Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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57 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES What seems from The Times of 15 May 1788 to be Courtney’s understanding of his imprecise new term may not have been understood even by those pipers who used it immediately after his death. Certainly none of them, not even those who edited or published music books in the next ten or so years, give any explanation for it. But they continued to use it because for them also it was a usefully neutral term, and a prestigious term, one that had received approval at the highest social levels. It was a label associated with a hitherto unachieved level of public professional success for a bagpiper, and it would be strange if they were to discard it, especially since ‘union’ did not at first have the negative political connotations that it would later take on in Ireland. Even when it had, it was by then a well established term that had created its own tradition. As will be seen, pipers associated its use with their predecessors, and developed a loyalty to it that lasted well into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it would appear that while it soon became an established term, it was one with no firm established meaning, and one that was ripe therefore for having further meanings assigned to it. Act of Union 1800 It has occasionally been said that the union pipes derived their name from the Irish Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish parliament in Dublin and provided Ireland instead with reduced political representation from Westminster. 163 The Act was brought into effect by bribery and corruption rather than by consent, and it led to more than a hundred years of economic, social and political 163 For example, ‘The name of Union pipes probably originated from the instrument having appeared about the time of union of the Irish and English parliaments...’ (Day 1891: 55); and more influentially but also more tentatively: ‘These [Irish Pipes] were called Union Pipes, either as immortalising the legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, or more probably from a mistaken rendering of the native name Uilleann or “elbow” pipes’ (Galpin 1911: 179).
COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 58 decline in Ireland. The word ‘union’ shrank in meaning there to become only a shorthand reference to the hated ‘Union’, and for many years in the mid-nineteenth century the leading Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell led a national movement for the repeal of the Union. It has never been explained what the connection of the Act to the musical instrument could have been, but at any rate, as has been seen, the term was in existence some dozen years before the Act was passed, and it was introduced in another country. The idea of political union was of course in public debate for some years before the passing of the Act, but it was not very actively promoted as early as 1788. 164 This proposed derivation of the term can therefore be dismissed as spurious. However, after the passing of the Act, this meaning was implied for political purposes at least once, in Scotland in 1806, and in connection with an Irish piper Richard Fitzmaurice: The Scots Society, in honour of St Andrew, held... their anniversary meeting, in the London Tavern, Bishopsgate-street 164 In fact the term ‘union pipes’ was so well established by the time of the Act of Union debate that it was used for political purposes in some satirical sheets published by the anti-Union side in Dublin in 1799: ‘Sir Pertinax Platter... though an hon. Gentleman had talked of Union Pipes in allusion to him, he was not sufficiently skilled in concert music to be able to understand...’ (Proceedings and Debate of the Parliament of Pimlico, in the Last Session of the Eighteenth Century. No. 1); ‘At the Royal Circus, near College-Green [the Irish parliament building]... January 15... After the Pantomime, a favourite Concerto on the Union Pipes, By Mr. Corelli...’ (poster). Similarly an American newspaper of the period used the term to make a political point about Ireland: ‘In the new pantomime at Covent Garden Theatre, the Irish Harp and the Union Pipes played in concert. We should be glad to find our Hibernian brethren inclined to such National Harmony.’ (Daily Advertiser, New York, 25 June 1799). The term had an even wider political application: ‘A transparency in a street in St. Ann’s Parish [London], represented Mr. Pitt, the First Consul of France, Mr. Windham, and Joseph Bonaparte, dancing a Fandango, to a tune played on Union Bagpipes. John Bull appeared in a corner, with a purse in his hand, ready to pay the piper.’ (Morning Chronicle, London, 16 Oct. 1801).
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Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar an
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