Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

47 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
at a disorderly annual outdoor festival at Greenwich Hill. The place
abounded in
... Recruiting Parties... Of these the most conspicuous were Captain
Leeson and his party, with Courtnay the Piper in a Highland dress,
as drunk as any of his fraternity, and viewed with professional
envy. They were attended by some gentlemen of the fist... Their
efforts were so skilfully directed... that many a bold Pat—rician
was induced to exchange his bludgeon for a bayonet; and decorate
that shoulder with a musket, hitherto degraded by a hod. 142
The next notices of Courtney are of his death at the age of thirty-four
on 2 September 1794 – ‘Lately, in the Middlesex hospital, Mr.
Courtenay, the celebrated player on the bag-pipes’ 143 – and of his
spectacular funeral three days later.
The funeral was ‘in the true Irish style... preceded by two pipers’
according to one Scottish report. 144 The fullest account of it suggests
that he was at least as well known in the Irish slum area of St Giles
as in the fashionable West End and confirms that, while he was
unique as a piper on the London stage in his time, he was only one of
a fraternity of Irish bellows pipers in London:
142
The Oracle and Public Advertiser, London, 24 Apr. 1794. Leeson’s luck
eventually deserted him. Turning to brandy, he shunned fashionable society and
‘sought the most obscure places in the purlieus of St. Giles’s, where he used
pass whole nights in the company of his countrymen of the lowest, but
industrious class, charmed with their songs and native humour... once the soul of
whim and gaiety, [he] sunk into a state of stupor and insensibility... Having
contracted a number of debts, he was constantly pursued by the terriers of the
law...’ (Egan 1820: 143). Courtney’s end may not have been dissimilar.
143
St James’s Chronicle or The British Evening Post, London, 4–6 Sept. 1794.
The date of his death and his age are recorded in the burial register of Old St
Pancras Church, London, which is now in the London Metropolitan Archives.
144
Scots Magazine, Edinburgh, Sept. 1794: 588.