in India. When her uncle died unexpectedly, Jane’s father inherited Craigie House,³ a Scottish mansion by the river in Ayr. At age nineteen, Jane met and married⁴ a fellow Scot, Colonel Thomas Munro,⁵ who would be best known for his work with the East India Company and as governor of Madras.

Munro’s biography,⁶ by George Gleig,⁷ described Jane as “a lady remarkable for the correctness of her manners and steadiness of her principles,”⁸ “beautiful and accomplished,” and that Munro’s “own happiness…could not operate unless there were some other being besides himself on whom to fix his affections.” Jane liked loyalty, honesty, and fidelity, morals in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.⁹ Just before leaving Kent in December 1819,¹⁰ Munro wrote:

… as I must return to India, I am impatient to be there. My attachment to both countries is so nearly equal, that a very little turns the scale. I like the Indian climate and country much better than our own; and had we all our friends there, I would hardly think of coming home; but this country is the country of all our relations and of early life, and of all the associations connected with it.¹¹

He worried about having good enough eyesight to explore France and Italy with Jane when he finally retired. Notably, he described himself as an Indian: “I may deceive myself, and fancy, like many other old Indians, that I am still fit for what may be far beyond my power.”

Jane and Thomas had two sons. Thomas¹² was born at sea sailing home from India,¹³ after Jane’s ship had docked at the Island of St. Helena, where Napoleon was being held.¹⁴ Campbell¹⁵ was born in India, where Jane later returned without young Thomas to avoid exposing him to tropical diseases.

Jane had a serious injury in India when she “met with a very unfortunate accident in February last (1821), by falling from a horse on her head; the concussion was so great that she was for some days insensible, and one of her eyes has not yet recovered its proper place.”¹⁶ The description fits a severe traumatic brain injury with several days of apparent reduced consciousness.¹⁷ Jane’s squint may have been due to brain, cranial nerve, or eye muscle damage, any of which can recover progressively.

Jane was separated from her family for a whole year with what Gleig later termed an eye injury.¹⁸ Finally, she was allowed to travel again when her eye defect was deemed to be “so slight as to be of no great consequence.”¹⁹ Eventually, “her recovery though tedious and distressing was complete.”²⁰ However, there is evidence that she may have had residual emotional and cognitive difficulties at that time. When she had a portrait of herself madeby a French artist from Pondicherry,²¹ she was so excited she could not concentrate to tell her husband who the portrait was for.

Meanwhile, Munro knew that many of the prevailing medical practices were out of date. He wrote to his sister Margaret about her husband’s illness in India, which he said was “inhabited only by … modest physicians,” “with their mistaken notions of climates and constitutions,”²² from which they could “not be convinced otherwise.” Munro’s friend in Madras, Andrew Ross,²³ had been kept:

idle for near five years by one doctor, the Rev. Mr. Bell, who lived in his house. I remember having been a witness one day of the manner in which he effected this lie … “Well, Sir, have you shown Lady Campbell the ice you made this morning ? – have you got your air-pump in order? – have you seen Mr. Spalding’s diving machine?” – and was proceeding with fifty more questions, when he was interrupted by the guns of the ship, which was to carry the letters he was then writing, saluting the fort on her leaving the roads for Europe. On this, he started up, turned out the philosopher, ordered his servant to get a catamaran, or raft, to chase the ship with his dispatches; finished his letter in about an hour, and then came to me, when we both began to abuse the Doctor who had by this time taken shelter up-stairs in his museum. – “This is the most preposterous man I ever met with; he always makes a point of coming to me when he sees me busy, and when he knows too that it is a matter of consequence about which I am engaged, and of pestering me with absurd talk about ice, and air-pumps, and diving-bells, and such like trumpery.”²⁴

When young Campbell Munro was gravely ill with a fever in 1826,²⁵ Munro wrote to Jane:

The cause which occasioned the desertion of this house gives everything about it a melancholy appearance. I dislike to enter Kamen’s room. I never pass it without thinking of that sad night when I saw him lying in Rosa’s lap, with leeches on his head, the tears streaming down his face, crying with fear and pain, and his life uncertain. His image, in that situation, is always present to me whenever I think of this house.²⁶

It was doubtful he would live. In fear, his mother took him back to Scotland in March 1826. Neither of them saw Thomas Munro, Sr. again.²⁷

The same month, Munro wrote a report on education. Almost certainly with Jane’s collaboration, he calculated how many more Hindu and Muslim schools were needed, even though he felt that the teachers’ overall pay and conditions were better than in Scotland. By then, Munro wrote that every Indian village had a school, but not enough. It looks like Jane was involved, with the completion of the report timed to her departure, especially given his comment in a later letter to her: “I do not see what use either you or I can be of any longer in this country.”^28,29

In January 1827, Munro was pleased to hear from Jane, having worried that her ship had an accident or had to put in somewhere for water. In July of that year, Sir Thomas Munro died of cholera during a tour of rural India in an effort to prevent the disease.³⁰ This was twenty-seven years before John Snow identified cholera from the Broad Street pump. Just before Munro died, he described a delirious hallucination: “What a beautiful garland of flowers they have stretched across the valley!” An old Indian man understood the sign: “Alas! A great and good man will soon die!”³¹ His time from being well to dying was recorded as nine hours.³²

Eight years earlier in 1819, Jane had sat for a portrait³³ with Sir Martin Archer Shee.³⁴ (Fig. 1) King George IV had made Thomas a Baronet for his work in India, and Jane’s baronial-style white and red velvet dress and Indian pearls identify her with both Munro and with India.³⁵ Jane’s pearls are badges of fondness for India. They probably came from Thiruchendur or Thoothukudi, both on the Coromandel Coast near Madras.³⁶ Shee had his portrait of Jane engraved to publish, which is rare.³⁷

More should be known about Jane,³⁸ but the writing of only a handful of English women in Regency India has survived. Good examples are by Maria Graham³⁹ and Eliza Clemons,⁴⁰ with intelligent psychological-mindedness and anthropology. There are no surviving written accounts from native Indian women, a sad reflection of low school attendance and literacy rates at the time, which the Munros tried to improve. Munro wanted to do considerably more for India with more funding.

Jane’s original letters or her journal may still survive somewhere in India, Scotland, or the United States, where her descendants now live.⁴¹ Her writing would have been thwarted at least temporarily by her brain injury. However, her rare portraits and Munro’s published letters are windows into the medical, social, and humanitarian needs and challenges of Regency India.

End notes

1. Baptized Maybole, Ayr, 19 January 1795. She died at age fifty-five, on 2 September 1850, in Ayr. Jane’s memorial is William Henry Playfair’s handsome Greek family mausoleum at Auchincruive Church, St. Quivox village, Ayrshire, a couple of miles from Craigie House. Playfair (1790–1857) designed the magnificent National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. https://2edinburgh.com/edinburgh-architecture-william-henry-playfair/
2. She was born at her grandmother’s in Maybole.
3. It seems like the work of Robert Adam, as grand, but delicately-balanced Palladian. An attribution to John Smith, the town architect, looks erroneous, as Smith worked later from 1805.
4. At Craigie House, on 30 March 1814.
5. 1761–1827. Munro had previously been overseas continually for twenty-seven years, until 1808. His father was a Glasgow tobacco merchant.
6. GR. Gleig. The life of Sir Thomas Munro, late Governor of Madras. Colburn and Bentley, London, 1830. Volumes 1-3. The sources on Jane for this article comprise all entries on her in Gleig, including Munro’s letters selected by Gleig, and parish records.
7. 1796–1788. Gleig was a clergyman, infantryman, and historian.
8. Gleig, Vol. 1, p. 401.
9. Gleig, Vol. 3, p.411.
10. This was Munro’s last trip back to India, having returned once already since his marriage. Having left young Thomas from 1819–1901 in the care of family at Craigie, they arrived Bombay in May 1820, then the ship from Bombay to Madras was about three weeks.
11. Gleig, Vol. 3, pp. 93-94. Letter to Munro’s sister Erskine.
12. 1819–1901.
13. Noted on the latitude of the Azores in the Atlantic.
14. Thomas stayed in Scotland in the care of Jane’s family, but wrote letters to his father by age four, which he cherished.
15. 1823–1913.
16. Gleig, Vol. 3, p. 409. Munro to Graham Moore, 5 November 1821.
17. Annegers JF, et al. A population-based study of seizures after traumatic brain injuries. N Eng J Med. 1998. 338: 1, 20-24. Annegers’ widely-used definition of severe traumatic brain injury is loss of consciousness or amnesia for more than twenty-four hours.
18. Gleig, Vol. 2, p. 194. After that, Munro and Jane separated again for at least five months in 1822, Gleig, Vol 3, p. 411.
19. Gleig, Vol. 2, p. 196.
20. Gleig, Vol. 2, p. 209.
21. Whereabouts or existence now unknown.
22. Gleig, Vol. 3, p. 87.
23. A magistrate and botanist, who worked on sago and sugarcane crop yield in Indian famine alleviation at Korukonda, from 1793.
24. Gleig, Vol. 3, p. 87.
25. Gleig, Vol. 2, p. 179-80.
26. The boy and his parents used his own version of his name, Kamen, when he was too young to say Campbell. Rosa was apparently his Indian maid or nanny.
27. Campbell actually lived to be ninety. His son was the mountaineer Hugh Munro (1856–1919), famous for listing the “Munros,” the high Scottish peaks over 3,000 feet.
28. Gleig, Vol. 2, p. 182.
29. The average, true picture of colonial ethics was probably somewhere in between the Munros and GK Chesterton, whose assertion in The Illustrated London News, September 18, 1909, p. 387, made even Gandhi thunderstruck with inspiration for India to nuance itself and not copy the British: “I do not doubt for an instant that many of our Imperial officials are stupid and oppressive; most Imperial officials are stupid and oppressive.” Munro, with Jane, at the other extreme, had the mindset of running the Madras Presidency just like a provincial English county; in England, that was still bad at times.
30. In July 1827, in Andhra Pradesh.
31. Bradshaw, J. Sir Thomas Munro and the British settlement of the Madras presidency. Oxford University Press. 1893. pp. 210-2.
32. Jane commissioned Francis Legatt Chantry to carve a portrait medallion memorial plaque to Munro, still in St. Mary’s Church, Chennai. Munro is rare in drawing attention praise for his character and good works from Indian historians, including Sriram Venkatakrishnan, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, and KN Jayaraman. A move to take down Chantry’s equestrian statue of Munro in Chennai fifteen years ago failed due to local protest.
33. Jane, Lady Munro, by Sir Martin Archer Shee, oil on canvas, 1819, NPG 3124a. Munro sat for a companion portrait by Shee at the same time, NPG 3124.
34. 1769–1850. Archer Shee later succeeded Thomas Lawrence as President of the Royal Academy.
35. Stephen Martin. “Jane, Lady Munro” in Regency Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, September 2021, accessed June 2025 https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp03220/jane-lady-munro Accessed May 2025
36. From 1787 to 1792, the Honorable East India Company controlled the pearl trade, theoretically sharing the profits with the Nawab of Carnatic and the Dutch. From 1796, the British took complete control, when the Dutch East India Company collapsed due to escalating weakness and internal corruption. The Nawab was pushed aside completely for not agreeing to British control of cloth. James Hornell. Report to the Government of Madras on the Indian Pearl Fisheries. Government Press, Madras, 1905, p. 19.
37. Gleig, Vol. 2, p. 320.
38. From clinical experience studying bad people, both historically and clinically in the present, pure criminality or anti-social personality are similar across cases, being far more predictable than nuanced study of individualistic altruists. We need to know why things went wrong in history, but should study the positives to learn from them and replicate for the present and future. “All good” or “all bad” positions lack credibility.
39. Graham, M. Journal of a Residence in India. George Ramsay and Co, Edinburgh, 1813.
40. Clemons, Mrs Major. The Manners and Customs of Society in India, including scenes in the Mofussil stations; interspersed with characteristic tales and anecdotes: and reminiscences of the late Burmese war. Smith Elder and Co, London, 1841.
41. Craigie House stayed in the family until the Council bought it in 1940, but neither the University of the West of Scotland that now owns it, nor the County Archive have anything catalogued.