Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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