Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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75 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES from ‘sionnach, valve of bellows, pipe-reed’). 263 In 1833 in Sydney a set of ‘Irish Union Chord Bagpipes’ is advertised for sale. 264 All the foregoing can be considered trumped by the Scottish piper Mr Graham who is 1836 was performing in Hereford on the ‘”Royal Patent” improved Union Pipes’. 265 Thomas O’Hannigan, visiting Britain in 1844, is described as the ‘celebrated Performer on the recently improved Chromatic and Diatonic Union Pipes’. 266 A late term for the instrument is also found: the Northumbrian bagpipes specialist William A. Cocks, writing in 1954, refers to ‘hybrid union pipes’; 267 this seems to be a term of his own devising which he applies ahistorically to bellows pipes with a foot-joint resembling the earlier Geoghegan ‘pastoral’ type of 1743. The disaster of the Great Famine of the 1840s and the continuing damage done to traditional social life by high consequent levels of emigration to Britain and to the United States had of course a catastrophic effect on Irish bellows piping, and the instrument came close to disappearing from Ireland by the end of the century. The terminology for it was not however affected. The popular terms continued to be used and ‘union pipes’ held its ground (although the pipes themselves are referred to less frequently, and even then usually in terms of their decline). In the Dublin directories Maurice Coyne appears from 1839 to 1861 as a ‘Maker of Union and Scotch Bagpipes’, and John Coyne similarly from 1855 to 1864. 268 In the early 1850s a ‘most ingenious mechanic, Denis Harrington of Cork’ 263 MacBain 2nd ed 1911: 324 (these terms are not in his first edition of 1896) . Eamonn Ceannt, writing in An Claidheamh Soluis, Dublin, 29 July 1911, has ‘valve, an sionnach’ as an Irish term for a ‘union pipe’ valve. 264 Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 9 Nov. 1833 (reference courtesy Keith Sanger). 265 Hereford Journal, Hereford, 24 Aug. 1836. 266 Carolan 1994: 48. 267 Cocks 1954: 345–6. 268 Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 27, 29.
COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 76 (who later had to emigrate for lack of orders) was making and exhibiting ‘Union pipes’. 269 The instrument and its traditional terminology seemed to limp on: in 1882 the pipe-maker Michael Doogan was exhibiting three sets of ‘Irish Union Bagpipes’ at an exhibition of Irish arts and manufacturers, in the Rotunda, Dublin, 270 and in 1888 he was still in business as a bagpipe dealer in Dublin. 271 It would seem that Courtney’s term was by now hallowed by usage and by association with the older race of pipers and the vanished glory days of the instrument. Even in the Dublin periodical Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, dedicated to the promotion of the Irish language, a blind Galway piper Peter Kelly is reported in 1897 without any adverse comment as playing ‘Union Pipes’ at a Gaelic League meeting in Belfast. 272 The Cork Pipers’ Club, the first Irish pipers’ club, was founded in Cork city in March 1898 when the bellows instrument (as distinct from the recently revived mouthblown pipes) seemed on the verge of disappearance. 273 For bellows pipes, the Club seems from newspaper reports of its early years to have favoured the term ‘Irish pipes’ but not infrequently used ‘union pipes’. The term had survived the vicissitudes of the second half of the century and was being used naturally by a purposeful group of nationally minded piping revivalists and Gaelic League supporters. ‘The piper with whom we are best acquainted’, said Fáinne an Lae, a national Gaelic League newspaper, in the very last days of the century, ‘is the player of the Union pipes... the Union piper’. 274 269 Grainger 1986: 2. For his emigration to the United States or Australia see O’Neill 1913: 159, Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 38. 270 Exhibition of Irish Arts and Manufacturers, Rotunda, 1882, catalogue in NLI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8117 (3). 271 Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 14 June 1888 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly). 272 Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. The Gaelic Journal, Dublin, Oct. 1897. 273 Mitchell-Ingoldsby 1998: 6–12. 274 Fáinne an Lae, 9 Dec. 1899.
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Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar an
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Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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