Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

69 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
the Northumbrian pipes. 215 A Mr Walker of Newcastle was reported
in 1866 as having played there at a function of the Newcastle and
Northumberland Yeomanry Cavalry ‘a variety of selections on the
Northumberland union pipes’. 216
At least some Scottish and English makers of the Highland pipes and
Northumbrian pipes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century also turned to making what secondary sources call ‘union
pipes’. Although it is usually known when these pipe-makers
flourished, it does not seem possible to be certain when they
individually added these bellows pipes to their manufacturing
repertory, or indeed whether they themselves (as distinct from
bagpipe studies and museum catalogues of a later date) called their
instruments ‘union pipes’. At least some of their instruments so
labelled are of the Geoghegan ‘pastoral pipes’ type of 1743. 217 Hugh
Robertson of Edinburgh (c. 1733–1822) seems to be the earliest of
these pipemakers, possibly producing bellows pipes in the 1780s. 218
There is also James Sharp of Aberdeen (fl. 1828–63), 219 John Dunn
(1764–1820) of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 220 Robert Reid (1784–1837)
and James Reid (1813–74) of North Shields, 221 and a miscellany of
others. 222 A J. Scorgie from Scotland was making ‘Scotch military,
215
William Scott Bell, Autobiography (1860), quoted by Bain 1982: 17 and
Uglow 2006: 398–9 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
216
Newcastle Courant, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 26 Oct. 1866.
217
Cheape 2008: 96–100; McLeod 2002: 2.05/ 1–2; McCandless 1998: 19.
218
Cheape 2008: 17, 111, 118 refers to a ‘Union Pipe by Hugh Robertson of
Edinburgh of the 1780s’, and to hallmarked bellows-blown bagpipes by
Robertson from 1793–4 and 1808–9. For further information on Robertson see
Sanger 2010: 44–6, who thinks that Robertson was making ‘Irish pipes’ about
1793. Proud & Butler 1983: 16 refer to a John Gibson of Jedburgh, died Sept.
1795, who ‘made and played Irish pipes’.
219
Campbell 2011: 29–30.
220
Proud and Butler 1983: 14–5.
221
Proud and Butler 1983: 29–30.