Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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SPreAD OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
for the union pipes and are spoken of in the 1870s as having patronised
there ‘Mike gill, a Celebrated Player on the Union Pipes’, who may have
been Irish. 214
There is some evidence too that Courtney’s term was occasionally
applied to the very different northumbrian bellows pipes. robert
eliot Bewick (1788–1849), son of the famous northumbrian engraver
Thomas Bewick and a northumbrian piper, a pupil of John
Peacock’s, was described by an acquaintance as playing the ‘union
pipes’ when it is clear from his description that Bewick was playing
the northumbrian pipes. 215 A Mr Walker of newcastle was reported
in 1866 as having played there at a function of the newcastle and
northumberland yeomanry Cavalry ‘a variety of selections on the
northumberland union pipes’. 216
At least some Scottish and english makers of the highland pipes and
northumbrian pipes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century also turned to making what secondary sources call ‘union
pipes’. Although it is usually known when these pipe-makers flourished,
it does not seem possible to be certain when they individually
added these bellows pipes to their manufacturing repertory, or indeed
whether they themselves (as distinct from bagpipe studies and
museum catalogues of a later date) called their instruments ‘union
pipes’. At least some of their instruments so labelled are of the
geoghegan ‘pastoral pipes’ type of 1743. 217 hugh robertson of
214
Wanless 1872: 48–51: ‘When Mike play’d up an Irish reel,/ We neither minded
maut or meal’.
215
William Scott Bell, Autobiography (1860), quoted by Bain 1982: 17 and Uglow
2006: 398–9 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
216
Newcastle Courant, newcastle-upon-Tyne, 26 Oct. 1866.
217
Cheape 2008: 96–100; Mcleod 2002: 2.05/ 1–2; McCandless 1998: 19.