Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 24<br />
Mr. Courtnay afforded much pleasure to the general entertainment<br />
of the evening. His excellence on the <strong>Union</strong> Bag-pipes is<br />
universally admired, and he played Maggee Lawther with much<br />
effect. The instrument was particularly well adapted to the room. 66<br />
For a period Courtney now disappears from the prints, but he<br />
doubtless went on to capitalise on his successes, performing<br />
unreported at Vauxhall and elsewhere, and privately for the ‘noble<br />
personages’ who had patronised his first stage appearance. Within a<br />
few years it was said of him that ‘The principal nobility of the three<br />
kingdoms are well acquainted with his excellence’. 67 A muck-raking<br />
publication, attacking the prominent nobleman Charles Howard, 11th<br />
Duke of Norfolk (1746–1815, also known as ‘the dirty Duke’ and<br />
‘the drunk Duke’), says of Howard:<br />
Although no person can be more tenacious of the dignity due to<br />
high birth, or more jealous of the privileges of Aristocracy, yet his<br />
appearance, manner, and habits, are strikingly plebian, and his<br />
companions are selected from the very dregs of democracy. The<br />
principal friends and attendants on his Grace, are a Mr. Se—ge—<br />
ck, a subaltern actor belonging to the Haymarket Theatre, Mr. C—<br />
n—y, the celebrated performer on that harmonious instrument the<br />
bagpipe, and the noted Captain M—r—s, whose excellent songs<br />
have acquired him such unbounded popularity. 68<br />
66<br />
The Times, London, 17 May 1788. This third spelling of Courtney’s surname<br />
in as many notices, two of them in the same paper, is typical of the lack of<br />
uniformity found in print for his name.<br />
67<br />
Hibernian Journal, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1793.<br />
68<br />
[Pigott] 1792: pt 2, 10–11. Thomas Sedgwick (d. 1803) was a bass singer<br />
much in demand as well as an actor. Thomas Morris (1732–1818), a retired<br />
soldier who may have been <strong>Irish</strong>, was a well known bon viveur and a writer of<br />
both respectable and obscene songs. For both see Highfill et al. Howard<br />
famously would only allow his servants to wash him when he was dead drunk.<br />
By coincidence another contemporary <strong>Irish</strong> piper named Denis was also taken<br />
up by a drunken English nobleman: ‘Les Lords Lieutenants d'Irlande... ont le<br />
droit de créer chevalier qui il leur plait, ils en ont quelques fois fait une<br />
plaisanterie assez mal placée, à ce que je pense. Le duc de Rutland, après avoir