Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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73 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES<br />
on the <strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Union</strong> bagpipes’. 247 Remarkably, the term was found in<br />
oral tradition in Britain as late as 1960, used by an elderly<br />
Lancashire woman whose father had played the bagpipes. When<br />
asked by a folklore collector if he was Scottish, she replied, ‘No,<br />
certainly not, he played the <strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’. 248<br />
In the later nineteenth century visiting <strong>Irish</strong> professional pipers<br />
continued to use the term in Britain. The Cahir, Co Tipperary, piper<br />
Thomas O’Hannigan, for instance, later ‘Royal Minstrel’ to Queen<br />
Victoria and Prince Albert, was advertised in Ireland in 1838 and<br />
1839 as playing on the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’ as well as the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> union<br />
pipes’. 249 But in Liverpool in 1842 250 and in London in 1843 the<br />
newspapers universally describe him as an ‘<strong>Irish</strong> Piper’ simply<br />
playing on the ‘union pipes’. 251 The famous Kerry piper James<br />
Gandsey, one of the sights of Killarney, was playing the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> union<br />
pipes’ to acclaim in Edinburgh in 1841. 252 In 1853 ‘Mr Thos. Mahon,<br />
Professor of the <strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Union</strong> Bagpipes’ was even advertised in<br />
Scotland as ‘<strong>Irish</strong> Piper to Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen’. 253<br />
Courtney’s term is also found, but to a lesser extent, throughout the<br />
nineteenth century in Ireland. There ‘<strong>Irish</strong> pipes’ is still more<br />
favoured, presumably for reasons of national feeling and in reaction<br />
to the term’s imagined connection with the Act of <strong>Union</strong>. In<br />
addition, new <strong>Irish</strong> variant terms and some new terms are found. In<br />
1802 in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, Timothy Kenna is advertising<br />
247<br />
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Sheffield, 22 Aug. 1896.<br />
248<br />
Schofield 1975: 90.<br />
249<br />
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Dublin, 9, 13, 15 Jan.<br />
1838; Belfast News-Letter, Belfast, 30 Mar. 1838; Carolan 1994: 46–52.<br />
250<br />
Liverpool Mercury, Liverpool, 4 Mar. 1842.<br />
251<br />
Carolan 1994: 46–52.<br />
252<br />
Sanger 2001: 90.<br />
253<br />
Caledonian Mercury, 26 Sept. 1853.