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