Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 86
and the early 1930s, the term almost invariably employed in
newspaper programme listings was ‘uilleann pipes’ and not ‘union
pipes’. The more recent term was used during those years of Máire
McCarthy, Leo Rowsome, Risteárd Ó Briain, Séamus Mac
Aonghusa (James Ennis), Liam Breathnach (Liam Walsh), R.L.
O’Mealy, Philip Martin and Sean O’Leary in publicity for their
occasional 10- or 15-minute radio recitals. The term was doubtless
promoted by Seamus Clandillon of Galway, the first director of the
station and an Irish-language enthusiast, 317 and it was firmly
established in a radio context by the time he retired in 1934.
In 1928, the year of his death, Grattan Flood was still actively
engaged in his campaign to have his term accepted: ‘Uilleann pipes
[are] incorrectly called the “union” pipes’. 318 This was his last known
word on the matter, although his opinions would live on influentially
in print.
But among Irish bellows pipers usage still continued to vary. When
they began to record commercial 78s for the Irish market, in London
from the 1910s, ‘(Irish) union pipe’ was the term commonly used on
their record labels by such nationally known players as William N.
Andrews of Dublin and later Leo Rowsome of Dublin and Liam
Walsh of Waterford. 319 In the course of the 1920s this was replaced
first on labels by ‘Irish (bag)pipes’, and joined in the second half of
the decade by ‘(Irish) uilleann pipes’. From his frequent newspaper
317
He is reported as having used the term himself in 1931 when being
interviewed by a journalist for an article on ‘The Passing of the Irish Piper’
(Irish Independent, 13 Feb. 1931).
318
W.H. Grattan Flood, Cork Examiner, Cork, 14 July 1928, quoted in An
Píobaire vol. 2, no 2 (Sept. 1978): 4.
319
The very earliest Irish bellows players to record commercially were Coventryborn
Thomas Garoghan in Britain (who used the term ‘Irish bagpipes’ on
Berliner discs of c. 1898) and Limerick-born James C. McAuliffe in the United
States (who used ‘bagpipe’ on Edison cylinders of 1899).