Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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75 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES<br />
from ‘sionnach, valve of bellows, pipe-reed’). 263 In 1833 in Sydney a<br />
set of ‘<strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Union</strong> Chord Bagpipes’ is advertised for sale. 264 All the<br />
foregoing can be considered trumped by the Scottish piper Mr<br />
Graham who is 1836 was performing in Hereford on the ‘”Royal<br />
Patent” improved <strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’. 265 Thomas O’Hannigan, visiting<br />
Britain in 1844, is described as the ‘celebrated Performer on the<br />
recently improved Chromatic and Diatonic <strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’. 266 A late<br />
term for the instrument is also found: the Northumbrian bagpipes<br />
specialist William A. Cocks, writing in 1954, refers to ‘hybrid union<br />
pipes’; 267 this seems to be a term of his own devising which he<br />
applies ahistorically to bellows pipes with a foot-joint resembling the<br />
earlier Geoghegan ‘pastoral’ type of 1743.<br />
The disaster of the Great Famine of the 1840s and the continuing<br />
damage done to traditional social life by high consequent levels of<br />
emigration to Britain and to the United States had of course a<br />
catastrophic effect on <strong>Irish</strong> bellows piping, and the instrument came<br />
close to disappearing from Ireland by the end of the century. The<br />
terminology for it was not however affected. The popular terms<br />
continued to be used and ‘union pipes’ held its ground (although the<br />
pipes themselves are referred to less frequently, and even then<br />
usually in terms of their decline). In the Dublin directories Maurice<br />
Coyne appears from 1839 to 1861 as a ‘Maker of <strong>Union</strong> and Scotch<br />
Bagpipes’, and John Coyne similarly from 1855 to 1864. 268 In the<br />
early 1850s a ‘most ingenious mechanic, Denis Harrington of Cork’<br />
263<br />
MacBain 2nd ed 1911: 324 (these terms are not in his first edition of 1896) .<br />
Eamonn Ceannt, writing in An Claidheamh Soluis, Dublin, 29 July 1911, has<br />
‘valve, an sionnach’ as an <strong>Irish</strong> term for a ‘union pipe’ valve.<br />
264<br />
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 9 Nov. 1833<br />
(reference courtesy Keith Sanger).<br />
265<br />
Hereford Journal, Hereford, 24 Aug. 1836.<br />
266<br />
Carolan 1994: 48.<br />
267<br />
Cocks 1954: 345–6.<br />
268<br />
Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 27, 29.